#ICYMI: There are thousands of APIs available across many different industries online today, and it can be tough to be able to find just the right API and make sense of the differences between them. Even two APIs that might share a common resource like photos or videos might have completely different designs and make different types of data available. Depending on what your motivations are for wanting to find data, you might have different views of what data is valuable and which characteristics are most important to you. Many of the companies we talk with about data discovery express their interest in data that is changing in real time, but in the same breath, dictate that they want data from API providers who have significant historical data as well. It can be fairly easy to find real-time sources of data, and it can be relatively easy to find data that possess archives, but finding API sources that have both proves to be pretty difficult, making this a pretty interesting challenge when it comes to API discovery.
The federal government is one place to find significant stores of archival data, ranging from economic to environmental — the problem is they don’t have very much data that is delivered in real-time. Social data has recently been a rich place to find real-time data, but leading platforms are increasingly shutting down access to historical data, and in Twitter’s case, they are working to actively monetize it. Data is valuable these days, real-time data makes it even more valuable, and each year of historical data you possess makes it exponentially more valuable. https://goo.gl/KvfHPa