The MyChances API accepts a number of variables, from test scores and AP classes to ethnicity and parents’ education. Using the values, along with its internal data on a college’s admissions practices, MyChances reports back on the probability the student will be accepted (more details at our MyChances API profile).

This service is bound to be controversial. For one, many colleges and universities weigh more heavily qualitative information, such as essays and recommendations. However, MyChances gives a guide based on real applicants. And students searching for a school are looking for any sort of feedback they can get. In addition to probability, MyChances also returns their sample size and corresponding statistical accuracy.

Though the API references free and enterprise versions, the site does not list any charges. The terms of service reference potential fees for usage “over a certain rate, or for certain types of commercial applications.” And the company appears to be reviewing developer projects, through an application that requests details, though this practice is somewhat common.

FairLuck API: The FairLuck API is a random number generator intended to help casino software developers test and verify the lucksets created by their server code. By using this API, online games can offer their players total confidence because no cheating is possible.

ForeclosureListings.com API: ForeclosureListings.com combines one of the largest databases of foreclosure listings direct from major banks, mortgage companies, Government, HUD, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and others. Their nationwide network of courthouse scouts obtain information as it is filed regarding owners that have just been served with a foreclosure notice (pre-foreclosure). The ForeclosureListings.com APIs let you get the latest 10 Foreclosure Homes in any zipcode, city, county or state and also know if a property in a given address is a foreclosure.

Lemonfree API: Lemonfree is an automobile search engine. There are 2 million cars offered for sale. It does not charge dealers or private sellers to list their vehicles for sale. The service offers quality vehicle listings that you can into your own website or project. The Lemonfree API allows you to obtain Lemonfree.com vehicle results for a variety of search queries.

Location-API.com API: Location-API.com helps developers and mobile service providers to locate mobile phones and other mobile devices connected to the GSM and WCDMA networks.

Geographic coordinates for latitude and longitude are provided from a database that includes cells from 200+ countries and 3.9M cells.

oDesk API: oDesk is a marketplace for online workteams, with a unique business model for both buyers and providers that looks to guarantee to buyers that an hour billed is an hour worked, while guaranteeing to providers that an hour worked is an hour paid.

The oDesk public API allows developers to access the oDesk platform from outside oDesk.com, search jobs and providers and view detailed work histories of others on your team. Also check your messages and reply to important messages via the API.

Touchnote API: The Touchnote API lets any website that hosts images use to integrate a print-on-demand facility for postcards into their offering. It also lets developers make money by getting paid a share of every card that uses one of their images: 10% of revenue (revenue is all the money that they get paid by the customer for the postcards minus tax). And an introductory offer gives 30% of revenue until March 32, 2010.

Unfortunately, neither the data nor the imagery is available in the API version of Google Maps. While Google provides programmatic access to driving directions, as well as walking directions — the third type, transit, has never been a part of the Maps API. The reason could be that there are extra factors, like fares and zones, that don’t quite fit the same structure as other directions.

Indeed, though Google receives hundreds of transit feeds from hundreds of agencies, only a handful have data accessible to other developers. This may not be Google’s fault, as I wrote in Why Aren’t There More Transit APIs? It’s easy to see the benefit of providing data to Google, but a harder sell to open up to any developers. Of course, some are better than others.

Developers don’t necessarily need Google or agencies to provide them with all the data. London Tube Journey Planner, for example, shows routes and plans trips. We currently list 91 transit mashups, several dating back to 2005.

Founder Gil Elbaz announced Factual’s launch:

“Today, we are announcing the beta launch of Factual, a platform where anyone can share and mash open data on any subject. Factual provides smart tools to help the community build and maintain a trusted source of structured data so everyone can make better decisions. Users can contribute data and get deeper data on a particular subject, publishers can add free content to their site with embeddable tables to enhance the end user experience, and developers can customize tables and create new applications using the Factual API.”

There are a handful of fun datasets already, such as American Idol finalists (embedded below) and a little peak into Factual’s employees.

Some have noted a similarity between Factual and Wolfram Alpha, which also has a new API. SearchEngineLand explains the difference:

“Unlike Wolfram Alpha, which is a closed system with data “curated” by employees, Factual has adopted a Wikipedia-like model which allows anyone to create, structure or even edit data in Factual tables. Elbaz hopes this open model will encourage community participation, enabling Factual to grow rapidly and enjoy widespread adoption.”

As part of the open model, Factual allows both reading and writing to its API. Also, unlike Wolfram Alpha, Factual’s API is free for developers.

Factual joins our list of 20+ database APIs. Among the most similar services are community-generated Freebase and Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network.

The announcement was made at the PayPaxl X Innovate Conference, which gathered an enthusiastic crowd of developers and third party integrators. This was PayPal’s first developer conference and it was sold out. Sebastian Rupley has a good summary of the conference over at GigaOm.

Additional documentation on the PayPal X APIs is available, including documentation on the now publicly available Adaptive Payments API. PayPal has also released several client libraries, including PHP, ASP.Net, and Java libraries. A gallery of sample apps is also available to get some additional insight into how the APIs can be used (a PayPal developer account is required).

To promote adoption of the PayPal X APIs, PayPal has also launched a Developer Challenge with several cash prizes, including a $50,000 first prize. If you’re interested, you’ll need to enter the contest by December 15, 2009, and your application must be submitted as a live app and demo by February 1, 2010.

Museum of London API: The Museum of London API is a REST interface to the following data sources: publications from the Archaeology Service; events at the Museum of London, Museum in Docklands, and London; Archaeological Archive and Resource Centre; and a converter from OSGB grid references to latitude/longitude. Also there is archaeological sites to the publications API, which means that KML output.

Pachube API: Pachube enables you to store, share and discover real-time sensor, energy and environment data from buildings or other devices. Pachube provides most of its functionality through its API, rather than through its web site. Plug-in to participating projects in real time so that, for example, buildings, interactive environments, networked energy meters, virtual worlds and mobile sensor devices can all talk to each other. Real-time data available. Pachube makes use of Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML), which extends the construction industry protocol IFC.

Raven Tools API: The Raven database contains search results for thousands of keywords. Each week the Raven engine captures 50 (100 for Bing) search results for these keywords from the major search engines. This data can be returned in XML or JSON format. Raven offers tools for researching, managing, monitoring, and reporting on SEO, online PR and social media campaigns. Customers are typically Internet marketing agencies and in-house marketing departments.

Yahoo Contacts API: The Yahoo Contacts API enables applications to view and edit the social relationships that exist in the Yahoo Address Book. The Contacts API is based on OAuth, which allows the secure transfer of data in a way that respects user privacy and permissions.

In a move sure to be popular with developers, Twitter has added list manipulation features to their API (see our Twitter API profile). Last week, Twitter founder Biz Stone wrote about the significance of the Lists API on the Twitter Blog:

Lists also make it easier to curate tweets into meaningful real-time experiences on your own sites via the Lists API. Media companies are already taking advantage: for example, check out @huffingtonpost’s use of the Lists API in their World Series coverage… We’ve been taking our time rolling out the lists feature to make sure things go smoothly and developers have a chance to begin experimenting with our Lists API.

The Twitter API’s new list functions are still in private beta, and will be rolled out to the public soon. The List API uses the same familiar RESTful interface as other aspects of the Twitter API, and data can be returned in either XML or JSON format. Developers are also able to access data about the number of accounts and tweets associated with a particular list, and to find out whether or not a list has been made public.

The Twitter API allows developers to create and update lists, add accounts, and manage user subscriptions to lists. Developers are also able to include list descriptions when creating new lists and query if a user account belongs to a particular list. Another interesting feature of the API is access to the entire collection of a user’s public lists, with the data returned either as a single array, or optionally, broken up into pages.

The Twitter API’s new list features are likely to inspire tons of new apps that take advantage of grouped accounts. Several new sites have already been built using the Lists API: Listorious provides a searchable directory of interesting Twitter lists, while TLISTS is a platform that allows media organizations to publish and manage a large amount of lists at a time. Certainly lots more coming soon.

For a listing of hundreds of mashups that are already using the Twitter API, see our Twitter mashup directory.

The news was announced on the Google Wave Developer blog, with additional details about the release:

When we first unveiled Google Wave a few months ago, one of the fundamental concepts we discussed was the vision for wave as an open communications protocol. We are happy to announce that the developer instance of Google Wave is now available for experimental interoperability testing with other wave providers. This means that if you are interested in building a service that uses the Google Wave Federation Protocol, you can begin prototyping with a tool like FedOne against WaveSandbox.com.

The news continues to highlight Google’s efforts to open up Google Wave as a new model for communication and collaboration. The release of the prototype server comes less than six months after Google Wave as initially previewed at the Google I/O conference, and about a month after Google Wave was opened up as a public preview to select users. There is a Google Wave API that has been available since the developer preview was released at Google I/O as well (our Google Wave API Profile).

Google has set up several resources for developers interesting in experimenting with the prototype server, including updated documentation for the Google Wave conversation model, installation instructions, a Java-based testbed client called FedOne, and EchoeyAgent, a simple “agent” for FedOne that echoes data back to a wave provider. Additional details for the installation process (and potential issues) have been posted to the Google Wave discussion group.

The installation relies on several dependencies, including the OpenFire XMPP server (or equivalent XMPP server) and Java 6. It should come as no surprise, that the instructions lean towards installation on Linux (though other operating systems are “likely” to work as well). We’re looking forward to seeing where all of this goes, as there is the potential for a new ecosystem of wave providers to emerge in the near future.

Their press release explains some of the API’s functionality:

The new ForeclosureListings.com API can be integrated right into an existing website by a programmer and will provide the ten latest foreclosure home listings for any zip code, city, county or state. For anyone with a real estate website, this is a great resource to have and use in conjunction with their site.

By returning only 10 results the API is limiting the types of sites developers can build. This API is not likely to help you aggregate data about a zip code or city–the sample size just isn’t large enough. However, it could help you add another layer of information to a map, for example.

The data returned by the API is enough to get a feel for the house’s location and some basic amenities. Why the latitude and longitude aren’t provided is a mystery, as that would make it even easier to plot results on a map.

In addition to the foreclosure search, there’s another potentially handy call. The isforeclosure function accepts an address and returns whether or not that home is in foreclosure.

Like many APIs, there’s a limit to the number of calls you can make, in this case you can make up to 1,000 API calls per day without contacting the company. The trade-off is that this data–which is gathered at the local level–is not available from any other API.

There are now the 13 real estate APIs in our directory. It’s a surprisingly popular niche of APIs and topic we looked at last year back when there were 7 real estate APIs in our post: What Housing Crisis?.

 Amazon EC2 used in Get Better Diet Info: PubMed and Amazon.com Ratings

 Commission Junction used in EchoCurrent Affiliate Product Optimizer

 Disqus used in Doodle Source

 Facebook used in Friendcup, Relocator

 Flickr used in Sobo.la - Everything about Soocer

 Google Desktop used in CPU Smiley

 Google Maps used in Gastro, Just Trace, LastGeo, Relocator

 Google Search used in Doodle Source

 indeed used in Relocator

 IP Location used in Just Trace

 Last.fm used in LastGeo

 LinkedIn used in Relocator

 LyricWiki used in MIKEsearch - Karaoke search engine

 NCBI Entrez used in Get Better Diet Info: PubMed and Amazon.com Ratings

 Twilio used in FixMyCity DC, Mobile Commons

 Twitter used in Doodle Source, Sobo.la - Everything about Soocer, TwitDone - Twitter GTD

 WatchMouse used in Just Trace

 Yahoo Site Explorer used in Yahoo Site Explorer in 3D

 YouTube used in Doodle Source, MIKEsearch - Karaoke search engine, Sobo.la - Everything about Soocer

 Zazzle used in Friendcup

And each day there is one mashup selected to be Mashup of the Day. Here are last week’s winners:

 Doodle Source

 FixMyCity DC

 Friendcup

 Get Better Diet Info: PubMed and Amazon.com Ratings

 Relocator

 Yahoo Site Explorer in 3D