December 31st, 2005

2005 Year End Stats

ProgrammableWeb’s 2005 year-end ’stats’: 137 APIs & 275 mashups.

This time next year? We’ll see, but somehow suspect by then this year’s numbers will look tiny by comparison…

Happy New Year to all!

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Posted by John Musser as General at 6:16 PM | No Comments »

December 29th, 2005

Mashups With an Edge

Seems like folks are starting to get a little more creatively provocative with mashups as we near year end:

• Slut-o-meter: Evaluates the promiscuity of the subject you enter by comparing the number of Google search results with and without “safe-search” enabled. This gives the “Promiscuity Percentage”, calculated as: Pr(slut) = 100% ((unsafe-safe)/unsafe). Try your favorite celebrity and see how they rank. [via]
• Buzzingo: Mashup of what’s ‘hot’ now using the Yahoo! Buzz index to show the day’s most popular (or recently popular) search queries on Yahoo! It’s updated hourly with sections on Music, Movies, Sports, Games and others. [via, but as Philipp warns, this may be NSFW]

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 12:20 AM | 1 Comment »

December 28th, 2005

Google Feed API Coming Soon

Niall Kennedy reverse engineered Google’s Reader and uncovered an API in there. Which, as it turns-out, the Google team says will be available early next year.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, News at 8:01 AM | No Comments »

December 27th, 2005

Read All About It Mashup

Just catching-up on some recently added mashups. This one entitled Read All About It combines Amazon’s book catalog and MSN Virtual Earth (now Windows Live Local) allowing you to browse for books via online maps. This image shows the map of Hawaii in the main window and books such as “Fodor’s Hawaii” and James A. Michener’s “Hawaii” listed on the left.

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December 25th, 2005

Christmas Mashup

In honor of the holidays is this Christmas-themed mashup: SantaStars.com. Use it to find elaborate Christmas lights displays. Readers can add comments and vote for favorites. The current #1 house is in Richmond, British Columbia and has 87,625 lights. [via]

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 8:25 AM | 1 Comment »

December 23rd, 2005

World Volcano Map

One of the new mashups added earlier this week is the World Volcano Browser which displays volcanoes of the world on a Google Map. The data comes from the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Vulcanism Project. Certainly are plenty around here in Seattle…

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December 22nd, 2005

Copyscape

Copyscape is an interesting business built on top of the Google Search API. Their services include:

• The free Copyscape service for finding copies of your content on the Web by typing in the address of your original web page.
• The advanced Copysentry service provides comprehensive defense for an entire website. Copysentry automatically scans the web daily and alerts you to copies of any page on your site.
• The Global Web Rights campaign provides tools and information for “defending yourself against content theft and copyright violations on the web.”

In a bit of a ‘terms of service trickle-down effect’, they make it clear that “Use of Copyscape is subject to Google’s API terms“. And their FAQ states that “Google has generously provided us with a high-capacity Web APIs key for use with the Google Alert and Copyscape sites” [emphasis added].

(I ran across their service this week when it was used to verify some plagiarism.)

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 1:00 AM | 3 Comments »

December 21st, 2005

Web Services for Dummies

In a good overview post entitled Web services for dummies, ZDNet’s Richard MacManus looks at the debate over web services protocols and the complexity vs. simplicity continuum.

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Posted by John Musser as News at 7:53 AM | No Comments »

Yahoo Offers New Travel APIs

Continuing their onslaught of new APIs, Yahoo! yesterday announced a set of new Travel APIs that allow you programmatic access to the Yahoo! Trip Planner.

As they note: “The Yahoo! Travel Trip Plan APIs have been designed to operate just like the Yahoo! Search APIs, so if you’ve already written code for Yahoo! Search you can start using Travel almost immediately with only minor modifications. And just like Yahoo! Search, the Yahoo! Travel APIs support both XML and JSON output. ” The API groups are:

• Trip Search: Use the Trip Search API to search for trip plans created by Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner. Search for public trips or restrict your search by keyword or to trips you or another user have created.
• Get Trip: Use the Get Trip API to retrieve a specific trip from Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner.

There’s a new full entry for this in the API database:

    http://www.programmableweb.com/api/YahooTravel

Now are 130 APIs listed.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, News, Yahoo at 7:25 AM | No Comments »

December 20th, 2005

New York, New York

You can now take your choice of how to virtually tour New York City (and although not as good as the real thing, the virtual city doesn’t go on strike):

• Virtual NYC: Navigate through the streets of New York using thousands of pictures and reading the city’s history. 16 tours currently available.
• NYC POV: Takes the Quicktime VR 360-degree approach to touring the Big Apple. [via]

You can also use the ‘nyc’ tag to check-out other NYC mashups at any time:

    http://www.programmableweb.com/tag/nyc

There are 17 NYC-related mashups currently listed.

Update: The New York Times has a new mashup Commuting Guide that can help people find transportation alternatives including car pool staging areas.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples, Mapping at 5:55 AM | No Comments »