Though we have previously warned startups to tread carefully when building their businesses on third party APIs, there are still plenty of successful businesses that rely on them for their day-to-day operation. For application developers, if you’ve found yourself repeatedly visiting Downforeveryoneorjustme.com to check on the status of a site or API, one company may just have the perfect solution.
A product of Dutch website monitoring service WatchMouse, API-status is an easily-interpreted heads-up display of 26 popular third party APIs. The big boys like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are all present and accounted for, and other services like Salesforce, and Posterous are supported also.
The site has two main windows, one for the current status, and another containing a matrix of the history over the past week. Clicking one of the API names in the current status list opens a page containing further detailed stats for that service. Included is a graph of average daily performance for various parts of the API, a map displaying the current status by country, and graphs of availability over both the last week and the last day.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the service shows some poor performance currently in South Africa and was also able to track this morning’s downtime in Twitter’s friend timeline API.
Some features we would love to see implemented would be the ability to compare two or more APIs on the various charts, as well as the support for looking further back than a week. Allowing a user to subscribe to alerts for particular APIs would also go a long way in helping those using the APIs to be instantly aware of any outage.
