eBay API News

John Musser, June 16th, 2006   Comments(1)

In eBay news: they have four new APIs on the way and have introduced new forums and a developer center for PayPal. Skype’s API is making inroads and as noted in this press release the Skype developer program now has 3,500 developers creating both software and hardware products (and they too have a series of APIs due this year).

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SRC Demographics API

John Musser, June 15th, 2006   Comments(0)

SRC freedemographics.com, a provider of geographic business intelligence software announced this week the release of a new API: www.FreeDemographics.com/api. A “dashup” as they call it:

Data services readily available to add to developer mashups. The FreeDemographics API lets developers embed business intelligence content including, market, consumer and corporate data directly into a website with JavaScript. As the industry’s first demographics API, developers will be able to add data to their mashups in less than five minutes delivering business intelligence content at Web speed.

* Deliver a dashup of U.S. Census data for any geography including zip codes, cities, counties, states, etc. — making demographic information publicly available on any Web site

* Pull back complete reports of census information for a specific region by identifying a street address or intersection

* Data, geography, country, GIS and Web mapping API independence allowing the developer to run FreeDemographics in any application regardless of source, format or country of origin

* Request charts and data from FreeDemographics without the requirement of a map mashup

* Free access to SRC’s Explorer geocoder, the industry’s only geocoder that is country independent, enabling developers in any country with a cartographic database to geocode any geographic component for international applications

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New Microsoft MSDN API

John Musser, June 14th, 2006   Comments(1)

Some interesting API news from Microsoft this week: MSDN, Microsoft’s venerable, and quite large, documentation database now has an API: the Microsoft/TechNet Publishing System (MTPS) Content Services. From MSDN’s Craig Andera:

In brief, the MTPS Content Services are a set of web services for exposing the content in MTPS. MTPS is the application I helped write a few years back that stores and processes all the content at MSDN2. With the web service, you now have programmatic access to all that data via SOAP. So if you want to embed access to the documentation for System.Xml.XmlTextReader into your application, go for it. If you want to know what the child nodes of System.DateTime.ToString() are in the table of contents, you can go and find that, too. I expect to see some fairly interesting uses of the service pop up in the near future. There’s such a huge amount of good information in MTPS that I imagine lots of people will want to leverage it.

As they note, it’s a useful dataset that’s been freed to new forms of external search, display and mixing. It is now listed with the APIs here. [via Alex Barnett]

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Yahoo Updates Map Licensing

John Musser, June 14th, 2006   Comments(3)

In response to the latest Google Maps news the team at Yahoo! have changed the licensing restrictions for their mapping API. Good news for developers:

…we have lifted many of the restrictions associated with the Yahoo! Maps APIs. Until today, the APIs were available only for non-commercial use unless you applied for an exception. The concept of commercial and non-commercial has gone away and exceptions are no longer necessary in most cases. We have given you explicit Usage Policies to help guide you.

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Google Maps Goes Enterprise

John Musser, June 13th, 2006   Comments(7)

There’s a new entry in the Google’s growing “Enterprise” product line: Google Maps for Enterprise. Licensed, supported mapping for both behind the firewall and external, commercial use. Even comes with a service level agreement (SLA). How much? Starts at $10,000. Announced yesterday, at their Google Geo Developer Day. From their site:

The speedy performance and ease of use of Google Maps is now available with full enterprise licensing and support. With Google Maps for Enterprise, businesses can integrate data and seamlessly build maps into applications of all types to create a high performance mapping experience. Map customer locations, track shipments, manage facilities—virtually any application with location data can benefit from a geographic view.

They note that “if and when” advertising is added to the free Google Maps that paying, licensed customers may turn these off. Although as they hint in FAQ “we hope you find it [the display advertising] so useful that you choose to include it”.

In addition, geocoding — the ability to convert street addresses into specific latitude and longitude coordinates — is no longer a big missing piece of the Google Maps puzzle. Yesterday they also announced support for international geocoding. This covers US, Canada, Japan, France, Italy, Germany and Spain. [via Google Maps Mania]

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dev.live.com

John Musser, June 12th, 2006   Comments(1)

Microsoft’s developer resource center for the quickly evolving Live Platform is now up at dev.live.com. Not a lot there yet but it bodes well for a more integrated approach on their part to developer support on the new platform.

One of the things that Microsoft has traditionally done as well as any vendor is developer support (perhaps that happens when the founder was a coder). In this space Microsoft is playing catch-up to Amazon, eBay, Yahoo! and Google, all of whom currently have much more comprehensive support for their web-based APIs. Microsoft knows this and is clearly starting to get their strategy lined-up. [via Dare Obasanjo]

On a related note Microsoft has introduced the MSDN Wiki, a new collaborative framework around their longstanding Microsoft Developer Network. As they note “On this site you can add content to VS 2005 documentation topics and edit contributions from other users. Our goal is to extend the documentation with code examples, tips and tricks, and other information that you add.” [via Alex Barnett]

And yes, it’s a big loss for Microsoft to have Scoble leave but a big congratulations to Robert and PodTech on his smart move!

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Where 2.0 Entries and Winner

John Musser, June 12th, 2006   Comments(1)

Last week We offered a free pass to O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference to a randomly selected reader who replied with ideas for mashups they’d most like to see or be most afraid to see. The most afraid to see struck a nerve, especially given the recent press about hackers and mashups.

Here’s a sampling of the responses:

• Elaine Nelson: Mashup I’d be afraid to see: flickr data combined with google maps (satellite photos?!) to display path of picture-taking. Maybe combined with google/yahoo calendar to show where you were supposed to be, but ended up at instead.
• Patrick Tufts: In the category of “Mashups I’d be most afraid to see? I’d like to suggest a Yelp + Google Maps + Craigslist combination where restaurant patrons who have too much food can post it to Craigslist and reach an audience of people who would like a free meal. The resulting company, leftovers.com, would have the hottest IPO this side of eBay.

Read the rest of “Where 2.0 Entries and Winner” »

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Mashing Up The Library Competition

John Musser, June 8th, 2006   Comments(0)

There’s a new mashup contest in progress, this one from the folks at Talis, provider of library management systems to the UK and Ireland library marketplace. They have a fairly complete API which was just added to the ProgrammableWeb listings this week.

As for the contest, from their site:

For all those users of libraries who have ever wished they could bring information from their library to life outside the virtual walls of its web site. For all those librarians who have contemplated enriching their OPAC with maps, reviews, jacket images, or folksonomies. For all of you, and for anyone else who has harboured a yearning to see information from or about libraries put to best use and displayed to best effect alongside information or services from other sources, we bring you the Mashing Up The Library competition.

This is your chance to wow the world with your ideas; your chance to build better systems on top of library data; your chance to demonstrate the value and the power of libraries; your chance to take library information and display it in exciting new ways; and your chance to walk away with £1,000. Entries are due by Friday August 18th.

This and the MSN Messenger Invasion of the Robots Contest are both in the ‘active contests’ list on the ProgrammableWeb contests page.

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Windows Live Expo API is Live

John Musser, June 7th, 2006   Comments(2)

Microsoft’s Live Expo team have announced the release of a beta API for Windows Live Expo. You can now access their classifieds listings via both SOAP and REST. [via Dare Obasanjo]

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Eventsites, a Serverless Mashup

John Musser, June 6th, 2006   Comments(0)

Just a quick pointer to this interesting writeup by Peter Nixey at Webkitchen about the design and architecture of his mashup Eventsites. Why is it interesting? Because his application uses no server-logic or database of its own, just pure AJAX and web-services. Serve-up a page with some HTML and JavaScript, fetch data from EVDB, Flickr, GoogleMaps, and mix.

This may sound easy but as of today nearly all mashups use some degree of server-side processing: either for retrieving and parsing data, mixing data from multiple sources (sometimes to work around browser-side security constraints), caching, or other reason. Peter gives a great example of what’s possible with super-lightweight mashups. [via Amazon's Jeff Barr]

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