Behance officially launches its developer API, evolving its creative network into a powerful platform

Behance, the popular portfolio-sharing network for creatives, first began rolling out version 2 of its previously private API on August 31st. Now, the company is officially launching it, allowing developers to build apps that incorporate the service’s projects, works in progress and users. In other words, the network has now truly become a platform.

With over 12 million images and nearly 2 million public projects, Behance says its overall goal is “to provide just about every function of Behance through the API, both read and write.” To make this a reality, the company has plans to integrate oAuth 2.0.

For now, however, the first iteration of the public API will allow “granular access to projects, users and works in progress by searching a number of different criteria such as popularity, tags, location, creative fields, and more.” In other words, only existing content is being offered to developers at the moment, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle. There’s massive potential here for Behance to solidify itself as the de facto standard for creativity, and opening up its API can make this happen.

This announcement comes in the middle of a busy year for Behance, which has so far launched an iPhone app, redesigned its site and raised a $6.5M round of funding after bootstrapping for five years. Now, today’s launch gives us a peek at what’s next to come.

If you’d like to get started with Behance’s API, you can log into the site and register your application here. You can also view the documentation here for examples and check out the company’s starter libraries in PHP and JS (more to come).

Contributions by TNW’s Josh Ong