Ask: What Can API's Do For You?
As internet firms adjust to being in the news spotlight for the wrong reasons (again) regarding user information, how it's gathered, secured and the way it is re-purposed; you would be forgiven for envisioning a future in which these mechanisms are kept under tight wrap.
Unfortunate for privacy consumers; the proliferation and ease of use of API's looks to simply accelerate societies debate on user data.
Fortunately; for those who earn a living from consumer information, a plethora of new strategies are beginning to emerge that will decide the bottom line.
A recent favorite is Dialogflow. A "chat" bot with a mislabeled purpose. Allowing you to create a centralized, mobile and highly adaptable container; Dialogflow is everything someone with limited technical abilities but high vision could have dreamed of.
The true genius of Dialogflow however comes from it's ability to natively integrate into Google Suite offerings. From the basics such as Gmail, Chrome, Books, to more advanced sets of information pulled from Analytics, AdWords and third parties such as Wikipedia.
Looking at the above picture; we start to pull into view the potential of tools labeled as "chat bots".
Yellow: we can label as a generic cloud service - this allows to tap into tens if not hundreds of basic programs which encompass decades of development work.
Red: media platforms. UTM parameters, cookies, click tracking.
Green: analytics API's. Cities, devices, user behavior, interaction statistics. Reports from analytics programs are usually housed in a very tight knit manner which allows to streamlined downloading on multiple data factors.
Blue: external connections. Your miscellaneous programs required to provide a holistic training session.
Black: nodes which have not yet been unlocked for greater flexibility in shifting or merging data.
Major corporations & governments have already begun to invest heavily into these "bot" projects. (i.e. Siri, Alexa, Google Home). As regular people break the barrier to create incredibly flexible and advanced "bots" in a matter of minutes, the question will be; what can API's do for you?