August 24th, 2005

NewsGator Online API Released

NewsGator has just released their NewsGator Online API. Some overview in their press release and details in their API Homepage.

At first glance looks mostly SOAP based with a subset exposed as REST. Data formats are OPML and RSS, both with NewsGator extensions. Functional API groups for managing locations, folders, subscriptions, feeds, and posts. Authentication by HTTP basic and Digest, SSL is supported.

It has now been added to the API reference.

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Posted by John as APIs at 9:18 PM | No Comments »

Google Talk

Google Talk is all the buzz today. Using the non-proprietary Jabber/XMPP as the protocol is a nice disruptive Google-style entry into the space.

Couple of points: clean interface, currently no advertising or popups, requires GMail account.

Useful posts on the topic:

• The official Google Talk site.
• There’s already a Wikipedia entry on it.
• DeWitt Clinton’s post on Google Talk Over SSH

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Posted by John as News at 9:05 PM | 3 Comments »

August 20th, 2005

ProgrammableWeb’s Categories

Here’s the initial set of categories for the blog: General, News, Examples, Links, API of the Week, Security, Legal, and ROI. Frankly, if nothing else, it gives me a framework for outlining ideas. I won’t expect to get much posting done initially given most time will be spent on site and database setup.

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Posted by John as General at 7:51 AM | 1 Comment »

The Web as Platform

So what’s the point of this site? Although still euphemistically ‘in beta’, the goal is to create a home page for Web 2.0 developers. Content to include news, reviews, comparisons, and examples. Formal APIs, unofficial APIs, and accidental APIs are all fair game. Anything ‘programmatic’ that’s publicly accessible online from sources including Amazon, Google, eBay, Microsoft, del.icio.us, Feedster, UPS, EVDB, WeatherBug, indeed, Blogger and others.

Why? Because going From Web Page to Web Platform is a big deal. It’s immature and a bit ill-defined but full of potential. To particpate as developers requires understanding, and to do that means to know what the parts are and how they work.

Another way to look at this site is from its genesis: frustration. I wanted to get the ‘big picture’ view of web apis. So I picked-up what books I could find (like Iverson). Pretty good start. But not enough. Then where? Everywhere. Despite what seems like an infinite number of social/web2.0 blogs, sites and businesses, I still couldn’t find the ‘go-to’ place I wanted.

What do I think will be good to include here? Descriptions. Examples. Structured comparisons. Graphs. Relevancy. Debate. With what distinguishing traits?

• Visual. I’d like the blog to be a bit more graphically rich than average: more diagrams, tables, images, and charts. This will take a bit more time and effort, but hopefully it will keep the signal-to-noise ratio high.
• Timely. If there’s a new, notable API released, it should get listed here ASAP.
• Relevant. There are already more APIs than you can shake a debugger at. Some will get more space here than others. Just not enough of my bandwidth. But the key is to provide a sense of relevance, priority and impact (something that can get lost when looking at a set of del.icio.us tags on ‘api’).
• Collaborative. Ideally something more than the usual comments and trackbacks. How can this be a more collective effort? Not sure on this just yet.
• Educational. At the moment it appears there’s no shortage of examples of people using the existing APIs. But frankly, to find them takes a lot of legwork. While I like the books, I don’t always want to hit Google Hacks, then Amazon Hacks, to the next one. Although, if O’Reilly folks are listening, how about a hack-of-hacks meta-book…
• Experimental. Is there a way to ‘walk the walk’ and make use of those APIs to make this site more useful?
• Explorative. These new APIs have not only their expected usages but what can be really interesting is when smart, clever people build things that the API creators never envisioned. Not only can that happen with a single API but there’s also taking multiple APIs to build a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
• Beyond nuts-and-bolts. Hit the all-important non-technical topics like legal issues (API restrictions or copyright gotchas) and ROI (where’s the money?). At the end of the day these topics may moot the endless debates over REST v. SOAP.
• Agenda-free but not opinion-free. Because really, what fun is a blog if there’s no spice to it? But personally I do not really care if it’s WS-*, REST, or morse-code-over-HTTP. Just ask good questions, be creative, solve problems.

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Posted by John as General at 7:35 AM | 6 Comments »