Mashups via Programmable Web

FaceCash & Dwolla API Profile

2012-03-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

Exchanging currency for items or services is such an old time tradition and yet there are so many ways it can be done. I've just taken a stroll through the payment systems neighborhood and I've felt inspiration from the innovators FaceCash & Dwolla, pride in my home state operator PowerPay, and murky suspicion toward JunglePay.

Facebook Ads API: Gaming the System

2011-10-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

Facebook Ads API: Gaming the System

Posted: 26 Sep 2011 12:00 AM PDT

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. You can reach him on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, his blog, or good old-fashioned email at dennis@blitzlocal.com.

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Until recently, only a handful of vendors have had access to the Facebook Ads API—a few major tool developers and some folks willing to make a $5M deposit with Facebook. We’ve been running Facebook ads and building apps for the last 4 years. The breakdown on the Facebook Ads API: It's not exactly as robust as the Google AdWords API, but that creates an opportunity to build what Facebook has missed, or game the system, depending on whether you're white or black hat.

Let's discuss the current landscape and then reveal what's missing:

50 New APIs: PayPay Invoicing, CloudMine and New York City’s API

2011-10-25T06:41:00.000-07:00

50 New APIs: PayPay Invoicing, CloudMine and New York City’s API

Posted: 23 Oct 2011 08:00 AM PDT

This week we had 50 new APIs added to our API directory including an online payment service, image recognition service, backend-as-a-service platform, video hosting and publishing platform, crowdsourcing platform for startup funding and an app translation management service. We also previewed New York City’s thrid annual BigApps conference. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.

Sierra Trading Post API: Sierra Trading Post is a retailer that specializes in offering discounts on popular outdoor clothing brands and outdoor gear.

The Sierra Trading Post API allows developers to access Sierra Trading Post's data and functionality. Some example API methods include searching products, listing brands & departments, filtering, accessing reviews, sorting and automatic affiliate's deep links generation.

500px API: 500px is an online community for photographers and fans of photography. Photographers can upload their pictures to share with other 500px users, and all users can browse and search the photo collection for discovery and artistic inspiration.

The 500px API allows developers to access and integrate the functionality and content of 500px. Some example API methods include searching and retrieving photos, uploading photos, and finding users.

13 Google APIs That Are No More

2011-10-25T01:18:00.000-07:00

13 Google APIs That Are No More

Posted: 19 Oct 2011 08:00 AM PDT

Google has a lot of APIs, more than any other company we track. Perhaps as part of adding many APIs, the search giant also has to remove them from time to time. Recently the company has become more liberal in its platform pruning, with at least three separate announcements this year. Most recently Google dropped three more APIs, including the Google Buzz API.
In the announcement post, Google explained its approach to cutting products:

We aspire to build great products that really change people's lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don't work on. It's why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products.

Below is a list of all 13 Google APIs that have answered the grim reaper’s call:

Google Buzz, a social sharing service
Google Code Search, a developer-focused search engine
Google Desktop, a gadget and desktop search service
Google Health, a health data service
Google Maps Data, a geodata storage, update and viewing service
Google Maps Flash, a flash-based mapping service
Google Mashup Editor, a mashup creation tool
Google Notebook, an online notebook service
Google PowerMeter, a power consumption monitoring tool
Google Search, search services
Google Shared Spaces, a collaborative widget service
Google Sidewiki, a service to access Google Sidewiki content
Jaiku, a social messaging service

You can see all 13 deadpooled Google APIs in our directory, or our list of all 92 Google APIs.

Developer Painkiller: Interactive API Docs

2011-10-19T11:36:00.000-07:00

Developer Painkiller: Interactive API Docs
InfoChimps Bundles Many Location Sources in One API
Stereomood Gives You Access to Some Real Mood Music

Neil Mansilla is Director of Developer Products and API Evangelist for Mashery. Mashery is a ProgrammableWeb sponsor.

Developers are game changers. Developers are craftspeople. Like all smart, motivated tinkerers who like to make stuff, developers also tend to have strongly-held opinions about what makes their craft easier or more difficult. Developer pain tiers upwards from mildly annoying to "bang head here" WTF. Debugging someone else's sloppy code or terminal sessions timing out? Non-awesome. Coworkers talking loudly on the phone near their desk or standing over their shoulders? Painful. Awful documentation? Excruciating.

In the world of web APIs that numbers over 3000 and growing rapidly, developer surveys conducted by Mashery and other parties clearly show that poor documentation is public enemy number one. And don't think that the perpetrators are understaffed, underfunded startups. Even the most bleeding edge, well-funded Silicon Valley tech companies serve up atrocious API docs.

To address this problem, there are new tools and trends in this space that are helping both API providers: tool-generated documentation and interactive interfaces. The rest of this article will discuss the challenges of traditional API documentation and how implementing new tools can help API providers deploy next generation docs that will knock developers' socks off.

8coupons Now Aggregates 500+ Coupon Sources, Releases New API

2011-10-16T04:49:00.000-07:00

Ok, Maybe the Google+ API Was An Afterthought

Posted: 12 Oct 2011 08:20 PM PDT

According to a post from a Google engineer, intended to be private to the search giant’s employees, the Google+ API was not ready at launch. Google’s Steve Yegge also badmouthed the read-only, public API. When the company’s new service was only two weeks old, I wondered whether the Google+ API was intentionally late. Maybe it was just truly late.
SiliconFilter has a breakout of the important bits and there’s a mirror of the full post.
Here’s the portion where Yegge focuses on the API:

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don’t get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call.

AirBNB API Will Pay Developers With Affiliate Program

2011-10-16T04:12:00.000-07:00

AirBNB API Will Pay Developers With Affiliate Program
ThinkUp Now Supports Google Plus API
MapQuest’s Neighborhood App MQVibe Has a Hidden API

Airbnb is an online service that matches people seeking vacation rentals and other short-term accommodations with those with rooms to rent, generally private parties that are not professional hoteliers. The site was founded in August 2008 by Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. In July 2011, the company had over 100,000 listings in 16,000 cities and 186 countries. Listings include private rooms, entire apartments, castles, boats, manors, tree houses, tipis, igloos, private islands and other properties. In 2008, Chesky and Gebbia moved to San Francisco. The Industrial Design Society of America was holding its yearly design conference at that time, and hotels were sold out. The two, who were unable to pay their rent, offered part of their loft as accommodations. The company was incubated by the Y Combinator in January 2009. The initial name of the website was Airbedandbreakfast.com, but it was shortened to Airbnb.com in March 2009. At this time the site's offerings expanded from just shared spaces to apartments, whole houses and other properties. In June 2010, the founders' loft was still being used as an office. To make room for employees and to study the Airbnb product, Chesky gave up his

Popular room rental service AirBNB does not yet have an official AirBNB API. But signs point to one’s existence, as well as an affiliate plan in place to pay developers for reservations booked through the API. If the company sticks with the plan as written now, developers will be able to make up to 10 million API calls per day before contacting AirBNB.

Here are some choice quotes from the AirBNB affiliate terms, which include branding requirements, rate limits and other fine print:

You will be paid for Commission-Earning Activity derived from Application Programming Interface (API) only if your Software (including websites, web apps, mobile apps) complies with all of these Terms and Conditions.
For each transaction, You will be compensated in accordance with the then-current Payout schedule for Transactions on Airbnb.com site (“Commission-Earning Activity”). To qualify as a payable transaction, a user must take an affirmative action, clicking on your properly-coded link in a browser or browser environment.
You may not include affiliate links on any of Airbnb.com pages, nor may you use affiliate links to promote your own Airbnb listing or those of your sub-publishers or those of anyone else with whom you are affiliated.
You will use not use the listings we provide without using Airbnb's creative assets. It should also be clear to the user that these listings are from Airbnb.
If you exceed or plan to exceed any of the following thresholds, please contact us prior to using the API: (>10M API Calls per day)
If You collect information about the user or about user's web usage, You have to receive explicit permission from the user prior to using this information to display advertising
You will not directly or indirectly offer any consideration or incentive for any Commission-Earning Activity or for clicking on an affiliate program-coded link unless expressly authorized to do so in writing by Airbnb.

37 APIs Used in 7 Days: Trulia, Google Maps, Salesforce.com

2011-10-16T03:53:00.000-07:00

37 APIs Used in 7 Days: Trulia, Google Maps, Salesforce.com

Posted: 15 Oct 2011 08:00 AM PDT

This past week 19 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 37 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Aviary Feather, Aviary Suite, Education.com, Exchange Rate, Trulia, Yandex and ZoomInfo. The most often used APIs this week are Facebook, Google Maps and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (7 APIs, 13 mashups), Shopping (3 APIs, 4 mashups) and Search (3 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Amazon eCommerce used in Book-Current, eCommazon
Amazon Fulfillment Web Service used in eCommazon
Amazon Marketplace Web Service used in eCommazon
Aviary Effects used in LipMe
Aviary Feather used in LipMe
Aviary Suite used in LipMe
Bing used in Lionyzer
Calais used in JGE Automatic Content Generator
DocuSign Enterprise used in EasySlip

35 New APIs: Medicare, NYC 311 and Mobile Contact Syncing

2011-10-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

Today we’re marking another milestone in our API directory: we now list 4,000 of them. It’s only been six months since we toasted the 3,000th. And, as we’ve said before, the site ended its first year, 2005, listing only 105 APIs. The whole web as a platform has come a long way and done so very quickly. There are some areas, such as social, which are incredibly popular. There’s also a lot of room for expansion, as industries like travel and retail have yet to fully embrace APIs. How soon will we mark the 5,000th?

Obviously Facebook has been an incredible force on the Internet, so that shows in the over 500 social APIs. In fact, just within Facebook itself we’ve seen growth over the last year.

Travel API Hack Event Highlights Industry Complexities

2011-10-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

Travel API Hack Event Highlights Industry Complexities
Are There Open APIs Behind Apple’s New Voice Commands?
Twitter Influence API Makes Klout a Billionaire
Accounting iOS App Wins File Storage Developer Challenge

Travel API Hack Event Highlights Industry Complexities

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 12:00 AM PDT

The Tnooz THack event at ITA Google’s headquarters in Boston was a lesson in how overwhelming development for the travel industry can be. On the morning of the first day of the hackathon, the eleven API hosts provided brief descriptions of their APIs and their respective functionality or access to data. It became clear, very quickly, that most of the APIs were not like the Twitter API or Google Maps API. Many of the APIs delivered a lot of complex data in a highly structured format. Building some kind of mash-up using any of the APIs would be a challenge.
The first hack, presented by the Amadeus team combined the Amadeus hotel API along with flights, the Silver Rail API for rail tickets, the Goby API for things to do, along with the Facebook API for social graph. The purpose of the hack was to allow a combination of social trip planning with dynamic package building around a user’s favorite NFL team. The dates and locations of the games were hard coded into the app (or in a final version in the database). The flights, hotels, and activities were then triggered based on the dates and locations set with the chosen football game. Despite the limited time frame, the application managed to allow for searching and retrieving content from the various APIs, and building a basic itinerary along with the ability to share the itinerary with friends.

The second hack presented by the developer from Delta Airlines was a partially working

Google Maps for Flash Among Several Axed Google APIs

2011-09-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

Google Maps for Flash Among Several Axed Google APIs
Viadeo Looks to Take on LinkedIn in the US
Every City Should Have an API: Let’s Start With Watertown, MA

Google Maps for Flash Among Several Axed Google APIs

Posted: 06 Sep 2011 10:00 AM PDT

It has been a long spell of "Operation Product Cleanup" at Google. Some of the high profile announcements like shutting down of the Google Translate API and the outrage have seen it reframed as a paid version. Others, like Google Maps Flash, were not so lucky in the most recent round of API euthanasia.

In what it calls a “fall spring-clean,” Google has marked a series of products for retirement. The blog post clearly states that the products identified do not fall anymore in the high-impact group and hence the decision to retire them.

Google Maps API continues to remain one of the most popular APIs in our directory with thousands of mashups that uses it. The Google Maps API comes in two flavors: Javascript and Flash (Actionscript). If you are using the Flash version of Google Maps API, popular for creating more fluid experiences, then you need to search for a replacement. However, existing Google Maps API Premier customers using Google Maps API for Flash will continue to be served. One would expect that to include popular map mashups like New York Times’ Census Explorer. Read the Google Geo Developers blog post for more details.

OfficeDrop boosts PaperPort with Device to Cloud API

2011-09-10T14:18:00.000-07:00

OfficeDrop boosts PaperPort with Device to Cloud API

Posted: 05 Sep 2011 08:00 AM PDT

Cloud Based storage solutions are getting more mainstream by the day and finding their way as an essential extension of popular products. Imagine a scenario where you scan documents and they are directly stored in the cloud thereby giving you instant features like sharing the documents, indexing and even searching them. OfficeDrop, a web-based digital filing and document sharing services has just announced integration of the OfficeDrop API into PaperPort Anywhere to seamlessly bring in cloud storage for Nuance's popular PaperPort application.
The OfficeDrop and PaperPort Anywhere document management API can now be used not just by developers but even by scanner and multifunction printer vendors to connect their software and hardware solutions to cloud based storage and sharing. An example given is that of a multifunction printer vendor who can now provide "Scan to Cloud" features by utilising the PaperPort Anywhere API.

Google Translate API is Back… For a Fee

2011-09-04T13:29:00.000-07:00

Google Translate API is Back… For a Fee

Posted: 29 Aug 2011 10:00 AM PDT

After pulling the plug on its Google Translate API, the company will now charge for the service. It hopes the fee will curb what it characterized as “extensive abuse.” Users did not respond favorably to the original announcement and we were pleased to report that the API would be available as a paid API. We now have the details on the pricing.

As part of the move to a paid API, the service also removes some of the restrictions of previous versions and can be used in commercial products, which is an important step. Google’s Jeff Chin announced the pricing:

The paid version of Translate API removes many of the usage restrictions of previous versions and can now be used in commercial products. Translation costs $20 per million (M) characters of text translated (or approximately $0.05/page, assuming 500 words/page). You can sign up online via the APIs console for usage up to 50 M chars/month.

Google is positioning this to developers who wish to harness the language translation market commercially. For websites, Google still recommends the translator gadget, which is free for use. In addition, all Google applications like Google Translator and their mobile applications will continue to remain free. The initial comments seem mixed and it seems that you need to have a solid plan around how to monetize your offering since you will be incurring the cost now for the Google Translate API.

40 New APIs: Automated Trading, Flickr Real Time, Best Buy BBYOpen

2011-09-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

40 New APIs: Automated Trading, Flickr Real Time, Best Buy BBYOpen

Posted: 28 Aug 2011 08:00 AM PDT

This week we had 40 new APIs added to our API directory including a stock trading system automator, file sharing service, website performance testing tool, realtime photo updates from flickr, mobile visual search and a local deals aggregation service. Additionally, we covered the potential value of emerging commerce APIs. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.

100 Facts About Me API: 100 Facts About Me is a Russian website dedicated to helping people become better friends by providing an easy way to share information about yourself. The 100 Facts About Me API enables users to post, retrieve, and list facts about themselves and their friends using the XML-RPC protocol.

25 APIs Used in 7 Days: CareerBuilder, Last.fm, LinkedIn

2011-09-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

25 APIs Used in 7 Days: CareerBuilder, Last.fm, LinkedIn

Posted: 27 Aug 2011 08:00 AM PDT

This past week 23 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 25 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include CareerBuilder, FreshBooks, LinkUp Job Search Engine, Magento, Mediaburst SMS, Scalr and SocialOomph. The most often used APIs this week are Facebook, Twilio and Twilio SMS. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Job Search (4 APIs, 4 mashups), Social (4 APIs, 9 mashups) and Reference (2 APIs, 2 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:

Amazon EC2 used in Research And Compare
Amazon eCommerce used in Research And Compare
Amazon S3 used in Research And Compare
CareerBuilder used in Job search HireADroid
Facebook used in BirthdayGram, Gmarjil, MiniDates, Research And Compare
Forvo used in The pronunciation guide for Windows Phone
FreshBooks used in Mobile Time Tracking
GeoNames used in Mood Music
Google App Engine used in BirthdayGram
indeed used in Job search HireADroid
Last.fm used in Mood Music
LinkedIn used in Droidin – LinkedIn on Android, Job search HireADroid
LinkUp Job Search Engine used in Job search HireADroid
Magento used in Magento Mediaburst SMS Notifications
MailChimp used in Research And Compare

6000 Mashups: Social Continues Rising

2011-08-29T13:01:00.000-07:00

Twitter API Ditches XML For Trends: New Features Are JSON-Only

Posted: 26 Aug 2011 05:17 PM PDT

Twitter is embracing the trend where 1 in 5 new APIs do not support XML. The trend is playing out, appropriately enough, with Twitter’s endpoint for accessing global and local trending topics. It follows a move in late 2010 where Twitter Streaming went JSON-only. All signs point to no XML support for new Twitter features.

The move to JSON is brought on by Twitter’s consolidation of the three separate endpoints for accessing trends into a single endpoint. The one solution is built off of Yahoo’s WOEIDs (Where on Earth IDs). WOEIDs have been the basis of location-related Twitter calls since Twitter originally released location trends nearly two years ago. The identifiers were also central to the Mixer Labs’ GeoAPI acquired by Twitter in late 2009. Global trends will still be available using a WOEID of 1.
Twitter’s Jason Costa explained why Twitter is removing XML:

As well as standardizing the trends URL we are also planning to switch the trends API to JSON only. The reason for this is because the use of XML on the trends API is significantly low and removing support would allow us to free up resources for other developments.

Running down the data formats supported by Twitter’s various APIs, there is still plenty of XML support (as well as RSS and Atom), but some of the newer features are JSON-only.
Twitter API Data Formats

Robot Trading Produces Automatic Profits

2011-08-29T12:57:00.000-07:00

Robot Trading Produces Automatic Profits

Posted: 25 Aug 2011 08:00 AM PDT

Stock trading systems community Collective2 is bringing automated trading systems to the retail brokerage customer. Joe Shmoe can now have access to a trading system developed and practiced by an experienced broker, mad technical analyst, or possibly even a computer algorithm. The Collective2 API will make it possible for quant systems all over the internet to trigger trading in unknown numbers of retail customer accounts. Dangerous? Frightening? Futuristic? Yes, Indeed.

At first blush, the real core of the company’s API consists of trading 'signals' which are created when a system enters a trade. For example, take the Superior Returns trading system, which is up by a annualized rate of 305% at the time of this writing. Anytime the creator of this system registers a trade, everyone that subscribes to the model will receive a trading signal.

If they chose to go all the way, this signal will cause a trade to be entered into their account automatically. This auto-trading is possible because C2, as it’s called, has interfaced with a collection of retail brokers. The tools needed to develop a C2 interface to another broker are included on the developer page as well.

This RESTful API service returns XML responses. It's one of just 6 stock and finance APIs. The only other API we've documented that triggers real-time trading of financial instruments is TradeKing. Has the trend started?

Collective2 API Profile

Viralheat Set to Disrupt Sentiment Analysis Market With Free API

2011-08-29T12:55:00.000-07:00

Viralheat Set to Disrupt Sentiment Analysis Market With Free API

Posted: 24 Aug 2011 01:30 PM PDT

The need to understand social media has been around for a few years now. Companies are increasingly realizing that the discussion of their products and services has gone viral. For some companies this means the conversation has moved into an environment that they just don't understand. Viralheat seeks to bring understanding to large enterprises and small businesses alike through their shockingly affordable social media analytics services. Adoption is it's goal with a new free sentiment analysis API released one year after their free social trends API.

Now that Twitter has created a machine readable transcript of human conversations, we're seeing a new application for analytics: how do you understand 1,000 simultaneous conversations? This is a impossible task for even a team of humans but it is the perfect project for high powered computer systems. Until now, the cost of such a service has been prohibitively high, with analytics for the "Twitter firehose" running into the $1,000s.

I had the opportunity to chat with Viralheat's CEO Raj Kadam and CTO Vishal Sankhla last week. They told me the story of the organic development of their social media analytics platform.

36 APIs Used in 7 Days: Zillow, Rotten Tomatoes, Netflix

2011-08-24T02:28:00.000-07:00

36 APIs Used in 7 Days: Zillow, Rotten Tomatoes, Netflix

Posted: 09 Jul 2011 08:00 AM PDT

This past week 10 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 36 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Active.com, IP2Location, Rotten Tomatoes, The Movie DB, Trulia, TweepSearch, Tweet Press, TweetARun, TweetFeel Twitter Sentiment , TweetLater, TweetRL, TweetSentiments, TweetShrink and Weather Central. The most often used APIs this week are Facebook, Google Maps and TweetSentiments. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (8 APIs, 9 mashups), Blogging (3 APIs, 3 mashups) and Music (2 APIs, 2 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Active.com used in Best Place Live
Amazon eCommerce used in New and Upcoming
Amazon Marketplace Web Service used in TunesIQ
DonorsChoose used in HereKid

YouTube Create: Now Any App Can Add Videos

2011-08-24T02:25:00.000-07:00

Face.com Brings Mood Detection to its 20,656 Developers

Posted: 08 Jul 2011 11:17 AM PDT

Finally, you have definitive proof that your significant other is only 52% happy. Face detection and recognition service Face.com has been busy since it launched its free API a year ago. The company has been adding servers to handle the load of the over 20,000 developers who signed up. It’s also been adding features, the most recent the ability to detect the mood of a face, along with a confidence rating.

Perhaps more amazing than an API detecting the mood of the people in the photos is doing it for free. Developers using Face.com can send 5,000 photos per hour to the service without paying a thing. That’s over 100,000 photos processed each day, plenty of room for most apps to figure out how to make money. “As soon as you make money, we can talk,” CEO Gil Hirsch said. Even then, the company isn’t against developers making money on its free platform. “Whatever we give away for free now will always be free,” Hirsch said.

Fancy Twitter Website Usable Even Without Twitter Account

2011-08-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

Fancy Twitter Website Usable Even Without Twitter Account

Posted: 07 Jul 2011 01:00 PM PDT

Twitter’s a great tool for keeping up with what’s going on with everyone. Everything from mundane this-is-what-I’m-eating tweets to more informative Eric-Estrada-is-at-the-mall-across-the-street (this actually happend) tweets. We have a great deal of tools for keeping track of it all, namely TweetDeck, the Twitter desktop client bought by the microblogging company. Downtweet is a Twitter dashboard of sorts and takes to bring a TweetDeck-like experience to the web. It uses Twitter’s streaming API, some fancy AJAX and the thing works pretty well, even if you don’t have a Twitter account.

Downtweet presents you with a set of panels and a list of categories on the left-hand side. You can sign in to your Twitter account and bring in your regular feed or build custom feeds of specific Twitter users. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can still use the preset categories to keep up to date on specific genres.

23 APIs Used in 7 Days: Nexmo Wholesale SMS, Google Maps, Facebook

2011-08-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

23 APIs Used in 7 Days: Nexmo Wholesale SMS, Google Maps, Facebook

Posted: 20 Aug 2011 08:00 AM PDT

This past week 30 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 23 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include BookingMarkets, InfoChimps Datasets, Nexmo Wholesale SMS and Producteev. The most often used APIs this week are Google Maps, Twilio and Twilio SMS. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Photos (6 APIs, 7 mashups), Social (4 APIs, 10 mashups) and Messaging (2 APIs, 6 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
BookingMarkets used in InBed.Me
Calais used in Relax
ESRI ArcGIS JavaScript used in Call My Map by ESRI
Facebook used in Episkeptis, printo.jp, Stay in Touch, TalkSatisfaction
Flickr used in printo.jp
Foursquare used in printo.jp
Google App Engine used in in2clouds Social Listener
Google Maps used in CashFly, Episkeptis, in2clouds Social Listener, Italian Wines and Food Mashup, Loudoun County Stream Assessment, printo.jp
Google Picasa used in printo.jp
Google Visualization used in in2clouds Social Listener
InfoChimps Datasets used in Textable

Plug to be Pulled on Google Health and PowerMeter

2011-07-26T05:30:00.000-07:00

Plug to be Pulled on Google Health and PowerMeter

Posted: 06 Jul 2011 10:36 AM PDT

It seems that the API cleaning has not yet ended at Google. Awhile back, Google announced its decision to shut down its popular translation API, a decision that did not go down favourably with the users. Now Google Health API has been given a negative prognosis and Google PowerMeter API will soon run out of juice.

The Google announcement to bring down Google Health and Google PowerMeter does throw up larger questions. Health and green standards are areas where Google had an opportunity to lead the way. Google Health was targeted towards allowing individuals to record and manage their health information. When you look at the potential benefits of having a centrally managed Continuity Care Record, it is a no brainer. But it’s a challenge to make all health providers adopt a standard and adapt their systems to use it. It takes years and there are potentially other competing systems, not to mention issues of security and data privacy, especially when personal health data is involved.

PowerMeter allowed people to get information about their energy usage. It was definitely a right first step to make consumers aware of their usage first and then look for solutions. Given the upswing in smart devices in and around our homes and cities, what PowerMeter set out to do is embedded deeply now in all devices.

Google PowerMeter is retiring on September 16, 2011. Google Health is retiring on January 1, 2012, but the data is going to be available for download till January 1, 2013. We assume that the API will also be available until the dates mentioned. But if you have any of your applications dependent on these APIs, the time to start the planning to transition over to another service or your own custom solution is now. The suggested mechanism to retrieve all your data before the services go offline is to simply go to each of the sites and download your information in a variety of file formats. Refer to the Google blog post for more instructions.

Get Holistic and Scientific with GoodGuide

2011-07-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

Get Holistic and Scientific with GoodGuide

Posted: 05 Jul 2011 12:00 AM PDT

GoodGuide is a service that we have been using as a family for a while. It attempts to analyze a product holistically & scientifically to produce a simple 1 to 10 rating of its “goodness.” I am personally satisfied to see that the GoodGuide API will share this data with the world.

Many consumers would love to choose products based on their total goodness, but how can you possibly investigate all the companies and products that are out there? Can you the find time to check out their practices with regard to the environment, working conditions, manufacturing, or ingredients? Only a few people are driven to make that kind of time commitment, and a bunch of them got together to form GoodGuide.

Now that this information will be available programmatically, the potential to see good-ratings integrated on other platforms is tremendous. Imagine if Amazon decided to include GoodGuide’s ratings? That would be a huge step forward in consumer empowerment. You know what might be even better: lots of smaller retailers using GoodGuide to better inform their customers. Could this happen with a few open source API implementations? Will the demand for this type of information be strong enough that e-commerce developers will want to offer good guide plug-ins that automatically pull each products good guide rating? I sincerely hope so.

There are 18 Green APIs and GoodGuide is the only recommendation engine to factor in holistic values. The API site has a long clear page detailing the only supported method, which is search. Requests are RESTful and responses come in XML format. Ratings can be found by product or company. Products can even be found by UPC code. The range of search metrics available should ease the task of integrating the ratings into an existing product database. Developers can even take a look at the full example implementations.

GoodGuide API Profile

38 New APIs: BlueVia, MLKSHK and Wine Search

2011-07-21T09:20:00.000-07:00

Aadhaar is India's ambitious project to provide a unique identification number to every citizen. The project has been in operation for the last two years and has now seen a unique number being assigned to over 9.2 million citizens. The latest strategy adopted by the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) is to create the UIDAI Authentication API and provide an SDK for its various subsystems, thereby inviting developers to create an ecosystem around it.

The move to open up the API free of cost to developers was announced by Nandan Nilekani, who heads the UIDAI initiative. Nilekani, who previously led Infosys before taking the plunge with UIDAI, clearly believes that by opening up the citizen database, he can get developers and service providers to tap into its potential and provide citizen services in a more streamlined fashion.

“People who have received these numbers will look for the benefits of the number. This is where the app ecosystem will come in. Different partners can build apps and provide benefits across different sectors like healthcare and banking,” Nilekani said.

The Aadhaar number is a 12-digit number that is going to be unique across more than 1 billion citizens of India. For more information on number scheme and the tradeoffs, read the numbering scheme guide. A key component of the UID system is the Authentication API. This API can be used by applications to validate the authenticity of the Aadhaar number. The API functions over SSL and uses XML as its input and output data format. The Authentication API can also take into consideration additional input like demographic and biometric information to validate and confirm if the Aadhaar number is indeed the one being verified. This is expected to significantly ease out citizen services if service providers like Banks, Government institutions start integrating it.