Spire.io is out of beta

http://www.spire.io/posts/version-1-dot-0.html

by plunchete • 14 years ago

18 10 14 years ago

mthreat• 14 years ago

Hopefully constructive criticism here:

I've looked around your site, and I'm still not sure what you offer. I've figured out that you offer APIs, but APIs that do what? Push messages (urban airship)? Search (indextank, searchify)? Geostuff? Video encoding (zencoder)?

I could probably dig into the example libraries and figure it out, but if people don't figure out what you offer pretty quick, many will bail.

aeontech• 14 years ago

Same here, I spent 5 minutes reading 'Get Started', and still couldn't make heads or tails of it, so went back to HN to see if the comments here make it any clearer.

ecaroth• 14 years ago

Ditto - this comment mirrored my thoughts/experience exactly

spladow2• 14 years ago

This is definitely constructive. The fact that aeontech and ecaroth both had the same issue means it's clear that we can improve how we explain what we do.

Right now, the only API we have is secure real-time messaging. We are working on rolling out a bunch of others (ie identity, assets, storage ...) in order to create a more complete solution for developing backend infrastructure.

What kinds of APIs are you most interested in seeing?

Thanks to everyone for the feedback so far. It's been very helpful.

cobychapple• 14 years ago

Likewise. Although, looking at the examples made me even more confused: I was expecting to see some code examples showing how I'd actually go about using/accessing the API. But it just showed me an app, which could have been built using a large number of technologies in a large number of ways.

My advice? Show us how this product makes life easier than whatever it is that it's an alternative to.

graphnical2• 14 years ago

Haha... yea... so I looked at the API for like 2 mins then the code examples... and was trying to find the justification for the 'We provide you with hosted, secure, reliable, and scalable APIs' part... all I saw was a msging api... so I started thinking all deep like... is there some other part that generically talks to any api... and this is some architecture that organizes the other apis... like 'channels' & 'messages'... hahaha... then I was like... the hell... and RTFCs.

Perhaps, if you plan on other APIs that's cool but give indication that this is just one... give it an icon or something... and then a 'coming soon' icon... group 'em up in a section called APIs.

GL!

spladow2• 14 years ago

Thanks. This is good advice.

May I ask what you thought of the messaging service or what APIs you'd like to see next?

graphnical2• 14 years ago

I guess the idea is that these are utilities right?

You have msging and mention identity, assets storage...

So really this seems like it is heading toward the basic functionality of a CMS...

So... you might end up building some cloud-backed framework to demonstrate the bundle of APIs... that might not be your focus but people could build upon it...

Which is fine if that is what you want to do... another possibility is to branch into APIs covering novel functions.

Given your pricing model, seems you are going for widespread use that leans toward the more generic APIs...

I guess the question is... what do you want spire.io to be in the near future? That would dictate which APIs come next.

Have fun with that ;)

Hominem• 14 years ago

Is this satire? I'm a legitimately confused here. The getting started was about hypermedia and API discovery schemes but didn't say what I could even use the API for.

oblasco• 14 years ago

For all the worries above, check http://protoapi.com instead :)

Spire.io is out of beta

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