- by Carmen Apostu
- Posted June 1, 2016
Once you have your creative juices flowing, it’s time to take the next step toward figuring out if you should use an integrations and an integration platform to help you connect applications. You see, if you can list out a series of potentially valuable integrations it doesn’t mean that you would benefit from them all.
Sure, Slack has hundreds of integrations. But they are essentially an integration tool that allows messaging.
You will have to see which apps pair nicely with your application. Don’t rack your brain on this step. While it may not suit you to be a Swiss Army Knife of apps, you don’t have to search for a “perfect addition” and could benefit from multiple integrations.
Example: Starbucks allows you to download and listen to music right from their application (not exactly a direct correlation to coffee, but enough of one to work).
If the company were to also integrate writing tools to appeal to authors, or Wikipedia to appeal to students it wouldn’t make their app more cumbersome. In fact, it may make the app more valuable to end users who just happen to be drinking in their shops.
None of these apps would be about the coffee, but the user.
Does that make sense?
API Stat: Twitter receives 13 billion calls on their API daily.
On the other hand, your app could become directly more valuable due to APIs as well. Open Data (from sources like the data.gov and others) can make your products even more useful, or even give birth to entirely new products.
Example: Longtail Pro is a keyword search tool that allows webmasters to find search terms to target for search engine optimization (SEO). They use the Google Keyword Planner API to harvest the initial data, but also utilize other tools (with open APIs) to help users determine how easy it would be to attain first page rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing searches for each term.
A direct correlation with direct value added.
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