Open Web Camp 3 - From API to Website

Tuesday, 26 July 2011

A few months ago, Matt Harris and I were invited to present at Open Web Camp 3, which took place on July 16th. We’ve been fans of Open Web Camp for some time, so we took up the opportunity to participate.

Our presentation was titled “From API to Website”, and explains the thinking behind low effort, high impact products like the Tweet button. For many folks, the idea of doing a full-blown implementation of the REST API just to let someone tweet a piece of content from your site, or follow your account back on Twitter, was overwhelming and unnecessarily time consuming.

For our platform products, we knew that we needed to offer more tools to allow for great but extremely easy integrations. That’s the premise behind products like the Tweet button and Follow button - it shouldn’t take longer than five minutes to allow someone to Tweet about your content, and stay informed about what you’re saying.

In the presentation we explore the journey we took from the REST API to the Tweet button and Follow button; including our product motivations, engineering decisions, and the ways in which open web standards made a great deal of this possible. Enjoy!

http://www.slideshare.net/themattharris/from-api-to-website