Monthly Archives

Web API Sites

May 31st, 2006

eBay Developers Conference

FYI, the eBay Developers Conference is coming-up June 10-12 down at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas. Looks like a very full agenda and includes PayPal and Skype development as well.

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Posted by John Musser as Events, News at 12:02 AM | 3 Comments »

May 30th, 2006

Amazon S3 Disrupts Online Storage

Wade Roush over at The MIT Technology Review wrote this enlightening piece on the new Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service. He does a great job of “running the numbers” on the costs of online storage.

[Amazon S3 charges] $0.15 per gigabyte of storage used per month, plus $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. That’s a microscopic price, even compared to the charges at hot new online storage providers like Box.net ($1 per GB per month) and XDrive ($2 per GB per month) — not to mention older providers like Novastor ($12.95 per GB per month) and Quicken Online Backup ($24.95 per month for up to 10 GB).

Wade points-out that if you do a lot of transfers that the transfer charges might add-up and make the Amazon option less of a guaranteed cheaper option. He also notes that other big players, Google and Microsoft, are likely to weigh-in with low-cost online storage offerings of their own before much longer. Yet Amazon has lead the way on this front.

As Dion Hinchcliffe pointed out it won’t be long before you’ll be able to dynamically choose which storage service provider to use.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Amazon, Money at 12:32 AM | No Comments »

May 29th, 2006

Giving eBay a Facelift

Jackson West over at GigaOM has this interesting update and analysis of Cooqy. Cooqy uses the eBay API to create an alternative interface to auctions, buyers and sellers. Good detailed analysis of a mashup.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples at 12:05 AM | 3 Comments »

May 26th, 2006

Amazon Contest Winners

Catching-up on API contest news: in the Microsoft / Amazon Web Services contest there were 3 top prize winners. First place winner received a $5,000 Amazon wish list fulfillment. Nicely executed, creative applications. They are now all listed at ProgrammableWeb:

My 10 Wishes: First Prize winner. Lets children pick what they want for Christmas from custom list of Amazon toys and games.
Amazames: Second place winner. A portal for casual games related to online shopping in general and shopping, primarily via Amazon.com. Requires Windows download.
FeatFinder : Third place winner. Explore relationship between artists. Idea based on six degrees theory: no artist is separated from another by more than six other artists.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, BestMashups, Contests, Examples at 12:12 AM | No Comments »

New Virtual Earth API

Alex Barnett points-out that as part of yesterday’s upgrade to Local Live that Microsoft also made some API-side updates to their Virtual Earth Map Control. Useful enhancements include geocoding (address lookups including ambiguous addresses), driving directions with polylines, and GeoRSS support for encoding location data into RSS. In addition, there’s a new SDK.

For good coverage of the core product release see TechCrunch.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Mapping, Microsoft at 12:05 AM | No Comments »

May 25th, 2006

New APIs Added

A number of new APIs have been added here this month. The overall total is now at 208 APIs. Interesting new additions include:

Remember the Milk: Personal task management.
iShareMaps On Demand: UK postcode geocoder.
Performancing: API for retrieving blog metrics.
Civic Footprint: Lookup the political geography of Cook County, Illinois.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 8:27 AM | No Comments »

Mashups, Web Data, and APIs

Phil Windley has a very good writeup of the session on Mashups, Web Data, and APIs from the WWW2006 event. Panelists included Dan Theurer from Yahoo! on their APIs, Kevin Lawver from AOL, Frank Mantek from Google on GData, and Jeff Barr from Amazon.

Interesting points from Jeff Barr on API provider best practices:

First, have a program: Plan your API, don’t just throw it out there.
Get the business model right: Have a strategy, plan for licensing and pricing.
Get the technology side right: Support multiple formats like XML, JSON, and REST. Remember versioning (something that a large percentage of APIs here do not)
Support developers: Including samples and documentation
Create community: From forums to blogs and outreach

He’s also got a bit more on the conference here on his ZDNet blog.

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Posted by John Musser as Events, News at 5:34 AM | 2 Comments »

French Mashup Traffic

Once again, Europe’s interest in mashups was apparent at ProgrammableWeb as there’s been a lot of international visitors here recently, this time courtesy of “Web 2.0: un site pour geeks et pour curieux”.

There haven’t been many French mashups here so far. Perhaps more will appear this year since maps are the major source of mashups for now and the major US-based mapping services are starting to give better European support.

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Posted by John Musser as News at 12:20 AM | 4 Comments »

May 24th, 2006

Best New Mashups

After a bit of a lull the pace of new mashup activity seems to be picking-up again. A lot of very interesting mashups have been added here lately. Here’s a few:

Daylight Map: Excellent visualization of current daylight and nighttime regions around the world. Use the Options bar on the right to tune the settings.
Relate-a-zon Game: Six Degrees of Amazon recommended products. Complete missions like Find your way from DeWalt drill to the book American Psycho. Least hops or money spent earns a spot on the highscore. Fun game via the Amazon API.
Realtime Satellite Tracking Map: Very unique mashup that allows you track any of dozens of satellites in realtime as they circle the earth. Watch them move across the top of Google Maps. Lots of peripheral details as well.
Flickr Group Browser: Explore the relationship between Flickr groups and photos with this useful groups browser. While there, checkout GustavoG’s excellent visualization.
Following Political Dollars: Useful mashup that lets you see who has been donating money to which political party by zip code. Good combination of raw data, charts and maps. Data source is The Fundrace Project.
Top US High Schools: Map of the top high schools in the United States as reported in Newsweek. May 8th 2006 issue.

There have been other interestings one of late and will write about more shortly. In the meantime, the overall total here is getting close to 700. Full listing here.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 12:05 AM | 3 Comments »

May 22nd, 2006

An Open Data Can of Worms

“So everyone in our tech bubble thinks open data is a good idea but hardly anyone is doing it.” This and other very spot-on observations about the issues surrounding open APIs and the data they provide from Paul Hammond’s excellent presentation last week at XTech as very nicely summarized here by Suw Charman. Paul’s slides are here and his blog here.

In one slide he took ProgrammableWeb data and did a useful summary by API provider showing that a quarter of the 200+ APIs come from 7 providers:

ApisByProvider

Also noted: “There are millions of RSS feeds, but these highlight the problems even more. You can now get RSS feeds for almost anything you want, but try getting in depth sports statistics, or updated stock market data, or flight times. You can’t get it. RSS is intended to be read in an aggregator, and most of it can’t be reused or republished. So you can get any data you want from the net, so long as it’s the last 10 items on an RSS feed, and you don’t what to do anything with it.”

He then outlines a series of non-technical issues that are the real obstacles to API growth: