Mashery Success Story: Klout

Singletary: “An API was part of our business model from the beginning, and it’s been the key to becoming valuable to many companies and, by extension, individuals. If we just had Klout.com, we wouldn’t be nearly as big. The API lets others embed Klout scores and topics anywhere, which has led to many great partnerships.”

Singletary: “Capital One ran a campaign where they set cash-back multipliers based on your Klout score. Reuters shows Klout scores for political candidates and CEOs, as well as for its columnists. In total, over 3,500 partners use Klout to trigger alerts, curate content and contacts, identify brand ambassadors and influencers, segment audiences, and, most importantly, reward individuals.”

Singletary: “Less is more. Let partners get the minimum amount of data that they need. It might sound counterintuitive, but we would have far fewer partnerships if we had a more data-rich API. We favor RESTful APIs because they’re simple and self-documenting.”

Singletary: “We used to look mainly at call volume, but now my primary metric is the number of active partners. I also track developer feedback and enthusiasm at events.”

Singletary: “Serving an API is not our core competence, and Mashery lets us keep it that way. Mashery deals with caching and data centers so we don’t have to. We also benefit from Mashery’s new feature releases. We don’t have to build those ourselves.”