---
published: true
layout: post
title: API Evangelist Tells Stories To Understand and Not Always To Support
tags:
  - Politics
  - Deprecation
  - Policies
  - Monitoring
image: >-
  https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/algorotoscope-master/birth-of-a-nation-border-down-the-fence-line.jpg
---
We get some folks asking why we would share a post about an AI API from a company that is negatively impacting their world or sharing a link to the latest announcement from Facebook or Twitter API. Why on earth would API Evangelist support and amplify these companies when it is so clear they aren’t doing any good? It is important to understand that first and foremost API Evangelist is about learning, strenghhening our awareness, and shining a light into the cracks of the technology, business, policies, and people of APIs. We aren’t  in the business of amplifying and showcasing just API technology, and when we post something about a company, there is almost always a reason why we saw it as relevant, and we are always evaluating several dimensions.

- **Tactical** - Working to understand the immediate reasons and emotions behind a single move.
- **Strategic** - Allowing us to step back and think about how an API story fits into the bigger picture.
- **Timestamp** - Putting a timestamp on something that a company has done with their API.
- **Outside** - Bringing outside opinions and awareness to something that might not have made news.
- **Signals** - Sending signals directly to a company announcing something, or to their competitors.

Each blog post, conversation, video, and social media post within the API Evangelist domain is always part of painting a larger picture over time. [Consider Facebook quietly deprecating their APIs that were used to target people of color and of specific religions in 2017](https://apievangelist.com/2017/12/04/facebook-quietly-deprecates-the-audience-insight-api-used-to-automate-targeting-during-the-election/)-—without the timestamps of Tweets, we wouldn’t have caught the missing API and its absence from the Facebook change log. There are a lot of signals being sent by API producers in any given moment that we won’t always make sense as part of the bigger picture in the given  moment. Sometimes the outside system of record is all we have as companies remove dates from blog posts, rewrite change logs, and conduct other shapeshifting and time travel tactics as part of their API evangelism.