Edit: Thank you for all of your answers. I feel I have a much better understanding of what’s going on. Hope to see y’all on the other side of this.
In: 241
Let’s use Twitter as an example. Twitter has different functionality such as allowing you to see tweets, post tweets, like tweets, etc.
You use Twitter through the browser and have a visual interface but Twitter also allows this functionality to be used through APIs. An API is a way for a third party system to talk to another system (like Twitter). So I can write a software that will make these API calls to Twitter and do all the functionality machine to machine. So I could do an API request to Twitter to get all tweets mentioning tornados in Iowa because I’m making a weather app for example. This can be a large amount of data processing for Twitter to handle this type of request so Twitter might not want to do it for free because it costs them money so they sell access to their API.
Latest Answers