Solving The Problem Of API Discovery

API discovery has not changed much since 2005, when John Musser launched ProgrammableWeb, the API directory we've all come to know and love. In 2014 (9 years later), we have Mashape and a handful of other API directory and discovery tools, but we have not made progress on truly being able to discover the best APIs possible, in a distributed, machine-readable way.

Steve Willmott of 3Scale, and Kin Lane of API Evangelist, are at it again, looking to provide a possible solution, that we are calling APIs.json—a machine readable listing of your APIs and supporting building blocks that lives in the root of your domain.

The objective of APIs.json is to help fix this problem by making it easy for people to signpost where the APIs on a given domain are and provide information on how they work. The format is simple and extensible and can be put into any web root domain for discovery.

We are just getting started, so make sure and get involved via the Github repository or via the Google Group we've setup to facilitate discussion.