Paul Gebheim on how to just get your mobile app out there

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Paul Gebheim on how to just get your mobile app out there

​​API Economist: Congratulations on getting your new app launched, Beer Hunt. I see that it’s on the Apple App Store. Walk me through the Monkey Inferno creative process for the app.

Paul Gebheim: Basically, we are all old web developers. In order to help us think for mobile, our iPhone guy said, "I'm going to teach a class and show you all how to program iPhone apps." We all were like, "Sweet, it's going to be awesome," but we had to come up with ideas for what to make. One of the ideas that our sysadmin, Jesse House, came up with was about an app that lets you put pins on a map wherever you drink a beer. The more you drink beer, the faster you fill up the map. In two days, one of our architects, Michael, went from knowing nothing about how to make an iPhone app to creating the original app called, "Beer Map," now renamed, "Beer Hunt."

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John Sheehan on API design for humans

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John Sheehan on API design for humans

API Economist: Your article, APIs are Dead, Long Live APIs, created a little bit of a stir. What point were you trying to drive?

John Sheehan: I think it created a stir because people don't want to think that something so new could be “dead.” I was hoping to make the point that they're far from it; that the amount of attention that the consumer APIs out there get is disproportionate to the amount of total API traffic they handle.

I spend a lot of time talking with people, finding out where they actually use APIs, where they apply it most. The two things I hear most common are, "Yeah, we might use a social API here and there," or "Yeah, we might use an infrastructure API like Stripe, SendGrid, Twilio, or Parse" but the vast majority of our traffic is powering our mobile apps or internal to our company and never exposed externally. That's where most of the uptake has really happened in the last year.

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John Musser on how to start an API developer community

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John Musser on how to start an API developer community

​API Economist:  You founded ProgrammableWeb back in 2005, is that correct?

John Musser: That’s correct. It’s coming up on its eighth anniversary this summer. It was really the birth of the open API and web mash movement. The phrase “web mashup” was really coined four or five months before we started ProgrammableWeb. That was the same spring when Housingmaps.com was built, which was essentially the first quintessential mashup (a mashup of Craigslist and Google Maps).

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