Having Fun with APIs

PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf on the new Yahoo Maps API (via Jeremy Zawodny):

“There is of course the fancy new maps.yahoo.com/beta site which is fun, but as far as I am concerned the killer app here is the geocoding platform that drives this. And it is completely accessible for anyone to use. It’s also a sane API that anybody can figure out in minutes. Here are a few tips for using this API from PHP 5.”

This demonstrates why simplicity on the Web as Platform is a big deal. The guy who created PHP just helped thousands of developers build their own Geo applications, and it wasn’t because he had a great amount of time on his hands. It was because the API was simple, approachable, and fast.

The simplest, most useful API wins.

Update: Closely on the heels of Yahoo’s new API comes this: Clone the Google API. This is about the Search API, but it deals specifically with ease-of-use for developers…