APIs in a nutshell

An API is the medium that allows the exchange of data points between a service and the programmer or user. API concepts have been widely used in the software industry when we needed different software to exchange data with with another. Mobile and internet applications have been using web services and APIs to enrich information from external sources. Social media also started creating APIs to share their data with third-party application developers. The popularity of data science has made APIs emerge also as a source for mining and knowledge creation. The nature of all social media is different, so are their APIs. The steps involved in making a connection may not differ greatly, but the data points we capture do.