Monthly Archives

Web API Sites

February 28th, 2007

Widgets and Pipes Links

Just a quick post on some good recent links on widgets and Pipes. First off, with 11 widget APIs listed at ProgrammableWeb and thousands of widgets created to run on them, widgets are something you’ll be hearing more about here.

Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 1 and Part 2: Dion Hinchcliffe gives a good run-down of how the proliferation of widgets, badges and gadgets are making the web a do-it-yourself platform.
SOA for the masses: Widgets, pipes and teqlets: ZDNet’s Dan Farber takes a thoughtful look at the impact of widgets and powerful new mashup tools. “Just as more user friendly writing and video editing tools, as well as increasing bandwidth, have given regular people more of a voice and levers to push, making the Web more programmable–harnessing and mashing up any kind of data without heavy duty coding–will be another quantum leap for mere mortals.”

Read the rest of “Widgets and Pipes Links” »

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Tools, Widgets at 12:47 AM | 2 Comments »

February 27th, 2007

Mashup Congress, Win Money

Some of the most interesting mashup possibilities surround government and politics, so it’s great to see the Sunlight Foundation yesterday announced the Mashup Congress Contest:

The Sunlight Foundation is celebrating Sunshine Week with a $2,000 prize for the best “Web 2.0 Mashup” about Congress. The contest deadline is March 17.

Contest judges are digital technology pioneer Esther Dyson, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Entries will be judged on both creativity and how well they share information about Congress. New productions are encouraged, but any mashup created in the past six months is eligible.

Read the rest of “Mashup Congress, Win Money” »

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Contests, Gov at 12:57 AM | 3 Comments »

February 25th, 2007

Social SQL with FQL: the Facebook Query Language

SQL is going social with Facebook’s newly announced data access mechanism the Facebook Query Language. What is it? From their site:

Last week we released a whole new version of Platform. On the surface it may look similar to the old version, but under the hood it is a totally new implementation. And, starting today you can enjoy the benefits of that new implementation by getting direct access to a more powerful, flexible way of accessing Facebook data - a query language we call FQL…

FQL is a way to query the same Facebook data you can access through the other API functions, but with a SQL-style interface. In fact, many of the normal API calls are simple wrappers for FQL queries. All of the usual privacy checks are still applied. A typical query looks something like this:

SELECT name, pic FROM user WHERE uid=211031 OR uid=4801660

Read the rest of “Social SQL with FQL: the Facebook Query Language” »

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Social at 11:03 PM | 2 Comments »

February 23rd, 2007

Google Apps: Integrate and Extend

Looking beneath the covers of the collective buzz around yesterday’s launch of Google Apps for Your Domain Premium hides a new set of Google APIs that, as they describe, allow you to “integrate and extend”. How? With their new Provisioning and Single Sign-On APIs.

See our new ProgrammableWeb entries: Google Provisioning API and the Google Single Sign-On API.
Read the rest of “Google Apps: Integrate and Extend” »

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Google at 12:24 AM | 1 Comment »

February 22nd, 2007

Best New Mashups: Food, Tickets and Classifieds

Here’s a set of fun and sometimes useful mashups. Use them to help with: where to go to lunch today, how to get the cheapest event tickets, and visualizing the vast amounts of data you can get with the Google Base API.

Wheel of Food: The most fun way to pick a restaurant near you. Enter your zip, enter a cuisine, and let the Wheel of Food determine where to eat today. Data via Yahoo! Local Search. Another inspired mashup from Jim Bumgardner, aka Krazy Dad. Read more on his blog.

Read the rest of “Best New Mashups: Food, Tickets and Classifieds” »

Share This

Posted by John Musser as BestMashups at 12:06 AM | No Comments »

February 21st, 2007

Trulia Launches New API with Mashery

Yesterday, Trulia, the real estate search startup, and one of the oldest mashups on this site, just announced their new API. This REST-based API provides access to two primary types of data: local real estate price trends and real estate search behavior online. It should lead to some very interesting mashups.

This release is also notable as a showcase for API management provider Mashery who are providing Trulia with API infrastructure, rate limiting, developer community, and other related services (see our earlier coverage of Mashery here).

Some more notes of interest on this:

You can see our new Trulia API listing here.
There are now 3 APIs tagged “realestate”.

Read the rest of “Trulia Launches New API with Mashery” »

Share This

Posted by John Musser as APIs at 1:58 AM | 1 Comment »

February 19th, 2007

New APIs: Media Sharing, Q and A, and Politics

The latest APIs added to ProgrammableWeb once again cover quite a range: new web services for photo and media sharing, questions and answers, authorizing online payments, and getting details on your US government representatives.

Faces.com: Use the extensive APIs from Faces.com to manage media, do geo-searches, check profiles, manage blogs, post comments, and manage profiles. Both REST and SOAP APIs are provided.
Answerbag: They’re calling this the first social Q&A API. Access 300,000 answers to 100,000 questions. The service provides all of its core question and answer data through a set of read-only API Calls, and it also provides write API calls that allow the writing of content to its database.
Authorize.Net: Use these APIs when you need to authorize credit card transactions on your ecommerce web site. With SSL support of course.
Who is my Representative?: Give this API a US zip code and get back XML-formatted information on your representation in Congress.

There are now 382 APIs listed.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as APIs at 11:31 PM | No Comments »

February 18th, 2007

Best of 78 Real Estate Mashups

It’s hard to find an online real estate site today that does not in some way incorporate maps. And so it’s no surprise that another of the top ten tags at ProgrammableWeb is “realestate”, now with 78 mashups tagged realestate. Keep in mind that the first, and still one of the best all-time mashups, is Paul Rademacher’s HousingMaps that combines the Google Maps API and Craigslist.com listings.

One consideration is that just being a real estate mashup does not mean it’s only a re-hash of a listing database. Take Rentometer, a genuinely useful mashup that can help you determine if you are paying too much in rent. Enter an address, apartment size, and rent. It maps nearby units and shows a meter of your price versus min, max and average.

And then there’s the fact that it’s an international phenomenon:

Maiom Italy Real Estate: A sophisticated Italian real estate application using Google Maps with live completion geocoding, google earth integration, starrable posts, RSS feeds, lightboxed images, and YouTube videos.
NZFlats: NZFlats.co.nz uses the Zoomin API to Mashup rental New Zealand property listings on the Zoomin mapping system.
Vivirama: A housing listings website for all cities of the world. It uses Google Maps to facilitate locating the offers, and RapLeaf API to help to create the required trust for transactions to occur. It lets you search graphically by area and across cities.
Spyk Australian Property Search: A rich, dynamic mashup of Australian real estate websites onto the virtual earth map. Users can store favourites, and view full property details using lightboxes.
SeLoger: French real estate prices. Charts, maps, median prices. Time line of prices over time. Housing data from France.

Nor is it all Google Maps, many of the other mapping APIs get used:

NY vs SF Census Heat Map: Compare demographic information analyzing property values, population, education, income level and more with integrated Yahoo Local search points. Data Limited to NY and SF. Uses the new GeoIQ API.
AuctionCloud: A different way to shop the eBay listings for the most searched for products being auctioned. AuctionCloud shows popular keywords used by eBay users when searching listings. Real estate section uses the Zillow API for zestimates.
HomeThinking: Homethinking, built using the Yahoo! Maps API, monitors real estate transactions to know what each agent has done and also customer reviews about the job they did.

Lastly, just because it’s real estate, doesn’t mean it has to be boring. The ever inventive Jeff Marshal gives us the RealEstateFu mashup, a great mashup that “lets you watch the housing bubble deflate in SF and Silicon Valley.” Charts, map, median prices. Timeline of prices over time. Housing data from SF Gate.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Mapping at 3:38 PM | 4 Comments »

Thanks to Our Sponsors

We couldn’t keep making ProgrammableWeb the resource it is without the help of our sponsors and partners. As providers of powerful APIs and tools these companies are closely aligned with the mission of this site and we highly recommend you check them out.

OpenKapow: The online mashup builder community that lets you easily make mashups. Use their visual scripting environment to create intelligent software Robots that can make mashups from any site with or without an API.
Userplane: The premier provider of communication software for online communities. Userplane offers 5 hosted web apps in their suite: Webchat, Webmessenger, Webrecorder, Sitesearch, and Presence. A rich set of APIs underly the entire platform.
ClearForest SWS: The new ClearForest Semantic Web Services API gives you access to a set of very sophisticated natural language processing tools. This is a proven toolset based on ten years of helping companies get meaning from unstructured data. More at ClearForest.com.
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.
adaptiveblue: Creator of BlueOrganizer, a unique Firefox extension that helps “make your browser smarter” by unleashing information hidden in the pages of your favorite web sites and allows you to quickly do what you want to do.

If you are interested in sponsoring ProgrammableWeb please visit our /sponsor page for details.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Site News at 3:37 PM | No Comments »

February 16th, 2007

Coming Soon: Social Network APIs

Recommended reading is Olag Kharif’s brief report in this week’s BusinessWeek on “Social-Networking Sites Open Up”. It has the sub-head “Facebook, Friendster, and others are starting to let third-party developers build new features to attract more users - and profits”. The article predicts many of the bigger social network sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster will follow the lead of the Facebook API and make their networks available as web services.