Monthly Archives

Web API Sites

August 31st, 2006

Google Lock-in Or Better Mousetrap

With Google’s recently released GData API for Google Base (see the ProgrammableWeb API database entry here), there is renewed debate on their grand strategy. Is it a better mousetrap? Lock-in? Neither? For good commentary see these posts from Marc Canter and Chris Messina (with lots of trackbacks from there leading to more discussion). In the end this question may apply to all the big providers. We’ll see soon enough.

Speaking of Marc’s blog, he also had an interesting series of posts about Facebook’s API.

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Issues, News at 12:05 AM | No Comments »

August 28th, 2006

ProgrammableWeb One Year Later

A year ago this week ProgrammableWeb launched. Of course it’s been quite a year here and a lot has changed since then. Just start with the core database: there has been a sixfold increase in the number of APIs and ten times as many mashups. Here are the basic numbers:

From a media perspective the topic of APIs and mashups really started to take off this year with ProgrammableWeb getting dozens of press mentions including mainstream media like Newsweek, CBS News, New Scientist, Assoicated Press and Der Spiegel.

Besides just number of APIs and mashups, the site itself has really grown from a features perspective:

Mashup Matrix: one of the most popular features — an interactive tool for visualizing the mashup ecosystem by showing how API x + API y = ?. Over time a number of people have commented on the “white space” in the matrix, that is, where are the opportunities for combining things that haven’t been combined before.
The dashboards: Home, APIs, and Mashups.
How-to Guide that organizes 40+ articles on building your own mashups.
Technical Reference Guide that organizes material on RSS, microformats, and other web-as-platform components.
Contest Guide currently listing 16 ongoing and recent API/mashup contests.
Charts and sparklines to chart the growth of the API and mashup ecosystem.

One other very popular feature is ability to directly subscribe to feeds of new mashups, APIs, and now, starting this month, updates to wikis and comments (more on the last one soon).

And since much of what’s here comes from readers and visitors — a big thanks to the thousands of people who have contributed links, comments, ideas and other content.

I think the coming year will be at least as interesting…

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Posted by John Musser as Site News at 1:04 AM | 6 Comments »

August 25th, 2006

Elastic Compute Cloud from Amazon

It is not primarily about APIs and mashups, but Amazon has once again upped the web-as-platform ante, this time with yesterday’s announcement of EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud. What is it? A form of on-demand utility computing that enables fast, cost-effective provisioning of services via virtual server instances you setup on Amazon’s infrastructure. This provides scalability that can be activated in minutes.

Some quick details:

Each instance provides a predictable equivalent of: 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.
Designed to work with the Amazon S3 storage service.
It i’s a pay-as-you-go pricing model: $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed). $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic). $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

The ProgrammableWeb API database now has an Amazon EC2 entry.

For more on the EC2 announcement see also the Amazon Web Services blog, Phil Wainewright who compares it to Sun’s flawed utility vision, Dan Farber’s ZDNet Report, this quick screencast from Jon Udell, and TechCrunch.

Speaking of Amazon being ahead of the curve: Alex Iskold recently wrote about Amazon’s strategy in this Web 2.0 Journal report as well as in his Web Platform primer at Richard MacManus’ Read/Write Web.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, News at 5:35 PM | 4 Comments »

Tools for Google Maps

Mike Pegg does a great job tracking the most interesting maps mashups over at his Google Maps Mania. Occasionally he also does a roundup of tools for creating or enhancing Google Maps. Follow this link to see his eighth roundup of these tools along with links to the previous seven roundups. Good mix of Google Maps-focused tools.

ProgrammableWeb has a popular howto page that covers resources for a variety of APIs.

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Posted by John Musser as General, Google, HowTo, Mapping, Tools at 12:05 AM | 8 Comments »

August 23rd, 2006

Tips for Providing a Web API

Alex Bosworth over at Source Labs (and creator of the great open source resource SWiK) writes consistently good posts and Monday’s was no exception: How to Provide a Web API. In it he addresses the question of “What are a few simple rules for providing a web API?” with these five points:

Keep it clean and simple
Stick to standards
Make it about data
Keep it working
Design for updates

I completely agree with that list and might also add: a) provide examples, and b) document and support it. Neither of these need to be super extensive/expensive, just enough to get things kick-started (docs/examples) and help support the developer community as it grows.

This reminds me of Nat Torkington’s excellent post awhile back on How To Roll Out An Open API. He makes a good case that providers should: Make signup simple, offer toolkits for the languages that Internet developers use, and think laterally about business models. Recommended reading.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, BestPractices, HowTo at 12:05 AM | 5 Comments »

August 22nd, 2006

Salesforce Mashes Google AdWords

Every day ProgrammableWeb has a Mashup of the Day featured on the home page and the Mashup Dashboard. Today’s is a unique one in that there’s a lot more money at stake than usual: it’s the Salesforce for Google AdWords application which combines Salesforce.com and Google AdWords.

It’s based on a product from search marketing tools company Kieden — a company just acquired by Salesforce. The product allows tracking of the full lifecycle: creating ads, placing bids, tracking results, and measuring ROI. The introductory pricing is $300/month per customer. The stakes in online advertising are high (a $5.75B business last year) and this is an interesting combination of major league tools.

While it may not be as fun as one of last week’s mashups for racing around Paris in a Ferrari 275 GTB, it’s good to finally start seeing more tangible business value from mashups.

FYI: keep in mind that you can get the Mashup of the Day and others by subscribing to the ProgrammableWeb Mashup Feed here.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Examples, Google, Money, Salesforce at 12:02 AM | 6 Comments »

August 21st, 2006

Blueorganizer as Utility Mashup

At some point before long mashups will start becoming more utilitarian and less one-off novelties. Currently one of the more useful utilities built on web APIs is the blueorganizer Firefox extension from adaptiveblue (a ProgrammableWeb sponsor). It’s a “smart bookmarking” tool well suited to managing links related to products and media — books, movies, music — where you catalog items you own, make notes on products you want, tag, search, and compare prices (because it understands structured product data from supported sites). The just released version 2.5 has received a lot of press — for a good detailed review see Brian Benzinger’s Solution Watch summary.

What is interesting here from an API/mashup point of view is that it uses APIs and data from over a dozen sources including eBay, YouTube, Yahoo, Google and Flickr. Sometimes it uses an API and sometimes screen scrapes. For example the synchronization from any computer service is built on the Amazon S3 API for data storage services but the Cafe Press data is scraped. For a data-centric utility it’s not surprising to see so many sources in use and there will surely be more functional mashups like this to come.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples, Money at 12:09 AM | No Comments »

August 18th, 2006

Dapps, Ruby and Microformats

There has been a lot of notable API and mashup-related news, product launches and commentary lately. Here is a rundown of some of the better ones:

The very interesting Dapper service officially launched yesterday. It is designed to allow anyone, including non-coders, to create an API for any web site (akin to earlier discussions here about scrAPIs). You can use their GUI or use an SDK. Sample services include Magg a movie aggregator an Blotter which graphs blogs over time. This service is now listed here at ProgrammableWeb.
An good thread of discussion about “data mashups” and “process mashups” started with Peter Rip’s Meme-check - Enterprise & Web 2.0 with follow-up by Dion Hinchcliffe on his ZDNet blog.
In this brief interview at TechTarget author Bruce Tate discusses, at a high-level, REST and its use with Ruby on Rails.
Sebastian Küpers discusses some ideas on microformats and mashups. And in a comment from Dorai Thodla there’s a pointer back to these notes on that topic from last month’s Mashup Camp 2.

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Posted by John Musser as News, Tools at 3:17 AM | 1 Comment »

August 17th, 2006

Virtual Amazon Shopping

Amazon’s Jeff Barr has an interesting post about shopping at the Life2Life store in the virtual world Second Life. The store blends the real and virtual by creatively building on the Amazon API and the Second Life API. In that virtual store you can search the Amazon catalog, discover items, add them to your cart, click the ‘Checkout’ button, and you’re taken straight to the regular Amazon checkout page.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Examples at 12:02 AM | 2 Comments »

August 16th, 2006

Facebook Launches API

In one of the year’s more interesting API announcements, the hugely successful social networking site Facebook launched their own API this week. Up to this point most social networking sites including MySpace have been notoriously walled gardens (back in February I reported on a home-grown Facebook API). For a high-level overview of this one, TechCrunch gives a good summary here. As for the API itself: it uses a REST-based protocol and is available for commercial and non-commercial use up 100,000 calls within a 24-hour window.

There is now a Facebook API entry in the database here. As well as Facebook Friend Mapper, the first Facebook mashup. A map of course.

Will it popular? You bet. Within 48 hours there were already 79 discussion topics kicked-off on their discussion board, a pending site www.facebookapplications.com, projects at Google Code, and IRC discussions on it in places like the “#facebook” chat room on freenode.

BTW, there’s been some discussion lately about the responsibilities of companies that rely heavily on open source in terms of “giving-back” to the community. See Tim O’Reilly’s notes on Open Source: Architecture or Goodwill? and some of the links from there for examples. It seems that Facebook is diving right-in on this one and if you check this page you’ll see they’ve contributed back to the phpshell and memcached open source projects.

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