The world is rich with raw data waiting to be curated. This week we explore this data provided by informational API's and build the connected data sheet that collects this data. This exercise will allow us to explore data that may be valuable.
What is a Connected Data Sheet?
Imagine a page that pulled useful information in attractive ways. This was the promise of networked computing.
What is an informational API?
Companies that have access to information are willing to serve as the information suppliers to your applications - for a price. There are API's that get stock prices (Alpaca), weather reports (OpenWeather), bitcoin prices (Coinbase), even for getting Star Wars information (SWAPI).
Consider: nearly every single weather app in the App Store depends on the same weather data/API so every app is essentially a nice design overlaid on the same weather forecast.*
We can hit the OpenWeather API to get this same data. To focus on solving problems we wonder, how can this be helpful to people? Some apps focus on accuracy, others on friendliness and some on hilarious summaries of weather.
The value of connected data sheets
Any data can be enhanced by your own insights and this may be what your customers value. The data sheet should be timely, useful, or insight. Hopefully, it's all that and more.
Here we run a script that access the APIs of two cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase and Kraken. We can see that that there is price discrepancy. This could be very valuable to customers who want to perform arbitrage trades
It's up to your imagination, what we can do with this data. We could create:
The Weather + Bitcoin Price app that tracks weather conditions and pairs them to bitcoin prices to autogenerate suggestions for activities - "Suns out, Bitcoin is at $10k! Put on some sunscreen and hit the beach!" This app can even hook into the Coinbase api and purchase bitcoin. (we explore interacting with API's in the next newsletter)
"Bitcoin up and weather good = Bitcoin up, weather bright, let's party!"
"Bitcoin down and weather bad" = Maybe you should watch netflix instead of the BTC-USD.
"Bitcoin flat and weather grey" = Stare long enough... something will happen somewhere.
Why do this?
We are exploring the limits of the useful information available through API’s. We now have context and options to add insight to API’s, create our own API’s based on our ground truth data, or explore API’s future that can perform actions like send a text, create a payment transaction or buy handle an e-commerce store.
Grab Postman or your favorite language and its best request library and explore!