[dberlind]

Hi all, I was on vacation when this thread popped-up and I'm now just reading through it all and wanted to say that we at ProgrammableWeb strive to be the very best resource for anyone that's searching for APIs to use in their apps. I'll be the first one to say that achieving this objective always presents a challenge as there are many things we'd like to do by tomorrow, but not the unlimited resources I wish I had to make everything (including your suggestions) happen so fast.

Just to be clear, we have recently re-engineered our underlying data model to better reflect the complex state of the API economy. That data model is really at the foundation of all the functionality that our site offers. So, nailing that model has been critically important. For example, many (not all) developers love SDKs and these days, a large percentage of APIs ship with a full complement of SDKs. Our data model makes it easy to go from one to the other. If you land on an API, you can find all the related SDKs (even if they are third party SDKs that don't come from the API provider). If you land on an SDK, you can quickly get back to the "parent" API. I know.. not a big deal... the sort of basic task that MySQL and other RDBMS are made for. But you'd be surprised how, once we enabled this obvious capability, users started to move back and forth between them. There are many more not-so-obvious capabilities that taken together, will result in not only a very robust power search capability (ie: I'll take RESTful Storage APIs that aggregate all the other storage APIs - dropbox, gdrive, box, etc. -- and offer CSV, XML, and JSON-formatted responses), but also a much more powerful alerting service (our most popular feature).

That data model also had to be nailed to enable a great API for APIs which is also on our road map. I could go on, but hopefully, you get the point. We absolutely hear you on the many things we can do better.

Finally, I would like to address the part about ads, tracking, and so forth. Yes, we do have ads. To build our technology, to run a research team that's constantly finding the latest APIs and SDKs and adding them to our directory, etc, we need sources of funding. We have worked hard to ensure that the ads are not what you're seeing elsewhere on the Web.. you know the ones that have pop-ups on top of pop-ups and auto-playing video on top of already playing video content and so on. Our pages are not littered with text ads either. I would love to run a site without ads at all. But knowing that this isn't possible, I hope that you would consider the minimally invasive ad environment as one that isn't following the rest of the pack to do anything to keep you from your task of searching for APIs or reading our great content.

And regarding tracking, I suspect that it's mostly connected with the ads and retargeting (again, both necessities to help subsidize the cost of us running the site). And we use Google Analytics for measuring traffic which may trigger tracking detectors. But we (ProgrammableWeb) are not deliberately tracking you with some nefarious intent. We do very basic stuff like looking to see if people are finding their way from APIs to SDKs and back again to ensure the usability of our site.

We welcome feedback on everything that we're doing and have an open door policy. You can write to the entire team by writing to [e-mail] or you can write to me directly by writing to [e-mail].