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Web API Sites

January 31st, 2007

Proto Mashup Contest: An iPod a Day

One of the companies that had people talking at Mashup Camp earlier this month was Proto, an application for building “desktop mashups”. As they describe “Using our visual building environment, you can combine web services like Yahoo! Maps and Salesforce.com with desktop apps, like iTunes and Outlook. Build complete ‘composite apps’ in under an hour, and drop into the VBA IDE when you need to write a little code.” Certainly this is a good enterprise mashup story with its ability to pull together data from the desktop, behind the firewall and the types of APIs listed here.

This week the company announced a new mashup contest where they’re giving away 25 iPod Nanos, one each day for the best Proto-built mashup application.

This is now listed on our contests page.

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Posted by John Musser as Contests, Enterprise, Tools at 12:04 AM | No Comments »

January 30th, 2007

5 New APIs: From Chatrooms to Web Hosting

Want new APIs? Five new ones were just listed here at ProgrammableWeb in the past two days. Use them for making recommendations, hosting chat rooms, creating tutorials, managing web sites, or a set of services for getting reference data on anything from VAT rates to NFL team information.

Criteo: From their site “The Criteo predictive engine is a powerful tool that analyses consumer behavior and provide them with relevant product recommendations. The Criteo Quick-Start API allows you to start with recommendations on your web-site with a simplified but complete set of functions. Criteo technology is based on collaborative predictive analysis.”

Read the rest of “5 New APIs: From Chatrooms to Web Hosting” »

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:23 AM | 1 Comment »

January 29th, 2007

Best New Mashups: NYC, Parties and Pics

Continuing from Thursday’s best-of mashup roundup, here are a few new mashups worth highlighting. There’s more to these than just pushpins on a map.

GypsyMaps NYC: Yesterday’s Mashup of the Day, this very well designed and executed mashup gives you New York Subway and Bus Maps with interactive point to point directions.

Flickr Group Trackr: Allows you to track and plot the growth of public Flickr groups. Graphs displaying growth of a group are updated daily and can be linked from external websites. Group statistics can be syndicated via RSS/ATOM feeds and exported as CVS and TSV.

MyPunchbowl: MyPunchbowl.com is a new website that provides an easy and personal way to plan an at-home party. It includes a useful mashup of party stores searchable by zip code, displayed on a Google map. Also more in this TechCrunch review.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups at 12:59 AM | 2 Comments »

January 26th, 2007

Flickr Introduces Machine Tags

Flickr is one the most popular mashup platforms: as of today there are 159 Flickr mashups listed here. Now, Flickr made some very interesting enhancements to their service and API this week when they announced Machine Tags.

What are they and how do they relate to the API? From the announcement: Read the rest of “Flickr Introduces Machine Tags” »

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Posted by John Musser as Yahoo, photo at 1:17 PM | 2 Comments »

January 25th, 2007

Best New Mashups: Pics, EVDO, and Profanity

Do you want to search classifieds by photos rather than just text, see where there’s good EVDO wireless coverage, or win a game by showing your proficiency at swearing? If so, then these mashups might be of interest.

listpic: Listpic finds posts to Craigslist that contain pictures and allows one to easily browse through the posts by photos.

Read the rest of “Best New Mashups: Pics, EVDO, and Profanity” »

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups at 11:17 PM | 1 Comment »

January 24th, 2007

New APIs: Storage, Wikis and Photos

Time for a quick roundup of some of the more interesting APIs recently listed here. This includes a storage service (as noted here earlier this week, storage in cloud via an API can be a profitable utility service), a Wikipedia wrapper, a US government-supplied service, another photo service, and others.

Omnidrive API: The very useful “universal storage platform” now offers this REST-based API.
USGS Elevation API: Send a latitude and longitude to this US Geological Survey service and get back the elevation.
FUTEF Wikipedia API: A small independent service that wraps Wikipedia via an API. Returns data in JSON format.
Phanfare API: The Phanfare photo service offers this rich API for accessing their services.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 10:47 AM | No Comments »

January 23rd, 2007

More on the Mashup Economy

Recommended reading this week comes from Redmonk analyst Anne Zelenka in a piece for GigaOM that gives a very good overview on Making Money in the Mashup Economy. This is part of her Mashup Camp 3 coverage — earlier reports are here. A few business models covered include:

Elastic Computing: The primary exemplars here being Amazon’s S3 API and EC2 API with their pay-as-you-go virtualized infrastructure services. “Mashup developers could always buy and administer their own hardware, but the philosophy of mashups is based on putting together apps out of pieces other people provide. Elastic computing services make storage and processing.” Along these lines, Read/WriteWeb recently covered some Amazon success stories. Certainly storage in the cloud is likely to become a common API service with another good example coming from the Box.net API.
Aggregated Data Access: Traditional high-value data providers like Dunn & Bradstreet and Bloomberg making their data available via feeds and APIs (some are listed here as with the D&B Credit Check offered via API aggregator and service provider StrikeIron, a company also mentioned in the piece). Also mentioned in this category is none other than ProgrammableWeb, the “the favorite community website of mashup developers”.
Mashup Development Tools: Along the lines of the companies and tools we covered here last week Anne notes one her favorite demos came from ProgrammableWeb sponsor OpenKapow for turning any website into an RSS feed, component or API, which is a free service but highlights their commercial enterprise-grade tools. Also in her roundup are IBM’s QEDwiki, Proto, Coghead, Ning and DabbleDB.
The Mashups Themselves: Here the best-known models are advertising and affiliate revenue. In some of our research here using a sampling from our database of about 1500 mashups the most common monetization model was without question Google AdSense.

For more coverage of the business side of APIs and mashups see our 30+ past entries on “money” here.

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Posted by John Musser as Money at 12:15 AM | 2 Comments »

January 22nd, 2007

Best Mashup Camp Mashups

Last week’s Mashup Camp showcased some excellent mashups including the two first place winners. Along with those there were some other great contest entries, many of which have been added to the mashup listings here. Here are a few:

gigul8r: Gigul8r helps musicians get their gigs online, so they can share them on Web sites, MySpace, podcasts, and printable posters. Gigul8r takes the work out of listing something online by making tour listings as easy as typing in When and Where. Based on the Eventful API.

Gruvr: Google Maps plus MySpace gives you band tour maps with this handy mashup.

Booksearch: Useful mashup that lets you search through Amazon A9, Google Book Search, and MSN Live Search at once. See who returns the best results.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Events at 3:09 AM | No Comments »

January 19th, 2007

See the Mashup Camp Winners

Yesterday the Mashup Camp attendees reviewed over 15 entries in the mashup competition and placed their votes for the best mashup. And the two top prizes went to:

The Hype Machine: An experiment by Anthony Volodkin that keeps track of songs and discussion posted on the best blogs about music. First prize: a nice new laptop courtesy of Intel.

tourfilter: Use tourfilter to rack as many bands as you can think of. Listen to thousands of MP3 and RealAudio tracks by bands with upcoming shows. Browse recent music blog listings. Get updates via RSS, iCal and email.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Events, Examples at 5:10 AM | 2 Comments »

Mashup Camp 3 Roundup

Mashup Camp 3 at MIT in Boston wrapped-up yesterday. It was another well organized, well attended, very successful event organized by David Berlind and Doug Gold. The week began with two days of Mashup University. Lots of good, interesting discussions, some of which we’ve covered here: What Are Tools for Mashups?, and Making Money from Mashups. But there’s a lot of other good coverage of the event out there: