How Digg created cool tools (or rather how Digg got someone else to do it!)

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the Digg Labs, but the Digg team has really come up with some VERY cool flash tools to play with - or have they? If you pay attention to the small print on the bottom of the page, tt’s particularly interesting to note that the development was actually done by a little known design firm (by myself anyways), called Stamen Design in San Francisco. By using Digg’s API (Application Programming Interface) and Flickr & Root.net’s API as well, they have developed some awesome applications for these clients of theirs.

In the “What we do section” they describe themselves as follows:

Stamen’s client work and the research projects we pursue present us with as broad a variety of design challenges as we could hope for: from providing live views of social networks as they happen to covering live bicycle races over the internet, from building collaborative applications for car designers to describing the lifetime output of an all-but-uncategorizable artist/architect.

While we use a wide range of techniques to help us understand this broad range of concerns, our response has most frequently taken two forms: mapping and data visualization.

Anyways, they look like a real smart bunch of guys with a decent enough client list. The real point I’m trying to make that is that they build these cools apps through the use of API’s, the upsurge of which, was predicted on this blog, about a year ago.  In a few years time, we’ll wonder how we ever did without them (if we don’t already).

I can already see sophisticated design, marketing & advertising agencies starting to use API’s the way that Stamen have done with Digg & Flickr and create fascinating flash applications and widgets.  The world of API’s are upon us!!

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