While I gather my thoughts and references, relative to API design, testing, and promotions, let me ask you a question. Feel free to respond. What API disasters have you experienced? Tell me about your API nightmares. APIs that changed, didn't work, had bad documentation, poor presentation format, were hard to work with, had a buggy core product, had lousy developer support, etc. Help me compile my research into API Marketing, and ride my coattails into oblivion! Actual research findings, URLs, and citations coming soon. Stay tuned.

API (application programming interface) design, testing, and promotions to the developer community, is a current client assignment that I love working on. It's a new realm of marketing, and what's more, it enables me to pool all my skills and interests into one tight focus. It seems that the idea of an API as a "product" that is "sold" to the "end-user" development community is a relatively new approach. Fortunately, I've discovered many enlightening articles online, using Google Search, that have quickly brought me up to speed on this complex and challenging field. Journaling my progress, and setbacks, here, in this Slashdot Journal, as I seek to increase my expertise. It'll be the viewpoint of a communications professional, a writer. While confidential and mission critical information regarding my clients and their specific projects will never be disclosed, I'll share enough general and applied principles to fully prepare you to analyze API value and presentation, assure tested quality, and promote the API to the developer community. Developers who are likely to be interested in the functionalities and features your API makes available to them in their projects. We'll consider API design, testing, and promotions of Google Maps, eBay, YouTube, Salesforce, Amazon, WordPress, Krugle, StrikeIron, Skype, Feedburner, and many others. I'll quote from, and perhaps interact a bit with, folks like: * Joshua Bloch (Principal Software Engineer, Google) * Steven Clarke and Krzystof Cwalina (MSDN) * Duane Merrill (IBM Developer Works) * Bill Venners (Artima) * Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek) * Brian Marick (Testing.com) * Tiago Macedo (We Break Stuff) * Chris Locke (Cluetrain, Krugle) * John Hagel III (Net Gain, Edge Perspectives) * Matthias Ettrich (Trolltech) * Marcus Zarra (DevSource) * Alex Bosworth (SourceLabs) * Brad Abrams * John Musser (Programmable Web) * Phil Wainwright (TechRepublic) * Jan Strube (Confluence, Stanford) * Roy Lechich (Yale) * Eamonn McManus * Damian Conway ...and many others. Stay tuned. I have much to share.