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Web API Sites

October 31st, 2006

Best New Mashups: Games and Trend Mapping

Continuing from Friday’s best-of post, here are some more notable new mashups. These weekly summaries are now getting longer– in two parts — because of the increased volume of mashups. Even between these two posts they only cover about one out of every five entries this past week.

Flickr TagMan: Simple hangman game for Flickr tags. Guess all the letters of a tag and see 4 photos tagged with that word.

Live Search OPML Generator: Helps users find RSS feeds and autogenerates OPML files. Uses Windows Live Search API. Facilitates selecting feeds from root weblogs or comments feeds per user selection with support for international markets.
Neighboroo: Explore national trends from the serious to the interesting, all overlaid on a Google Map. Includes crime, lifestyle, and income.

Visual Search Mapr: Visual Search Maps powered by Google, TRYNT and Yahoo.
Rentalio: Designed to help you find for vacation rentals. The first mashup on this site to use the Vast API.

Here is the full list of 1143 mashups.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 12:08 AM | 1 Comment »

October 29th, 2006

Thanks to our Sponsors

Just a short note of big thanks to our Programmable Web sponsors:

Clickatell: The world’s leading provider of large scale SMS messaging services offers reliable coverage to 578 networks in 192 countries worldwide. Use their APIs and join over 22,000 satisfied customers including FedEx, Motorola, Fujitsu, and Heinekin.

ClearForest: The new ClearForest Semantic Web Services API gives you access to their sophisticated natural language processing tools. This is a proven toolset based on ten years of helping companies get meaning from unstructured data. You can win up to $2,000 by creating the winning entry in their SWS Mashup Contest.

adaptiveblue: Creator of BlueOrganizer — a very useful Firefox extension that helps “make your browser smarter” (by among other things making use of APIs listed here). At last month’s DEMOfall event BlueOrganizer received great reviews.

BT: Our inaugural sponsor. This summer BT created an innovative developer recruiting campaign using APIs and mashups as the means to find creative, talented programmers. And as a matter of fact, one of the entries, Locale, the Random Day Out Generator, was just listed here today.

As API providers, consumers, and supporters, these companies are closely aligned with the mission of this site and thanks to their support we’re able to grow Programmable Web along with the mashup ecosystem (starting with the number of mashups published here each day — which have doubled over the past few weeks).

If you are interested in sponsoring ProgrammableWeb you can get details on our our sponsorship page.

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Posted by John Musser as General, Site News at 10:21 PM | No Comments »

October 28th, 2006

Censored Data via Amnesty International API

There is more censorship occurring online than you may be aware of. But this is an issue that Amnesty International is hoping to shed more light on. How? Through an API of all things. It’s the latest part of their irrepressible.info campaign launched earlier this year. The API provides access to their database of content and sites that have been censored by both governments and corporations (including Google and Microsoft by virtue of their search engine policies). Their initial campaign relied on JavaScript banners and part of what they hope to gain via the new API is for developers to create ways to integrate this content into major JavaScript-free sites like MySpace.

See here for the new Programmable Web entry.

They are working in cooperation with the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), whose mission is to investigate and challenge state filtration and surveillance practices. Among other things they have put together this nice interactive Flash map of global online censorship.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Gov, Issues, News at 6:13 PM | 1 Comment »

Zillow API Gets FTCillowed

This past week the innovative real estate valuation site Zillow released their much anticipated API (see here for Programmable Web entry). A nicely designed API with two sets of functionality: home valuation and property details. On the valuations side, besides getting their trademarked Zestimate home valuations you can also get home valuation charts, market trend charts and comparable sales. Property details include historical price records, tax assessments and number of bedrooms and baths. The API gives you access to a big database containing 68 million property records.

Below is a screenshot of Auction Cloud, a mashup that among creates tag clouds from eBay data and within their real estate section integrates Zillow graphs:

But no sooner did the API come-out than the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) filed a consumer protection complaint (PDF) to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that “Internet financial services and real estate provider Zillow.com is misleading consumers, real estate professionals and financial service providers in on-line home valuations.” They argue that Zillow accuracy is within 10 percent of the actual value less than one third of the time. For a very good report on the story see “Zillow gets FTCillowed” from Blanche Evans over at Realty Times.

Because the API is used by affiliates and mashup developers it raises questions about trickle-down liability. NCRC asks the FTC to “act in the public interest and permanently enjoin and restrain Zillow.com from violating the FTC ACt in connection with offering its valuation services, and find Zillow jointly and severally liable for redress to all borrowers who were injured as a result of the company’s violations of the FTC Act; and ensure that all affiliate sites, including Yahoo Real Estate and the Yahoo search engine, incorporate appropriate injunctive and consumer protection settlement terms as agreed upon by the parties.”

And on Friday, Zillow’s president Lloyd Frink posted this response in their blog. Stay tuned.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Issues, Law, News at 2:40 PM | 1 Comment »

October 27th, 2006

Best New Mashups: Visual Shopping and Geo IP

Another busy week of new mashups, with an average of more than five per day, with no signs of letting-up. The API of choice continues to be, surprise-surprise, Google Maps. A few of the other APIs used include Trynt API, the Amazon E-Commerce API and the Vast API.

Flowser: is graphical Amazon Browser. Type in a product name and see a visualization of the search results by product type.

AmzWish: Uses the Amazon API and tools from RSSBus to create a wishlist widget. With this widget, not only will people buy you things, but you can get paid when they do.
Geo IP Tool: See geographical information about any Internet IP address or domain in the world.

Wikiloc: A collaborative mashup that helps people discover and share GPS tracks and waypoints. Over 600 tracks uploaded now.
Rentalio: Designed to help you find for vacation rentals. The first mashup on this site to use the Vast API.

Here is the full list of 1,122 mashups.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »

October 26th, 2006

API Innovation and Mashup Networks

Last year in this post I mentioned some research being done by Bala Iyer and Venkat Venkatraman at Boston University — now at Babson College — where they have been investigating ecosystems and multi-sided markets. A particular focus has become what is happening with the major online platform vendors and the mashup space. Last fall we setup a system whereby Bala could dynamically pull a subset of data from the Programmable Web database in order to run some numbers for his research.

Bala continues this research and the other day I took at look at his most recent graphs. Quite a bit more complex than the ones from last December. He has posted a whole series over the past year. In them, color is used to differentiate players (ex: Google is the dark blue), link thickness represents number of mashups made between two APIs, and size of circles represent number of mashups each.

It provides an interesting view into the mashup space and is a good alternate perspective to Programmable Web’s mashup matrix which of course uses a grid representation rather than graph. Both are useful but in different ways.

More of Bala and Venkat’s research can be found at their site Software Ecosystems.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples, Site News at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »

October 25th, 2006

Earth Sandwiches

Years ago most schoolchildren in the US “knew” that if you dig a hole straight down through the earth you end-up in China. But of course that’s not true, no matter where you are in the US. From nearly anywhere in the contiguous 48 states you end-up in the Indian Ocean. How can you see this? Using mashups built on the Google Maps API of course.

And not only is there one mashup that lets you interactively find the opposite point of any place on the earth , there are now three. Each has a slightly different take.

The first and most original implementation was Dig to the Other Side, created last year by Brazilian grad student Luis Felipe Cipriani. Click on the map, it gives you marker, click “Dig Here”, and you get a new marker on the opposite side of the world.

Then, there’s If I dig straight down, a more recent derivative variation. This model uses two maps, one above the other. Drag one and the other moves with it.
And last but not least, there’s the Ze Frank version created as part of his fun If the Earth were a Sandwich project earlier this year. He challenged his audience to place a piece of bread on the ground, have someone else place one on the opposite side of the Earth, and document it. For more background see this NPR story from Robert Krulwich, or, to here for the Ze Frank video. This one uses a side-by-side layout.

There are currently 29 mashups on ProgrammableWeb tagged with ’science’, click here to see the them all.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples, Mapping, PopularAllTime, fun at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »

October 24th, 2006

Enterprise Mashups via Google, BEA

According to this recent CNET report, “Google, BEA in enterprise portal mashup talks”, the two companies are in partnership talks on a new initiative to deliver tools for enterprise developers. The tools would allow creation of composite, mashup-style applications using BEA’s WebLogic Portal along with Google APIs like their popular maps API. The key piece for BEA is their not-yet-released “Adrenaline” technology that integrates sites outside the portal framework but still manages them within the portal context.

Regardless of how this one works-out, these sorts of deals are another step along the enterprise path as open Internet mashup techniques begin making their way behind the firewall. Expect to see a lot more of this from established enterprise tool vendors in the not too distant future.

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

October 23rd, 2006

300 APIs

The 8 new APIs listed here over the past 7 days brings the overall total up to 300 APIs in the directory (and mashups are at an even 1100). The average for the past month has been close to one API per day. More coming soon. Here’s a rundown of some of the latest:

Revver: The video sharing site that allows users to share in the revenue, now has a full API.
Windows Live Contacts Control: A pluggable client-side component with a JavaScript interface. Allows dynamic integration of user’s Live Contacts data.
Newscloud: An API into this open community for sharing and discussing the news. NewsCloud readers submit stories and videos from around the Web to read, vote on and discuss.

Besides viewing APIs by name, they are also viewable by date, category, and number of mashups listed. And as always, to see the APIs as soon as they are listed, as well as the ones not mentioned here in the blog, you can subscribe to the API feed.

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Posted by John Musser as News at 12:35 AM | 3 Comments »

October 20th, 2006

New Mashups: War Games and Halloween

Time for a review of some of the more interesting new mashup arrivals. Over 25 new mashups have been added in the past week alone. Subject matter includes games, sports, news, music, shopping, pets and others. Click here for the full list by date.

Endgame : World War: Claims to be the first massively multiplayer online (MMO) strategy game on Google Maps. Take over the world in this real time Risk-like game.

Cycling in California: Nice Google Maps mashup showing a list of road bike events in CA. Map popups show ride profile graph and current weather.
HalloweenMashup.com: Mashup of Local Halloween Events. Google Maps, Yahoo News, Yahoo Local, Flickr, and Upcoming. Uses the HostIP API to auto-recognize where you’re visiting from.
I Love Music Video: Music video viewer for Last.fm users. The music video can be seen from the chart of Last.fm very easily. Videos from YouTube.