Best New Mashups: Chumby and Facebook Voice Apps

John Musser, January 1st, 2009   Comments(1)

Telephony and voice APIs are one of the most active segments of the API and mashup world (our directory has 42 telephony-related APIs). For example, in the past week, two of the latest mashups in the directory use telephony APIs in innovative ways:

• Broadsoft Xtended Chumby Widget: Allows you to use the BroadSoft Xtended API and your Chumby to view your call history, click to return missed, placed or received calls, and to set Do Not Disturb using the BroadSoft web services. More at our BroadSoft + Chumby mashup profile.



• voicetag: Leave or broadcast voice messages to your Facebook friends from your phone. No need for microphone or installed software. Built by combining the Facebook API and the Ringful API. For more details see our voicetag profile and recent coverage on TechCrunch.

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Apps for America: A Contest to Make Congress Accountable

John Musser, December 23rd, 2008   Comments(2)

Do you want to use the power of open APIs and mashups to help make the US Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent? If so, then you’ll want to enter the new Apps for America Mashup Contest from the good folks at the Sunlight Foundation. Like last year’s Mashup Congress contest, this is another notable competition from Sunlight, whose nonprofit mission is to help organizations use Internet technologies to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people to create a “catalyst for greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government.”

How to compete?

• Contestants must join the Sunlight Labs Google Group
• Entries must use one of the following APIs or Datasets in their mashup:
  • Sunlight Labs API
  • OpenSecrets.org API
  • FollowTheMoney.org API
  • Capitol Words API
  • Sunlight Labs API Lawmaker Dataset
  • Sunlight Labs API Lobbyist Dataset
  • Sunlight Partytime Database Dump
• While not required, bonus points go to using one of Sunlight’s open source libraries
• All software you write has to be licensed under the MIT, New BSD, or the GPL family of licenses.
• Entries must be received by March 31, 2009. Winners will be announced on April 7th.

As with the Mashup Congress contest, there’s lots of great opportunity for developers to create something both innovative and beneficial. Take for example last year’s winner, Unfluence. Built using the API from Follow the Money it gets you more insight into the truth of campaign finance via an interactive network map of state level political contribution data (more at our Unfluence mashup profile).

We have profiles and mashup examples for these APIs including: the Sunlight Labs API, the OpenSecrets API, the Follow the Money API, and the new Capitol Words API.

For more ideas and inspiration, take a look at our Government Mashup and API dashboard.

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Christmas Mashup Roundup

John Musser, December 22nd, 2008   Comments(1)

Over at Google Maps Mania, Keir Clarke has a good round-up of new Christmas-themed Google Maps mashups. Each year developers create new mashups with holiday themes, with most being map mashups. Shown below are two of these that have been added to our mashup directory. For more see our report from last year on tacky Christmas lights and finding out how far does Santa travel to you.

• I Feel Christmassy: If you want to find things to do for Christmas and you you live in New York, London or Toronto, then I Feel Christmassy will give you ideas. Anything from shopping to ice skating to holiday events. Click on the Christmas tree icons for details. More at our I Feel Christmassy profile.



• NORAD Santa Tracker: Google and NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, have partnered to let you track Santa and his travels from the North Pole using Google Maps and Google Earth. The Santa Tracker goes live at 6am EST on December 24th. More at our NORAD Santa Tracker profile.

For other examples, see a variety of holiday-themed mashups in our directory.

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3 Mapping APIs Combined to Create 3D Virtual Driving Simulator

John Musser, December 18th, 2008   Comments(1)

Following-up on yesterday’s post on the best new mashups, here is another notable mashup from this past week, yesterday’s Mashup of the Day: Gaiagi Driver. What is it? It’s a mashed-up 3D driving simulator that uses a lot of web APIs across multiple windows to create a unique driving experience. Give it a starting and ending address and it follows the path created by the directions and shows your present position in four different views:

• Upper left: Google Earth view (the mashup requires you to have this installed)
• Upper right: Google Map view. You can toggle traffic information as well as street view information as overlays.
• Lower left: Google Streetview
• Lower right: Microsoft Birdsview

That’s five different APIs being used: Google AJAX Libraries + Google Ajax Search + Google Earth + Google Maps + Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Given how much is going in all those windows, it’s more than a bit demanding, so it helps to have a fast Internet connection.

As a bonus, it includes a dozen pre-defined tours, just press the button and go:

• New York City: Central Park to Times Square
• Las Vegas: Along the Strip
• San Francisco: Market Street to Golden Gate
• London: London Eye to Buckingham Palace
• Paris: Eiffel Tower to Notre Dame

It’s an impressive bit of mashup engineering.

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Best New Mashups: TweetCongress, SemantalyzR

John Musser, December 17th, 2008   Comments(6)

A quick update on a couple of the more interesting new mashups from the past week (our directory is up to 3,500+ mashups using 400+ APIs):

• TweetCongress.org: A grassroots effort to engage Congress on Twitter. Users can find their reps, see who is tweeting, and lobby them to join the Twitterverse. Built with the Twitter and Sunlight Labs APIs. As they say, “We the Tweeple…”. More at our TweetCongress profile.



• SemantalyzR: A tool for analyzing web pages for keywords. Use its page analysis to find keyword links to custom search results pages that search multiple services at once for that keyword. A mashup of many interesting APIs: ClearForest Semantic Web Services1 + Dooblet + Flickr + Google Ajax Search + Thumbalizr + Twitter + Wikipedia + Yahoo Term Extraction. More at our SemantalyzR profile.

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eBay’s API Release Calendar is a Google Calendar Mashup

Kevin Farnham, December 11th, 2008   Comments(0)

Every once in awhile you see one API provider making use of APIs from another. This is the case with the eBay Developers Program, who have announced the new eBay API Release Calendar. The calendar is itself a mashup, having been developed using the Google Calendar API. The resulting app is simple but works well: it’s color-coded to distinguish the significance of dates that correspond to each event.

As Laurel Kline noted in the announcement:

In the Month view, you get an overview of everything released or enforced that month. Click the Agenda tab and you can use it as a checklist for adopting upcoming features. Click the event and a detail balloon pops up. You can also copy that event to your own calendar. Since it’s powered by Google Calendar, you can subscribe to it just like any other public calendar. Subscribe just to the High Impact calendar, or subscribe to all of them.

As with this mashup, the Google Calendar API enables the development of client applications for updating and viewing customized online calendars. The API also provides event search capabilities. For more, see our Google Calendar API profile and our list of 29 example mashups. And our API directory includes a variety of eBay APIs.

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200 Music Mashups

John Musser, November 10th, 2008   Comments(0)

The world of music is not just where the phrase “mashup” originated, it is also one of the most popular types of web mashups. With over 40 music APIs to choose from, developers have created a wide range of music-related mashups and we now have over 200 music mashups in our directory.

If you look at the most popular music mashups you see some themes:

• Visualizations: often of relationships between artists and genres. One of the more recent of this type is LastGraph, which uses the last.fm API, does some number crunching, data squeezing and polarity inversion, and produces graphs for the users music history. More at our LastGraph profile



• Radio-related mashups: some are mashups using online radio APIs, others about specific stations like KEXP, or others about mapping radio stations by type.
• Artist and music search: these often combine many different APIs to create an one-stop lookup for online resources for music artists. Users can either browse or search for artists and the apps often pull-together music, photos, videos, streams and other resources. A good recent example is The Beardscratchers Compendium, “an experiment in discovering and collating music metadata”. As you can see in our Beardscrathers overview, it combines 8 different APIs.



• Music video-related mashups: With the recent release of the MTV API, it did not take long for developers to create mashups using it.
• Last.fm mashups: the most popular of the music APIs, we have 73 Last.fm mashups in our directory

For more on music-related web mashups, see our Music API and Mashup Dashboard.

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500 Photo Mashups

John Musser, October 21st, 2008   Comments(0)

While map mashups in many ways 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.

And even though there are now 48 photo APIs, it’s still Flickr and their ever-popular API that rule this segment. There are now 382 Flickr mashups listed here. The next most popular photo APIs include ImageLoop, Panoramio and Picasa (the latter two being Google products).

Lately we’ve seen a trend in mashups that combine music APIs and photo APIs. Here is a sample of three from this month:

• Flokoon: Flokoon is a visual search engine that lets you explore websites in a Flash-based visualization. Uses APIs including Last.fm for music data and YouTube for video. More details at our Flokoon mashup profile.



• TuneChimp: TuneChimp lets you discover the best music from any artist: Listen to top tracks, learn more about them through videos, photos, bios, news, and lyrics. This mashup uses APIs including Yahoo Boss, Last.fm and Flickr. More at our TuneChimp mashup profile.



• SoundPushr: Pick and collect items while surfing through last.fm artists, YouTube videos, Flickr shots and Amazon albums. More details at our SoundPushr mashup profile.

Track this topic at our photo API and mashup dashboard.

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Visualize Political Contributions by Industry

Raymond Yee, October 6th, 2008   Comments(1)

The non-profit Sunlight Foundation, whose mission is to help others use the Internet to make information about the US government more accessible (and we’ve covered previously), recently released a very enlightening visualization of campaign contributions from 1990-2008, broken down by industry sectors and party lines:

The data for the chart came from The Center for Responsive Politics (whose ongoing work is “tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy”). The chart was created in Google Spreadsheet, using the Motion Chart tool. You may enjoy the accompanying video by Sunlight’s Larry Makinson:

The fun begins when you start interpreting the data and visualization, especially in light of the highly topical proposed bailout of United States financial system. For instance, Ellen Miller, in announcing this visualization, wrote:

Wonder just how Wall Street has become so influential on Capitol Hill that it can command the attention of the federal government from the President on down? The answer isn’t only in how gyrations in the stock market may affect the real economy. The answer is revealed by the fact that the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) industries that collectively are at the center of the current crisis are the single largest sector–by far–of all the major economic and interest groupings that give campaign contributions to federal politicians.

There are certainly many ways to interpret the data and we can thank organizations such as the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics for getting the numbers out there so that the public can have discussions grounded in reliable data.

You might wonder how to create this visualization in the first place. The data to create the visualization is in fact available on OpenSecrets.org — but you would need to do a bit of assembly work. Specifically, you would go to

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/slist.php

to get a list of all the industries, broken down into 13 sectors. You would then grab data for each respective sectors — for instance the finance, real estate, and insurance:

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=F

There is currently no direct source of data for the visualization. Perhaps one day, such data will be directly available from the OpenSecrets API.

See our Government Mashup and API Dashboard to learn more on how APIs and mashups are being used by governments around the world as well as advocacy groups and others.

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Making Faces to Make Sense of Biomedical Data

Raymond Yee, July 7th, 2008   Comments(1)

Can we exploit the extraordinary ability that humans have to read faces to make sense of abstract data — by rendering data as concrete facial features? That’s a question raised by a recent ProgrammableWeb Mashup of the Day Pubmed Faceoff. According to the Pubmed Faceoff website:

This site applies a simple, photorealistic variant of the Chernoff Faces visualization technique to impact factor data for papers in the PubMed database of biomedical literature.

Basically it allows you to search PubMed and have the results represented as a set of human faces.

You can get more details from a blog post by Euan Adie the creator of Pubmed Faceoff:

Pubmed Faceoff is a mashup of Pubmed, Carl Bergstrom’s Eigenfactors dataset and Scopus, inspired by something that Pierre Lindenbaum mentioned on Twitter. It renders PubMed results as a set of photorealistic Chernoff Faces whose facial features are determined by the age, citation count and journal impact factor associated with each paper. The idea is that you can tell at a glance which papers are new, exciting and high impact and which are languishing, uncited and unread.

Let’s unpack these descriptions to understand exactly what’s happening with Pubmed Faceoff. The first thing to know is that the abstract data visualized by Pubmed Faceoff is search results from Pubmed — specifically lists of biomedical research papers:

PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 18 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.

You can try Pubmed yourself to see what’s in it; for instance, type in “lung cancer”, an example we’ll use later on. In addition to using the standard Pubmed interface, you can access Pubmed data via a the NCBI Entrez API, which is what the Pubmed Faceoff mashup uses. In fact, there are quite a number of alternative interfaces to Pubmed made possible by this API, including HubMed (see the HubMed search results for lung cancer).

The NCBI Entrez API gives you a list of articles and their publication date (i.e., the age of an article). When trying to figure out what papers to pay attention to (a pressing issue since there are often so many papers being published!), researchers become interested in the “impact” that a given paper is having. It’s hard (and perhaps impossible) to boil the importance of a paper down to numbers, but impact is often measured by the number of times it has been cited by other papers as well as by the influence of the journal in which a paper is published. Since the NCBI Entrez API doesn’t provide such data, the Pubmed Faceoff mashup makes use of

• Carl Bergstrom’s Eigenfactors as a quantitative measure of a journal’s impact. (Take a look the top ten lists)
• Scopus to get the citation count of a paper

Pubmed Faceoff attempts to distill these various factors for a given paper into a single representation: a face!

The ethnicity and gender of the face is selected at random for visual interest - you can turn this feature off if you so choose.The age of a face correlates with the publication date of the paper. Younger faces are more recent papers.A smile means that the paper has been cited more times than expected (based on its age). Larger smiles mean more citations.A frown means that the paper has been cited far less than you might expect.The raised eyebrows correlate with the impact factor (sort of - actually the Eigenfactor) of the journal in which the paper was published.

A novel aspect of the mashup is the use of more photorealistic Chernoff faces instead of the classic 2D-cartoon faces. When you look at a list of articles (such as for lung cancer), you see something like:

Although this visualization is eye-catching, Euan Adie acknowledges some of its limitations:

I’m quite pleased with how the system turned out although to be honest I still think the usefulness of Chernoff Faces is debatable. Does it actually work? Is the amount of time it takes you to adjust to scanning the faces more than the amount of time it’d take to simply scan a table of data? Or is it just cute?

The gender and ethnicity of each face are picked at random to add a bit of visual interest but personally I find it slightly easier to interpret the faces when they’re all male and European. That I’m rubbish at reading women comes as no surprise but the ethnicity thing is interesting as it fits with research into cross-race facial recognition that suggests we’re each better at recognizing the types of faces that we see every day.

Perhaps there’s a way to render our own faces or those of our closest friends and family members. Might that improve the visualization?

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