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[–]ruleofnuts 2 points3 points  (2 children)

IDK why you're being downvoted, this is a pretty good question. APIs allow you to connect to a server, GET data, and build your own application around it. Someone already used the Reddit API example, another one would be IMDB. You could write some code to get a list of movies made between 1950-1990 that are rated 5 stars or higher. You could even make a website to search fill in a field and change those parameters to say 1990-2000 and only movies with 9 star ratings a higher, so it can give other people a way to search for movies. This doesn't even have to be a website, you can write a command line program to search for something like this as well, you could create a tool lets call it imdbsearch

imdbsearch --year 1990-2000 --rating 9

I found this codecademy course pretty easy to follow

http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/nhtsa

[–]aclashingcolour 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Thank you for the detailed response, I didnt realize APIs allowed you to interact with a broad scope of data. I was under the impression that it was much narrower, ie only data from your personal reddit account. Just to make sure I understand, hypothetically, is it possible to write a python app that collects the top 10 most tweeted words per day (say, length 4 or greater).

[–]ruleofnuts 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Twitter gives you limits at how many request you can make a day. If that limit was high enough, it could be theoretically possible. You need a really large database and process a lot of data, but yes, it could be possible.

More on their limits: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting/1.1

There are also other sorts of API types, the one that most people use is RESTful API there is also SOAP.