Last week ProgrammableWeb crossed one of its biggest milestones thus far when we added our 1,000th web service API to our directory. This is a long way from the 32 APIs we started with back in the summer of 2005. Back then even the phrase “web mashup” was only a few months old.
While map mashups are what have defined this genre of application, the second most popular type of web mashup here on ProgrammableWeb are photo mashups. How popular? Just this past week the number of photo-related mashups passed the 500 mark, and there are now 505 listed.
A wide array of content and functionality has been incorporated into the ever-growing number of mashups out on the web today. From enterprise mashups to proof-of-concept hacks, developers and would be developers are leveraging the power of mashups to provide information in new and compelling ways. Mashups are still a relatively new phenomena, and as this new type of online application evolves it will become increasingly more important to ensure that your mashup adheres to a variety of best practices. Summarized below are five key best practices that you should strive to use in the development of your mashup.
As the various offerings by mapping API providers continue to mature, new opportunities have emerged for would-be advertisers and map mashup developers to tap into the ability to include advertising directly on a map. In addition to providing a wealth of information and spatial context, mapping APIs have the potential to serve as an additional venue for advertising.
The Flickr API continues to be one of the most popular Web 2.0 APIs and with a flurry of new photo mashups here lately, we now have 292 Flickr mashups listed. Overall they run a very wide range of creative applications, here are three of the most recent entries:
flickrbackup: A Java-based Flickr backup utility that [...]
At last month’s Mashup Camp Europe over in Dublin, Ireland the Yahoo Developer Network (YDN) team of Chad Dickerson and Tom Hughes-Croucher brought along their Y! video cam and journeyed out to see if they could get Dublin’s citizens and visitors to answer the question “What’s a mashup?”. From the dry delivery to the semi-censored [...]
In a very lively forum thread over at Flickr there’s a discussion/debate about the Flickr API, data ownership, copyright, and mashups. In a nutshell, a Flickr member, Austen Haines, noticed that some of his photos were appearing in the mashup Adactio Elsewhere even though he had flagged them All Rights Reserved (ARR). The mashup developer, [...]
Demonstrating that a sufficiently talented solo mashup developer can succeed in building an application worthy of purchase by a major corporation, David Schorr’s terrific Weatherbonk was aqcuired by The Weather Channel Interactive yesterday. The mashup does a great job of integrating disparate sources like weather and traffic cams, news reports, multiple data sources, and historical [...]
In a very interesting interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Sean Ammirati at Read/WriteTalk asks some good questions about the role of the the Twitter API in their success and plans going forward. Two things that jumps out is that Biz’s comment that the API has 10x the traffic of the website and that of [...]
In a somewhat quiet but noteworthy move the Google Maps API now gives developers an officially sanctioned way to overlay advertisements directly onto their maps. And share the revenue. This was announced by Google’s Pamela Fox in the maps API newsgroup. You access this new functionality through an API object named GAdsManager (see the reference [...]
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