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Monthly Archives
September 29th, 2006
More APIs: Fraud, Dots, and Stocks
Continuing on from yesterday’s post about new APIs, here are a few more of note added to ProgrammableWeb over the past two weeks (FYI, all the APIs can be sorted by date):
- FraudLabs Credit Card Fraud Detection API: Credit card verification services via an API.
- Bluedot API: The Seattle-based startup focused on community-based content sharing has an API.
- StrikeIron Stock Quotes Basic: Provides real–time quote and book information for securities traded on the INET ECN (formed by the merger of Island and Instinet). Most securities from NASDAQ, NYSE, and AMEX are traded on INET.
You can get automatically notified of all additions via this RSS feed of new APIs.
Posted by John Musser as APIs, BestMashups at 12:02 AM | No Comments »
September 28th, 2006
Latest APIs: Spam, Invoices and Ads
New APIs continue to arrive at a rate of 1 every 2 days here in the ProgrammableWeb API listings. Now up to a total of 281. Here’s a rundown of some of the newer entries over the past two weeks.
- Akismet API: Automatic Kismet, or Akismet, is a collaborative effort to track and prevent blog comment and trackback spam. They offer a hosted service, an API and also this interesting Spam Zeitgeist stats page with 218,684,318 spams caught so far and 93% of all comments they see are spam.
- Freshbooks API: Nice online invoicing and time tracking service with a web services API. Formerly named 2ndSite, headquartered in Toronto.
- Microsoft adCenter API: While this new service has an API it is currently only offered to a limited number of partners. Some details are available via the links from the profile page here.
- Commission Junction API: “CJ”, the well-established online advertising company (est. 1999) with one of the largest affiliate networks, now offers an API. For more see their recent press release.
Posted by John Musser as APIs, News at 12:20 AM | 1 Comment »
September 27th, 2006
30 Games Mashups
There are now 30 games-related mashups on ProgrammableWeb. Some are of course better than others. The most common APIs used are Google Maps and Flickr, although there’s an Amazon one thrown-in as well. Here’s a rundown of some of them:
- FlickrSudoku: Mashup of a popular online sudoku player and Flickr. Sudoku player courtesy sudoku.com.au.
- Fastr: A fun little Flickr game in which you view a set of ten images and try to guess the common tag. Time based scoring.
- Google Maps Quiz: Challenging map game. Match the close-up satellite image with its location on the world map
- ScoreSum: Tests how good you are at guessing peoples Hot-or-Not ratings, with an added twist. Somewhat similar is the Guess Who is Hotter game. As it says.
- Find the Landmark: Test your knowledge of US landmarks with interactive, timer-based Google Maps game.
- flicktionary: Test your guessing skills and flickr picture choosing skills in this fun twist on pictionary. Beware — some people tag photos quite liberally.
- Relate-a-zon: 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.
Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »
September 26th, 2006
Books for Amazon Mashups
Continuing the series on books for mashup developers — last week Flickr Mashup Books — here is a quick summary of books that can help you build mashups with the various Amazon APIs.
Note that the Amazon APIs are quite popular with 94 Amazon e-commerce API mashups listed at ProgrammableWeb. And you can use the Other Amazon APIs link on the left navigation of that page to see the 10 other Amazon APIs.
- The Web Developer’s Guide To Amazon E-Commerce Service: Developing Web Applications Using Amazon Web Services And PHP: by Jason Levitt. Published in May 2005 with good coverage of their core e-commerce API with code focused on using PHP 4 and 5.
- Professional Web APIs with PHP: eBay, Google, Paypal, Amazon, FedEx plus Web Feeds: by Paul Reinheimer. Just published this summer it covers Amazon plus a variety of other APIs (as you can tell from the long title). Has a good practical feel and the inclusion of web feed programming is key since that’s such a central piece of so many mashups. Being new it covers the latest versions of the APIs, which isn’t true for some of the other titles (see below).
- Amazon.com Mashups (Wrox): Due in January from experienced mashup developer Francis Shanahan, creator of Zuggest and the cool Zollage. Looks like it will most of the key elements of Amazon’s ecommerce API and their S3 API and combining those with other web services out there.
- There are a couple of other Amazon API-related books but are older and do not use examples from the latest API version: Mining Amazon Web Services: Building Applications with the Amazon API by John Paul Mueller, Real World Web Services by Will Iverson, Amazon Hacks by Paul Bausch as part of the good O’Reilly Hacks series.
Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Books, General, HowTo at 12:05 AM | No Comments »
September 25th, 2006
Rhapsody Programmable Jukebox
Over the past couple weeks the folks at RealNetworks’ Rhapsody have made some product announcements which have an API component, but that API piece hasn’t received a lot of press yet. Most of the initial buzz has been about the new devices like the upcoming SanDisk Sansa and the Sonos 2 home stereo device (with this positive review from Walt Mossberg). For Real, this is all part of their new Rhapsody DNA initiative — a combination of technology platform, DRM, partnerships and marketing. Here’s the Sonos setup:
The new APIs come into play because these devices integrate with it directly, no computer needed. So it becomes a device-to-web-API model. As they note in their blog “Now that we’ve built this API, Rhapsody can be easily extended to other embedded audio systems and solutions without involving a PC at all. The web service API is the cornerstone of DNA.” For example, the Sonos device can “browse, search and stream” the 2.5 million track Rhapsody catalog using this new SOAP-based API. The API can be used from other network devices, as is done with Sonos desktop client software. See Rhapsody Web Services blog posts here and here for more.
Also, see our Rhapsody API entry here for details on their existing services.
There are a not a lot of details about the new APIs available yet, but Real looks quite serious about creating a programmable jukebox in the cloud.
Posted by John Musser as APIs, Hardware, News at 6:30 PM | No Comments »
NYC in the Movies Mashup
This fall the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting will celebrate its 40th anniversary with the publication of a book, Scenes From The City, and a series cultural events across the city. But in addition they have created an excellent web mashup: Scenes from the City Interactive Map. It’s a Yahoo! Maps mashup that makes good use of Yahoo’s Flash integration. Find the locations of hundreds of iconic films and television shows: The Godfather, The French Connection, Saturday Night Fever, The Warriors, Bonfire of the Vanities, North by Northwest, and The Lost Weekend.
It does a lot of things well including providing multiple ways to browse and search as well as map markers that pop-up to show small and large images as well as film details. You can search by director (including Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, Terry Gilliam and others), time period the film was made, neighborhood, or scene type (chases, rooftops, subway, landmarks, etc). It even integrates with IMDB, a nice touch.
Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples, Mapping, Media, Yahoo at 12:11 AM | 1 Comment »
September 21st, 2006
1001 Mashups
Today the number of mashups on ProgrammableWeb hit the 1,001 milestone. The overall distribution in terms of topic (tags) of course has maps with the lion’s share at 46%, then next in line are photo (9%), search (9%), shopping (7%), sports (5%), travel (4%), messaging (4%) and news (4%). Here’s today’s summary pie chart:
Beyond the most common topics you can see the subject matter varies widely — with lots of mashups categorized under tags like: dating, religion, animals, books, environment, and television. Keep in mind that this is a sample of the mashup universe, a space with tens or hundreds of thousands of mashups depending on what you choose to include.
And feeding the growth of mashups is the growth of APIs, now with 275 listed here.
Not surprisingly the latest is a map mashup, this time the Moviemappr. It’s a mashup that combines filming location data — what movies were filmed where — with product data from the Amazon API. Good premise although the UI, as with many maps mashups, leaves a bit to be desired. Also today is the mashup If I Dig Straight Down that uses a pair of Google Maps to show where the opposite side of the earth is from a given point. Somewhat derivative of the more original earlier Dig to the Other Side.
Posted by John Musser as Site News at 12:59 AM | 4 Comments »
September 20th, 2006
Flickr Mashup Books
Want to learn how to code your own mashups? Try reading a book. There’s a growing library of books available now that are either fully or partially dedicated to programming mashups. I’ll start a series of posts on these books starting with a few for the Flickr API:
- Building Flickr Applications with PHP: by Rob Kunkle and Andrew Morton for Apress. A new title just published two months ago. FYI, Andrew created Phlickr the handy PHP wrapper for Flickr’s API, which they make use of in the book.
- Flickr Hacks: Tips & Tools for Sharing Photos Online: another good one from the O’Reilly’s Hacks series, this one by Paul Bausch and Jim Bumgardner with a forward from Flickr founder Caterina Fake. The bulk of the book is on Flickr in general but the last two chapters dig into the API and coding Flickr mashups. Jim has created lots of very creative, very popular Flickr mashups including Coverpop and Color Fields Colr Pickr.
- Flickr Mashups: by David M. Wilkinson for Wrox. Not yet published, due in January but looks interesting.
Posted by John Musser as Books, HowTo, News, Yahoo, photo at 12:02 AM | 4 Comments »
September 19th, 2006
Mashup Contests and the diGGGadget
Continuing from yesterday’s note on mashup contest news, there are more contest happenings: Google recently announced the winners for their desktop gadgets contest for mashups built using their Google Desktop API. Lots of entries there as well. Winner is the handy diGGGadget that brings Digg directly on your desktop: “Browse all the topics and categories. Share news with friends or watch your digg news in a slideshow which is personalized news based on your favorite topics”.
And for later in November there are two Voice over IP (VoIP) contests:
- AOL AIM Phoneline Developers’ Challenge: Build something creative with the new AIM Phoneline API. Their site suggests one possibility: Integrate the MapQuest API [also from AOL] with AIM Phoneline and enable users to locate a nearby delivery restaurant and then click-to-call to place an order.
- Global IP Sound’s VoiceEngine VIP (Very Innovative Product) Application Contest 2006: Here’s another chance to win prizes for building a VoIP application, in this case using their VoiceEngine Lite API to a game, a peer-to-peer or other application.
Posted by John Musser as APIs, Contests, Examples, Widgets at 12:05 AM | No Comments »
September 18th, 2006
Latest Mashup Contest News
UK-based Talis who have announced the winners in their Mashuping Up the Library Competition 2006. The contest was intended to “openly encourage innovation in the display, use, and reuse of data from and about libraries.” They had 18 entries, all of which are listed over in their forum (and will get listed here at ProgrammableWeb). First prize of £1,000 went to John Blyberg of Ann Arbor District Library in Ann Arbor, MI for his entry Go-Go-Google-Gadget makes library data easily available through a Google gadget. Note that Talis has announced they will be re-opening the contest for another round.
That contest is over but keep in mind there are other developer contests underway at the moment with time remaining to enter. The next two to close, both ending in October, are:
- BT Exact Mashup Competition 2006: BT, a ProgrammableWeb sponsor, is hosting this open mashup contest with no constraints on which APIs can be used. A winning mashup here might lead to £2,500 and a very interesting job at BT. For more on the contest see this earlier post.
- Rhapsody Web Services Contest: Use the Rhapsody API in order to win a road trip anywhere in the world to see your favorite band (I am one of the judges on this contest). Some first-round winners have been announced like this one now listed here: Pitchforkmedia Rhapsody Mashup. Other details on their site or this post here.
The easiest way to keep-up with mashup contests is via the /contests page here.
Posted by John Musser as Contests, Examples at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »
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