Public API

Sometimes, companies will make a few of their APIs available, and give you instructions on how to use them. A great example is the Twitter API. Normally, you’d use the Twitter app, which makes a bunch of API calls to internal Twitter APIs like show feed, send reply, and search (this is what we just spoke about: frontend and backend). But you can also call those APIs yourself, with code, outside of the Twitter app. For example, there’s a get user timeline API that you can use to see a user’s timeline (their tweets) – that API returns those tweets in JSON, which is a special text format.