June 30th, 2006

Google Desktop Gadget Contest

Another API developer contest has launched: Google’s Desktop Gadget Contest. Here’s how they describe it:

Do you have what it takes to create a great Google Desktop Gadget? Have you been waiting for some motivation to prove it? Well, good news — the Google Desktop Gadget Contest is here to spur you into brilliant action.

The contest runs until July 31st, 2006 and, while supplies last, each developer who submits an approved gadget will receive a limited edition Google Desktop Developer T-shirt and have their gadget shown to millions of Google Desktop users around the world. A panel of judges will also award three prizes based on popularity, visual appeal, use of new features and creativity. We’ll award $5,000 to the first place winner, $2,000 for second place, and $1,000 for third place.

Now added to the /contests page.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Contests, Google, Widgets at 12:05 AM | No Comments »

June 29th, 2006

The New Google Authentication

Remember Microsoft Passport, er now Windows Live ID? Google has just introduced their entry in the space, which is now more of the Identity 2.0 space. For details see thier new Account Authentication Proxy for Web-Based Applications page. And check Garett Rogers post at ZDNet for a concise summary.

It was only earlier this week there were a couple of interesting posts on Web APIs and authentication worth reading: Julien Couvreur’s piece on Web API authentication for mashups with follow-up by Dare Obasanjo. As Dare notes, “The devil is in the details when talking about authentication, authorization, and Web APIs.” This is indeed one of the biggest obstacles in making mashups a more serious business.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Google, Security at 12:02 AM | 3 Comments »

June 28th, 2006

Best New Mashups: Amazon

Continuing this week’s review of good new mashups, here are a few built using Amazon’s API:

• Similarity Web: Search for any product on Amazon and visualize its 2-level deep similarity web in Flash. Nice visualization.
• Amazon CLI: A unique browser based command line interface to Amazon.com. Search, browse and purchase Amazon products all via the command line — welcome to the world of Zero-click shopping. Firefox only.
• Frucall: Frucall is a free phone-based price-comparison shopping service for consumers to compare prices and purchase products using their cell phones, anywhere, anytime. Frucall tries to combine the benefits of in-store shopping with the flexible nature of shopping online.
• BitsOfTreats.com: A marketspace that aggregates deals and rebates for a wide range of products.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, BestMashups, Examples at 12:43 AM | 2 Comments »

June 27th, 2006

Best New Mashups, Part 2

Our review of the best new mashups continues and even includes some good non-Google-maps mashups (yes, they exist):

• floverview: floverview gives you a comprehensive one-page view of any Flickr member.
• Running Map: A nice site to measure your running distance. Built in Flash with Yahoo Maps. Good UI.
• Flickr in Second Life: A home in SL that sports a simple picture frame. Touch it and it looks up your avatar name to see what your favourite Flickr tag is, picks a random picture with that tag from Flickr and displays it on its surface.
• WhereAmI.At?: Have you ever asked yourself what city you are currently in or where am I at. Well, just in case that happens to you some time, WhereAmI.At can hopefully tell you where you are.
• HotelChatter Hollywood Secrets: Get the dirt on Hollywood celebrity hotel goings-on. HotelChatter covers everything related to hotels and lodging around the world, we cover hotel deals and reviews, which celebrities are staying where, hotel industry news, the hotels to stay away from.

More tomorrow.

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

June 26th, 2006

Best New Mashups

Here’s a sampling of the best new mashups added at ProgrammableWeb recently (go here for the full list of 789 mashups):

• Slurlmaker for Second Life: Slurlmarker uses your del.icio.us account to create a bookmark slurl of your favorite locations in Second Life.
• Flickrball: A fun six-degrees-of-separation scavenger-hunt game, using Flickr thumbnails and tags for clues.
• ASCII Maps: Google Maps in ASCII characters. Very retro, very creative mashup.

More best-of coming this week.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 12:07 AM | 2 Comments »

June 22nd, 2006

New Yahoo Messenger API

Yahoo! this week introduced a new Plug-in SDK for Yahoo! Messenger. It is a JavaScript and C++ API for building features to run inside their IM client. Some initial plug-ins are over in the Yahoo! Gallery.

There is a new Messenger API entry on the ProgrammableWeb site.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Yahoo at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »

June 21st, 2006

AOL AIM Updates

In AOL news: Open AIM continues to expand functionality, now with AIM bots, location-based services, and PC-to-PC calling. Since AIM supports SMS you can access the bots via your phone (like the Wall Street Journal bot). The location service is also designed for mobile devices — it can use the network to determine location and, at the user’s discretion, allow buddies to see this data.

The AOL AIM profile is here and AOL Presence here.

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

June 20th, 2006

Amazon MTurk and S3 Updates

As noted by Amazon’s Jeff Barr over in the good Amazon Web Services Blog there have been some updates to the Mechanical Turk and S3 APIs. Interesting feature enhancements. For S3 this includes virtual hosting and hierarchies of keys and for Mechanical Turk this includes event notifications (email or web service call) and rich media HITs. The S3 Updates are here and the Mechanical Turk updates are here.

You can view their API profiles and see some early mashups in the ProgrammableWeb database: S3 and Mechanical Turk.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Amazon at 12:10 AM | No Comments »

June 18th, 2006

Considering API Parity

Marc Hedlund over at O’Reilly Radar points out an interesting discussion at FlickrCentral. The gist of the initial question revolved around whether a competing photo service should be given an API key so they can directly use Flickr’s API to move a customer’s data directly out of Flickr and into theirs. After some back-and-forth and internal debate, Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield said “we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same. That means (a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access.” Marc calls it API parity and notes that the basic questions revolve not so much around APIs but freedom and ownership of data.

More on the discussion from Dave Winer, Marc Canter (with comments from Stewart), and Nick Carr.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Issues, Yahoo at 4:46 PM | 1 Comment »

June 17th, 2006

New Riya API

The photo search engine Riya now has their own API. Nice, clean REST model API includes access to their well regarded facial recognition search. More on the API itself from Dan Farber at ZDNet. They will soon release version 2.0 of the core service, an upgrade that moves them towards a more generalized visual search engine. Good details on that upgrade at at TechCrunch.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:40 AM | No Comments »