December 31st, 2006

2006 Year End Mashup Stats

2006 was a busy year in the world of web APIs and mashups. Here’s a quick summary of the ProgrammableWeb metrics at the end of the year.

• 1,404 Mashups listed here. At the beginning of the year where there were 245 listed. Here’s the current summary pie chart distribution by top tags:

  

  As you can see, the top 10 tags are: mapping, search, photo, shopping, travel, sports, video, messaging, news, realestate.

• 352 APIs. Compared to 92 at the start of the year.



The top 10 APIs in terms of number of mashups listed: GoogleMaps, Flickr, Amazon E-Commerce, YouTube, YahooMaps, 411Sync, del.icio.us, eBay, VirtualEarth, Yahoo Search.

How will this compare to the 2007 year end stats?

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Posted by John Musser as Site News at 4:44 PM | 5 Comments »

December 28th, 2006

102 Travel Mashups

One of the most popular tags for classifying mashups on this site is “travel”. How popular? So far, 102 mashups at ProgrammableWeb have this tag. Most are mapping-related, often used to highlight locations for a specific destination like French Champagne houses, UK Bed and Breakfasts, NYC Broadway Shows or Hollywood celebrity hotels (and gossip):

Other travel mashups are more utilitarian including:

• Find Airport Parking: Find everything you need when rushing to the airport and need parking. Find out which airport parking facility is closest to you or to the airport, which is cheapest
• GMaps Flight Tracker: View incoming flights into 7 major US cities. Altitude, speed, heading and flight path are all interactively displayed on the map. Be air traffic control.

While yet other “travel” mashups are just different:

• Fatal Crash Data Maps: Search fatal crashes by zip code, driving directions, custom drawn polygons on Google Maps. Search results include crash details.
• Air Travel Emissions Calculator: A Google Maps mashup that allows you to calculate the per-passenger greenhouse gas emissions created by a commercial airline flight between any two airports.



• Random Day Out Generator: Pick where and the types of things you like to do and where. Watch it build your itinerary for the day.

See all 102 travel mashups here.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Examples, Mapping at 2:05 AM | 1 Comment »

December 27th, 2006

News APIs for Blogs and Wikis

As 2006 winds-down and holidays are in full swing it means there’s not as much happening on the new API front. But, something’s happening. A couple new ones worth mentioning have been added during the lull:

• FeedBlitz: FeedBlitz is a service that monitors blogs, RSS feeds and Web URLs to provide greater reach for feed publishers. This fall they introduced this good API for developers.
• PBwiki: PBwiki claim to be the world’s largest consumer wiki farm. This early stage API allows programmatic access to wikis on their farm.

See the site for details on these and all 352 APIs.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:25 AM | No Comments »

December 21st, 2006

New del.icio.us API

Quick pointer to Niall Kennedy’s post on del.icio.us API for URL top tags, bookmark count. It appears that there are enhancements to the del.icio.us API designed to help support a new web badge from Yahoo!. As Niall notes “The API is officially unreleased, may be shut down if not used in full Yahoo-constructed blog sidebar badge form, and may be subject to further terms of service.” See also Kevin Burton’s observations in the comments section as well as Dare’s observation that this is the sign of providers ironing-out when to provide APIs and when not to.

On a related note, see this good rant from Dave Winer on God Bless the Re-inventers and the discussion afterwards.

The del.icio.us API has been very popular with mashup developers and there are 60 del.icio.us mashups listed here.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, News, Yahoo at 12:15 AM | No Comments »

Goodbye Google SOAP API

There’s been quite a buzz in the blogosphere over the past two days since Brady Forrest over at the O’Reilly Radar blog pointed out that Google deprecated their SOAP search API (see also Philipp Lenssen). If you go to the SOAP Search API homepage you’ll see the message “As of December 5, 2006, we are no longer issuing new API keys for the SOAP Search API. Developers with existing SOAP Search API keys will not be affected.” Instead, Google is recommending that developers use their Ajax Search API (an example of which is shown below).

The ensuing reaction from developers and observers has been quite vocal as you can see at Techmeme. Some saying it’s the beginning of the end for open web data APIs, others say it’s good discipline, a retreat to Web 1.0, or perhaps not surprising. Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet looks at the impact and asks Will Microsoft stay its search API course?. Martin LaMonica over at CNET gives this good recap.

The Google Search API entry is one of the early entries here at ProgrammableWeb. It has now been updated to reflect this change in status.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Google, Issues, News at 12:07 AM | 5 Comments »

December 20th, 2006

Winning News Mashups

As noted yesterday, winning mashups have been announced for contests from both Rhapsody and our sponsor ClearForest. As with Rhapsody, the ClearForest team had good success in getting a very creative range of entries. Because the ClearForest API provides semantic textual analysis many of the mashups do interesting things by processing current news data.

• Optevi News Tracker: First place winner. News Tracker allows for a new form of news reading — entity based navigation. It uses the ClearForest API to facilitate navigation by person, place, organization, company and other key elements. News Tracker’s entity cloud gives an overview of the news and allows you to quickly drill down to items of interest.



• Hype List: Second place winner. An elegant interface combined with a simple focus on one thing. Who is hot today. Hype-list finds the people within entertainment, business and sports news and presents the hot names in an appealing and functionally simple interface.



• Newsmakers of the Day: Third place winner. Mashup of ClearForest and Google Calendar. It places an unobtrusive icon at the top of each day. Click icon for snapshot of people, companies, products and locations in the news. You can drill down to the original news article.

Other honorable mentions included:

• Six Degrees: Find the connection or six-degrees of separation between topics. Mashes RSS feeds with the ClearForest API. Offers REST and SOAP interfaces so you can build on top of it. All connections exposed through RDF.
• PowerRSS: Power RSS is an RSS aggregator, which enables you to classify content in the article. The Power RSS will skim through the article and pick out the relevant articles, by analysing your interest categories.
• Semantic Searcher: Speed reading for news. This site takes popular news feeds and extracts key terms. They are listed in order of popularity within the last 24 hours. The system uses Clear Forest SWS web service with related images via the Flickr API.

You can see all the ClearForest mashups here.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Contests, News at 12:15 AM | 2 Comments »

December 19th, 2006

Rhapsody and ClearForest Winners

As noted earlier this month a number of this fall’s mashup contests have reached their deadlines for entry submission. For two of them, the Rhapsody Web Services Contest and ProgrammableWeb sponsor ClearForest’s Semantic Web Services (SWS) Mashup competition 2006, the mashup entries have now been reviewed and the winners announced. Here’s Rhapsody’s announcement and here’s ClearForest’s press release. Both contests did an excellent job of getting developers to try the APIs, generated a variety of innovative ideas, and lead to some very interesting mashups.

For Rhapsody, where I was one of the judges, there was diversity in how and where the mashups run. Take for example, the winning entry, Rhapsody Remote (which btw, won developer Aaron Murrell a trip for two anywhere in the world to see his favorite band). Aaron created a PC client and Pocket PC interface that turn the Pocket PC device into a remote control for Rhapsody. Here’s his explanation and you can see his mashup below:

Like many other subscribers, I love to listen to Rhapsody streams via an old computer connected to my home stereo. What I’ve been wanting for a long time is a way to avoid the hassle of getting up and messing with that computer to queue up a new set of songs, browse, and search through the Rhapsody catalog. Various hardware solutions and have approached this problem in many ways but often left core features lacking like searching music data outside of the music saved in your library, or playlists. Rhapsody Remote uses Rhapsody Web Services to allow you to search through the Rhapsody catalog, queue up songs and control the Rhapsody client software all from a WiFi connected handheld.

Other winners include:

• Pamela Fox and Ben Lisbakken’s Music Mash, a Google Gadget that let’s you search Rhapsody’s catalog of millions of songs by their lyrics. You can also use it to find YouTube and Yahoo videos.



• Derek Atlansky’s Rhapsody Scrobbler that monitors Rhapsody for tracks played and automatically submits them to the user’s Last.fm profile.
• Nir Tzemah’s Rhapsody Top Feeds gadget that polls top songs and album feeds from Rhapsody RSS to let users stay on top of news about their favorite artists.

There are now 11 Rhapsody mashups listed here with more coming soon.

For the ClearForest contest we’re adding more entries today and tomorrow’s blog post will give you the details on the winners from that one.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, BestMashups, Contests, News at 12:52 AM | 1 Comment »

December 18th, 2006

350 APIs

Today the the 350th API was added at ProgrammableWeb. Lots of variety. Last week’s API review Pings, Wikis, and Twitters highlighted some newer companies with APIs, but here is another set, this time with some pretty familiar names:

• WebEx: The main player in on-demand collaboration software now offers three sets of APIs into their services with more announcements expected from them early next year.
• Google Code Search: Lets you tap into the power of Google’s new code search service via this GData-based API.
• Dun and Bradstreet Credit Check API: Perform low risk credit assessments and pre-screen prospects with their well-known core credit evaluation data. Information includes company identification, payment activity summary, public filings indicators, and D and B Rating.

See all 350 here.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:51 AM | 1 Comment »

December 15th, 2006

Covering Mashup Growth

Quick pointer to a couple of interesting, thoughtful posts on mashups this week:

• The growth of mashups continued throughout 2006: Dion Hinchcliffe does a good thorough review of the state of mashups today: lots of examples but lots of unanswered questions and models yet to be defined or proven (the “value proposition”), potential support issues, monetization questions, lack of tools as an obstacle to broader growth (and he draws good analogy to how tools and libraries helped spread Ajax like wildfire) but the promising advent of new tools like JackBe Presto and the recently profiled Kapow.



• StumbleVideo - a sign of things to come: Where Microsoft’s Alex Barnett looks at the video market, the just-launched StumbleVideo and role APIs can play in service strategy given that StumbleVideo relies on web services like the YouTube API. He and I emailed earlier about this and I gave him a stat culled from the ProgrammableWeb database that I just haven’t had a chance to write about: there were 21 mashups tagged “video” in the first half of the year, and 52 so far in the second half. So, over twice as many per month using those APIs, essentially mirroring the rise in popularity of video online.

See all 75 mashups tagged video here.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples, Press, Video at 12:27 AM | 1 Comment »

December 14th, 2006

New APIs: Pings, Wikis, and Twitters

While the pace of new APIs over the past three weeks wasn’t up the nearly one per day rate the month before, there have been 26 added over the past 30 days. Included are APIs from big established providers and small startups. Below are a few of note with more coverage coming in the next few days:

• Pingdom: Besides getting you urgent alerts if your website is down or otherwise at risk, the Pingdom web site monitoring service offers this API that lets you dig directly into that monitoring data for detailed status and analysis.
• WikiMatrix: If you are comparing wiki software you can use this API to pull data from their DB of wiki product information
• Twitter: An API for “the global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?”

Total APIs listed here now at 348.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, News at 12:32 AM | 1 Comment »