Our team just published a byline in Forbes entitled, Demystifying APIs and API Quality, explaining why APIs matter and what makes a good API. Written for a marketing generalist, the article provides some great in-plain-English explanations of:

• What is an API?
• Why do APIs Matter? 
• What are Public Versus Private APIs? 
• What Differentiates a Great API? 
• What’s the Best Way to Evaluate an API?

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

I recently had an email exchange with my company’s CTO, in which he told me about some API award shows and how we should be entering them. I’ll admit, I was shocked to find out that there were API award shows.

I knew that APIs were critical to helping applications access data for important tasks, but I had never really thought of APIs as something with degrees of awesomeness. My vague conception was that you created some sort of metaphorical pipe and called it a day and that when you were evaluating a software solution, all you needed was a check box: has API?

Boy was I mistaken.

Read more here. 

(Note, since this article was published we have changed our name from Performance Horizon to Partnerize. Check out our home page for more information.)