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Web API Sites

May 9th, 2008

4 Spy Mashups - Watch in Realtime

If you want to see in realtime what’s going on Digg you can use their digg spy page. This popular Digg feature uses a dynamic Ajax UI to let you see diggs as they happen. And now it serves as a model for a growing number of mashups that use web APIs to give you a realtime window into activity on a variety of services. Here are four from our mashup listings:

Two good ones from the team at Ajaxonomy are TubeSpy (mashup profile) and del.icio.us Spy (mashup profile). TubeSpy shows the videos being watched on YouTube as they are being watched and del.icio.us Spy shows you the newest bookmarks added to del.icio.us and also letes you filter links and share the bookmarks.

FlickrSpy - the Flickr Peepshow shows you what’s uploaded right now (more details at our mashup profile).

Digg Comment Spy (mashup profile): Track live comments posted to Digg. Blue posts are replies to the top thread, yellow are replies to another comment.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Video, Visualization, photo at 2:28 AM | No Comments »

May 8th, 2008

Google Streetview in the Wild

In late March, Google announced enhancements to their mapping API that gave developers programmatic access to their popular streetview feature. Streetview allows users to “virtually explore city neighborhoods by viewing and navigating within 360-degree scenes of street-level imagery.” The API enhancements provide the ability to embed panoramas in an app and to even pan them dynamically using JavaScript.

Since that release, developers have had a chance to create some very interesting mashups using streetview, and in a recent Maps API blog post, Google’s Pamela Fox highlighted some of these (3 of which are now cataloged in our directory: StreetView Adventure Game, Povo Boston, and Dual Maps):

StreetView Adventure Game: In the spirit of the classic interactive fiction games like Zork, this demo lets you play a short game that begins with chasing a guy trying to climb out a window in San Francisco.

DualMaps: For a given location, displays the Street View, Birds Eye View, and Google aerial map view simultaneously and lets you embed or share the result.
Povo: A local reviews site specially for Boston. Displays street view in a lightbox for each location, and has made a Street View tour especially for the recent Boston Marathon.

And if you want more streetview mashup examples:

Also check out VegasVision, Ong Map V2 (Alpha), VPike, FlyRig, Street View Gadget, LotView, Street View SF Tour, RealBird, Glotter and a Street View Tour Gadget. And if you loved Trulia’s implementation (announced on Google LatLong last week), check out this demo that shows how to angle a street view panorama towards the side of the street that a building is on. (It involves math, but don’t worry, we’ve done it for you.)

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Mapping at 1:31 AM | No Comments »

May 7th, 2008

Love Color? Use This API

COLOURlovers, the terrific site for the color and design community now has its own API. For those not familiar with COLOURlovers, it’s “a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or even in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color apalettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.”

The new API (more details at our profile), gives you access to their growing database of user-generated named colors and palettes:

With the release of the COLOURlovers API, you can now access almost 1 million named colors and more than 325,000 color palettes for your creative projects and applications. Creating a theme editor and want to give your users some color theme options? Creating a visual project that ties keywords to colors? Who knows what amazingly creative stuff people will come up with.

Two of today’s new mashups, including the Mashup of the Day winner, were built using it: Dekaf Lovers and Renkler.

And for more on the “proper” spelling of the first word in their name see the enlightening post Color Vs. Colour, the Great Spelling Battle.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:48 AM | No Comments »

May 6th, 2008

How the Flickr API Now Handles Video

The most significant recent development for Flickr has been the introduction of video into what used to be a photo-only service. The Webware article What’s next for Flickr video? describes what the Flickr community has actually done with videos this last month. Of particular note for ProgrammableWeb readers is the state of the Flickr API:

One notable feature to come with the addition of video was the company’s decision to make it immediately available for use in Flickr’s standard data API. So far, there have been few services to take advantage of this, including Yahoo’s own video-editing tool Jumpcut. Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s general manager says that there’s still work to be done with the Jumpcut team before Flickr video gets tie-ins, but that they’re on track to deliver something that’s seamless for users of both services.

In the meantime, one of the cooler creations to take advantage of Flickr’s video API is a video browser put together by Matt Crampton. It takes a smattering of some of the latest videos and puts them together on a giant array that people can watch without having to venture on Flickr.

Matt’s video browser mashup is now listed in our mashup directory:

Flickr developers seeking a detailed description of how to use the API to handle videos should turn to Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s Videos in the Flickr API. The essential ideas of his post on the Flickr Developer Blog is simple:

First thing to understand is as far as Flickr is concerned videos are just a funny type of photo. Your API application can ignore that video exists and everything should go on working. This means:

you can display a preview of a video by treating it exactly like any other photo on Flickr.

photos AND videos are returned by any method which used to return just photos

you can get info about a video like you would a photo.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Yahoo, photo at 2:41 AM | 1 Comment »

May 5th, 2008

3000 Mashups

3000 mashups. That’s how many mashups are now listed in our ProgrammableWeb directory as of last week. What’s most popular? As you can see in the chart below, the top ten categories of mashups do of course include mapping, but there’s a fairly even distribution across many of the other top categories like shopping, photos, video and music:

New mashups have been added to the directory every day since we launched in August 2005 and the average number of new mashups added here per day is 3.45 (a sample of all the mashups in existence)
While map mashups are common, the reality is that over 340 different APIs have been used in the apps listed here, with an average of 23 different APIs used per week
Since we started awarding a Mashup of the Day (MOTD) in early 2006, there have been 687 MOTD winners
The mashup tag cloud gives a sense of the variety of mashup types
Just outside of the top 10 categories are subjects like social (160 mashups), music (153), mobile (150), widgets (110), bookmarks (103), reference (96), events (94), and visualization (80)
If you look at mashups sorted by popularity you see what people view most often
There have been a lot of contest winners
You can now view the mashup listings as text only, images only, or text + images
Past “round number milestones” covered here in the blog have included 500, 1001, and 2000 mashups

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Posted by John Musser as Site News at 2:00 AM | 1 Comment »

May 2nd, 2008

Twitter API Goes Geo

Thanks to some new API updates, one can now update the Location field in a Twitter user’s profile using the Twitter API. As Ryan Sarver writes on his blog:

Location updates currently aren’t normalized or geocoded, but the ability to update it on the fly allows for some very cool possibilities when it comes to geo-based tweeting — especially in apps like Twinkle [an iPhone app] and Twittervision.

This update has now been reflected in the official API Documentation. For example, the following curl command will update your location (where USER and PASSWORD are your Twitter username and password):

curl -u USER:PASSWORD -d location="Berkeley, CA"
http://twitter.com/account/update_location.json

Note that the location field is limited to 30 bytes when encoded in UTF-8. Hence, a long address such as “2855 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, CA.” will be truncated as “2855 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley,”.

It will be interesting to see how this ability to programmatically change a user location will be used in practice. In addition to using this location field to display tweets on a Google map, Twittervision (profile) has been promoting a way to update one’s location right within a tweet, by embedding a location such as L: Berkeley, CA. What will Twitter programmers and users use to update their location: the profile location, individual tweets, both, or neither?

Meanwhile the Twitter API continues to provide us with a steady stream of very useful and interesting mashups, with 46 Twitter apps listed here so far, including recent entries like the straightforward Twitterwatch that lets you see all the latest twitters as they are sent (full profile here).

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Mapping, Social at 1:29 AM | 5 Comments »

May 1st, 2008

Photobucket Releases Public API

The popular photo and video hosting site Photobucket have announced a new public API to allow programmatic access to photos and videos hosted on their site. The company blog notes that the API will allow developers to:

Securely log into Photobucket accounts
Create, edit and access albums
Upload new content to their albums (photos, images and videos)
Share content from albums via email
Search through publicly available content on Photobucket
Access and update metadata (titles, descriptions, tags, etc.)

The Photobucket web service is a RESTful API that also happens to be the second API covered this week that supports OAuth (the earlier one being Google’s implementation in the Google Contacts API).

In addition to a “non-commercial API option with open registration,” there is a commercial option “for developers with an approved business plan for their application.” Initial users of the API include Adobe, AOL, FotoFlexer, Intercasting, RockYou, Slide and Snapvine. An Application Gallery includes offerings from Blurb, Eye-Fi, Flektor and TiVo. The TiVo mashup allows users to view Photobucket content directly from their DVRs (more at our mashup profile).

To get started, go to http://photobucket.com/developer/.

The Photobucket API joins the very popular photo category: there are currently 39 APIs in ProgrammableWeb tagged with ‘photo’ and 445 ‘photo’ mashups.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as photo at 1:26 AM | No Comments »

April 30th, 2008

Make Phone Calls With AOL’s New API

AOL has just launched a new telephony web service for developers: the Open Voice API. As noted in the announcement, this API is intended to “provide third-party developers and VoIP device manufacturers with open standards protocols that will enable them to easily integrate the AIM Call Out service into softphones, as well as SIP-enabled hardware and cell phones with wi-fi connectivity.” The new platform works in conjunction with the AIM Call Out service that offers discounted global calling:

AIM Call Out is a pay-as-you-go outbound voice calling service built right into AIM that lets users make calls to landline and cell phones in more than 200 countries. This service complements the existing AIM Talk service, a free PC-to-PC voice calling service available to AIM users.

AIM Call Out offers low per-minute rates with no connection fee or monthly charge. Users pay for call credits in increments as low as $5. AIM users can visit http://call-out.aim.com/rates for a complete list of long distance rates.

Users can also make phone-to-phone calls using the Web Connect feature within the AIM Call Out service. Users simply enter their phone number and then the phone number of a friend. In a few seconds, the user’s phone will ring and then connect them to their friend’s phone.

As you can see on the AIM Call developer’s page, the API itself supports a host of SIP-related standards. We’ve now added a new Open Voice API profile to our directory.

Telephony and communications APIs have become a highly competitive space. How competitive? There are now over 20 APIs in the Telephony category alone.

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Posted by John Musser as AOL, Telephony at 12:48 AM | No Comments »

April 29th, 2008

Semantic Search the US Library of Congress

As the national library of the United States, the Library of Congress has created vast amounts of metadata to describe books and other documents in its collection. Among this metadata is the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), a “controlled vocabulary” for classifying documents by subject. In order words, experts at the Library of Congress have come up with a (large) list of subject headers from which catalogers of documents can choose. As an example, if you look at the Library of Congress record for Tim Berners-Lee’s book Weaving the Web, you’ll that it is classified under “World Wide Web“, specifically “World Wide Web–History“.

Since the Library of Congress isn’t the only entity that classifies documents, you can imagine that other entities (and not just libraries) would interested in reusing the LCSH vocabulary. But how should the Library of Congress make LCSH available so that it can be easily reused?

That’s where the recent release of lcsh.info comes in (see also the lcsh.info ProgrammableWeb Profile):

This is an experimental service that makes the Library of Congress Subject Headings available as linked-data using the SKOS vocabulary. The goal of lcsh.info is to encourage experimentation and use of LCSH on the web with the hopes of informing a similar effort at the Library of Congress to make a continually updated version available. More information about the Linked Data effort can be found on the W3C Wiki.

Let’s look at what you can do with lcsh.info through a couple of examples. First, we return to the subject heading World Wide Web, this time accessible from lcsh.info as

http://lcsh.info/sh95000541

Note the form of the URL: http://lcsh.info/{lccn} where lccn refers to the Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN), an identifier of the subject heading. In this case, the LCCN for World Wide Web is sh95000541.

If you drop this URL into your browser, you’ll get the default format or representation of the information lcsh.info has about the World Wide Web subject header, including:

broader terms (e.g., Hypertext systems)
narrower terms (e.g., Semantic Web)
related terms (e.g., Internet)
alternative label — (e.g, W3 (World Wide Web))

The diagram below illustrates some of these relationships

To facilitate reuse of the data, lcsh.info offers its data a variety of formats that can be accessed via content negotiation. That is, you use the Accept HTTP header to specify which of the following content type you want:

XHTML (with embedded RDFa), which is the default value (application/xhtml+xml)
JSON (application/json)
RDF/XML (application/rdf+xml)
N3 (text/n3)

For example, you can use curl to get JSON representation of the World Wide Web subject header:

curl -v -L -H “Accept: application/json” http://lcsh.info/sh85062913

By looking at the RDF/XML and N3 representations, you can see a concrete example of semantic web approaches to express notions of broader, narrower, and related terms as well as alternative labels using

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), which is “a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, folksonomies, and other types of controlled vocabulary”
designs rules for linked data to represent the network of interconnected subject headings

This experimental but promising service may soon pave the way for full production level web services from the Library of Congress.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Gov, SemanticWeb at 1:29 AM | 1 Comment »

April 28th, 2008

OAuth Coming to All Google Data APIs

Standardization, or lack thereof, around identity, authentication and authorization for open web APIs is one of the greatest challenges to mashup application developers today. So it’s quite notable that Google not only just quietly added OAuth support to their Google Contacts API but also stated that “This is our first step towards OAuth enabling all Google Data APIs.” With over a dozen GData APIs to date and more on the way, this is a significant endorsement of this relatively new standard.

OAuth, which we covered last fall, is an API access delegation protocol that has been described as your valet key for the web:

Like the feature on many cars today where you give the parking attendant a special key to your car that gives him some, but not all, access to your vehicle. On the Web you now have your own keys to dozens of sites but how to best handle the mashup-style case of site A wants you to grant them access to get some data from site B? Ideally you don’t want to give site A your password to site B. OAuth aims to simplify this problem: “It allows you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User).”

This marks at least the second API from one of the major providers to now support OAuth: earlier this year, the innovative Yahoo Fire Eagle API integrated OAuth support.

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