Contact APIs, Social APIs, and More: 5 API Types You Should Know About

As a developer, whether you’re new to coding or you’ve been doing it for years, it’s almost certain you’ll use APIs at some point. We are now so firmly in the API era that in 2016 alone, investors funneled over $500 million into API companies.

To refresh your memory (or perhaps inform you), an API provides the building blocks for developing an application that can interact with a service or a program. In other words, APIs let you interact with programs that other people have written and build upon them.

APIs are beneficial to both the services that make them available and the developers that use such APIs to build applications. The service provider or host website gets new functionality and features for free while developers get the opportunity to showcase their work.

It’s a mistake, however, to assume that all APIs are the same — they differ depending on the type of site/service that provides them. In this post you’ll learn about some different API types, including social APIs, contacts APIs (including well-known APIs, such as Apple’s Contacts framework, or newer offerings, such as Lusha’s Contacts API), and even some random APIs that you can play around with, free of any pressure to create an amazing new feature (see this fun list).

Social APIs

Social media APIs, or social APIs, provide a way for developers to build apps which enhance the use of social media services. First made available back in 2006, the Facebook API was one of the earliest forms of social media API that developers could use. Other examples of social APis include the Twitter and Instagram APIs.

Some actual use cases for things you can achieve with social APIs are:

• You can build a custom application to automate posts to your timeline using the Facebook API.
• Businesses can use the Twitter API to get real-time feedback on their products or services. This is also known as streaming data.
• Some developers have used the Instagram API to create Wordpress plugins that can display photo feeds from Instagram accounts.

eCommerce APIs

eCommerce APIs enable developers to build applications that improve the functionality of certain eCommerce services, delivering data-driven insights to marketers and sales personnel who want to help sell products on these eCommerce sites. Examples of eCommerce APIs include the eBay API and Amazon’s Product Advertising API.

You can do some exciting things with eCommerce APIs, including:

• Building programs that automate the normally tedious process of listing and monitoring auctions on eBay. This allows sellers to be more efficient.
• Creating custom apps that allow users to search for Amazon products or offers and use such apps on their websites.

User Management APIs

A user management API provides methods for programatically managing user permissions and user account functions. Such APIs are particularly useful for large enterprises or organizations with frequent updates to their access control lists. Two examples of user management APIs are the Google Analytics Management API and the IBM User Management API.

Examples of what you can do with user management APIs include:

• Update large numbers of accounts at once instead of doing it manually one-by-one
• List all users who have certain account permissions

Note that user management API use cases are more generalized and less specific to the services which make them available.

Contacts APIs

A contacts API is typically used to build apps that manage a user’s contact list. Examples of two markedly different contact APIs are Apple Contacts framework and Lusha.

To see how such APIs differ, take a look at what you can do with them:

• You can build contact apps for Apple devices using the Apple Contacts framework, formatting contacts lists in an alternative way to the base address book used on iOS.
• Contacts APIs like Lusha work differently — this particular interface provides the capability to add full contact details about a person or company to existing sales tools and other software.

Random APIs

Random APIs are less geared towards apps that make existing services more functional and more geared towards letting developers have fun and experiment.

• Mashape provides several public APIs, the coolest of which is its Face Recognition API. You can use this API to build face detection photo apps that identify the age, race, and gender of photographed people.
• There’s a Pokémon API that allows developers to build apps which retrieve detailed data on all Pokémon from the popular Japanese franchise.

Next Steps

Now that you have an understanding of the different types of APIs available and what you can do with them, it’s a good idea to learn how to use such APIs.

Many APIs are RESTful, meaning they use a specific architecture style for responding to and receiving requests. This tutorial overviews REST APIs.

You might also want to build your own API — here is a list of tutorials for building APIs using Node.js, PHP, Python, Rails, and Java.