Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy

by Parth Detroja

“collaborative filtering,” and it’s the same technique that Amazon uses to suggest items you might like based on your purchase history and the purchases of millions of other users.[33] Netflix’s movie suggestions, YouTube’s video suggestions, and Facebook’s friend suggestions also use collaborative filtering.[34]

the news feed algorithm doesn’t consider how true or reputable a post is; it only cares about maximizing engagement.[56] Fake newsmongers took advantage of this to attack politicians they didn’t like, posting outrageous and demonstrably false news articles around Facebook. These articles naturally drew many clicks and comments, so Facebook’s news feed algorithm propelled them to the top of many people’s news feeds.[57]

These snippets of code that let you borrow another app’s functionality or data are called APIs, or application programming interfaces. In short, APIs let apps talk to each other. Let’s look at three main kinds of APIs.

The first kind of API, which we’ll call “feature APIs,” lets one app ask another specialized app to solve a particular problem,

The second type of API, which we’ll call “data APIs,” lets one app ask another app to hand over some interesting information, such as sports scores, recent Tweets, or today’s weather.

The final kind of API, “hardware APIs,” lets developers access features of the device itself.