SoundCloud is a leading sound sharing platform on the web, with over 7 million sound creators. To draw comparisons, it’s like Flickr or YouTube for sound. On there you’ll find all kinds of sounds, from beats, to songs, to sound effects, to nature recordings, and through their APIs, it’s a completely open platform. At the moment they have 1000s of apps developed for Soundcloud, with 1000s of developers in their ecosystem, and just over 200 published apps. They’ve just signed a deal with audio software company CakeWalk for deep integration with CakeWalk Sonar X1, and have some great implementations of SoundCloud on smaller websites like Thinglink.com and OneSheet.com.
Eric Wahlforss, CTO and co-founder of SoundCloud, took us through the lessons they’ve learnt about APIs at Future of Web Apps 2011. Eric made a good point, that APIs allow people to use their own data, empowering them as users, which they love to talk about, resulting in more coverage for your service. They also help you extend your app and solve niche user requests that you might not have the time or resources to build into the core. Basically, your development community are the ultimate power users.
Here are Eric’s Dos and Don’t for developing an API:
- When it comes to building an API for your service, make sure you follow the KISS principle (Keep it simple, stupid!). Nobody likes using a bloated, hard to use API.
- You need to think about the level of your API and what it gets access to
- You need to think about scalability if your thinking of making an API.
- You need to watch your metrics so you can optimise for the most scalable use cases.
- You need to communicate with your audience.
- You need to talk about shiny new things.
- You need to eat your own dogfood. If you personally aren’t using the service and developing with your APIs, then why would anyone else?
- Don’t pay people to partake, as you don’t want your community to be driven by money. Contests work in the same way, and you end up not getting a deep, passionate commitment from your community that way.
- Don’t change. If you constantly change your service, you’ll end up alienating your audience. Once people are committed to your service, it gets harder to change things.
- Do bizdev 1.0 – 1.5 – 2.0. For more information on this, read Caterina’s article here.
- Finally, fail. Iterate. Fail. Iterate. Fail. Iterate. Fail. If you don’t fail, you’ll never succeed.
To check out the APIs and the developer tools at SoundCloud’s developer site. If you want to use Vapor on your Windows Phone, then check out Vapor, one of the first SoundCloud Windows Phone apps. To check out Eric’s slides head here.
