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April 30th, 2007

Platforms at Microsoft Mix 07

Microsoft Chief Architect Ray Ozzie kicked-off their Mix 07 developer’s event today by highlighting their “software plus services” platform strategy that aims to blend online and offline worlds. And although he alluded to Live APIs, much of the keynote was focused on Silverlight, their cross-browser plugin competitor to Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Expression, the suite of tools for web designers that will compete with Adobe’s Creative Suite. Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie also covered their Dynamic Language Runtime, something Jon Udell wrote about today. For more on Mix see Dan Farber, Richard MacManus, and Ryan Stewart. The keynote session ended with a lively interview of Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie by TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington.

Closer to home on the platform front: Microsoft announced simplified terms of service for Windows Live Services as well as higher levels of free access. On the pricing side there are no fees for sites with fewer than one million unique users (UU), then above that you can choose either $0.25 per UU per year or ad revenue sharing with Microsoft. The services covered under these terms include Contacts, Photos, and Silverlight Streaming, Search, Virtual Earth, and Windows Live ID. Exceptions include: search is free up to 705K queries/month, Virtual Earth free up to 3 million map tiles/month, and Silverlight Streaming free up to 4GB storage and unlimited outbound streaming, and no limit on the number of users that can view those streams.

More on the news, and in particular, new APIs, from Mix coming shortly.

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Posted by John Musser as Events, Microsoft at 8:29 PM | 2 Comments »

Virtual Earth API v5 Release

Given that this week Microsoft is hosting their Mix 07 event in Las Vegas there’s sure to be lots of Microsoft API and mashup related product news. One early bit of news came Friday with the release of V5 of the Virtual Earth API. Microsoft has invested a good deal of effort in this API and lately there have been lots of VE mashups added here at ProgrammableWeb: about 25 percent of the new mashups added the past two weeks use Virtual Earth. See all 80 in our listings here, including the one below, Reuters AlertNet, a map that displays crisis hotspots and retrieves the latest news from Reuters.

What did the team from Redmond focus on for this release? From their blog: “Of all of the requests we’ve seen and heard, the one theme that kept coming back was more options for customization. So that’s what we focused on.” The primary new features include a VEShape class that incorporates pushpins, polylines and polygons; shape layers that allow shapes to be viewed and accessed as groups; extensive mouse and keyboard event support; and, not to be underestimated, is a 75 percent reduction in the size of map control codebase (from 500K to 130K).

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Posted by John Musser as Mapping, Microsoft at 12:05 AM | No Comments »

April 27th, 2007

Mashups and Citizen Watchdogs

Can web mashups keep politicians on their toes? That’s the question raised by a story in yesterday’s Wired entitled “Web Mashups Turn Citizens Into Washington’s Newest Watchdogs”. In particular, the story profiles: MapLight.org, a nonpartisan website offering legislative data; the widely debated and bitterly fought California SB217 which would have banned clear-cutting in ancient forests; and this MapLight report showing that the logging industry gave twice the money to politicians as environmental groups did.

This is interesting follow-up to our post yesterday highlighting the new FedSpending.org API, which is now one of 9 APIs tagged “government”. As more of these types of APIs come online and more developers and organizations become aware of how to use them, there will certainly be many more enlightening mashups to come (or, as the Wired story notes, “Just in time for the 2008 presidential primaries”).

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Posted by John Musser as Gov, Nonprofit at 12:05 AM | 3 Comments »

April 26th, 2007

New APIs: US Federal Spending, Videos, Email

Three new APIs were listed on the site today: one helps you see where $14 trillion in your US taxes go, another gives you search access to 7 million hours of videos, and the third can help you manage and integrate email marketing campaigns.

FedSpending.org: A tool for the public and journalists to find out about US government spending. “The data is largely from two sources: the Federal Procurement Data System, which contains information about federal contracts; and the Federal Assistance Award Data System, which contains information about federal financial assistance such as grants, loans, insurance, and direct subsidies like Social Security.” This service was built with support from the Sunlight Foundation who are helping agencies and non-profits use APIs to increase transparency and accountability in government.
Blinkx API: The Blinkx service “uses automatic spiders that crawl the Web, and through partnerships with 200 leading content and media companies, blinkx has indexed over 7 million hours of video content and made it fully searchable using speech-to-text transcription and visual analysis.” Note that the API documentation is only available after registration.
VerticalResponse API: Their new API “allows you to easily integrate e-mail marketing functionality into your current website or software project. By integrating our e-mail service into your current workflow, you can leverage our robust list management, campaign creation/launching, and response management (e.g. bounce/unsubscribe) features.”

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:20 AM | 1 Comment »

April 25th, 2007

Best New Mashups: Tunes, Ferries and Flares

What’s new in mashups listed at ProgrammableWeb? Lately it’s been more about non-maps mashups and a broadening of the APIs being used. You can see happening in the highlights below:

FoxyTunes Planet: Universal personalized music mashup integrating many music resources into one convenient place, then making them available through the FoxyTunes browser extension, which supports more than 30 media players and music services. Combines at least 8 APIs listed here. For more, see VC Fred Wilson’s post about FoxyTunes Planet earlier this week.

BC Ferries: Interesting use of realtime GPS location data and the Virtual Earth API to display the current locations of all ferryboats in the British Columbia fleet. Click on the thumbnail map of a specific route to view a larger map with current ship status.

Recently Last.fm Activity Flare: Good mashup of the Feedburner FeedFlare API and the Last.fm API to show the last song listened to by the blog owner on Last.fm along with a user profile link. See the “Was Recently Listening to” link in the image.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups at 12:34 AM | 4 Comments »

April 24th, 2007

New APIs: More Twitter, More Enterprise

Besides last week’s big API news of the Google AJAX Feeds API and then the Digg API, other notable APIs have been recently added to our API directory including:

Twittervision: The folks behind the very popular Twittervision mashup that maps twitterers, now has its own API: “We wanted to publish easy ways for people to work with the location-based information available through Twittervision and Twittermap.” The straightforward API has methods for getting the current location and status of a user as well as the ability to update your current location. Note that this is another example of an “API stack”, that is, an API on an API, a topic we’ll cover more in a later post.
NetDocuments: This established SaaS vendor of document management and collaboration services offers their own SOAP-based API for enterprise application integration.

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

April 23rd, 2007

Open APIs Talk at Web 2.0 Expo

At last week’s Web 2.0 Expo I gave a talk entitled “Open APIs: Big Picture and Best Practices”. It was well received and since so many folks have asked for the slides I’ve published them here as a PDF (1.9MB). InfoWorld reporter Jason Snyder was there and if you read his good summary you can pick-up some other details that expand what you see in the slides.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Events at 9:05 AM | 2 Comments »

April 20th, 2007

Digg API Released, Contest Launched

Digg’s Kevin Rose has just announced on their blog the much anticipated Digg API is now available. “We intend to make most of the data on Digg.com available through the API. Currently, you can use the API to request very specific information about news stories and videos submitted to Digg, digging activity, comments, and users. The API accepts REST requests and offers several response types: XML, JSON, Javascript, and serialized PHP.”

We now have a Digg API profile in our ProgrammableWeb directory.

It’s a good looking API. One of the interesting API design decisions they’ve made is that although they require an application key for all requests, as they note here: “The value of the appkey argument is up to you, within the constraints described below. Digg does not issue or authenticate appkeys at this time. It is used only for statistical purposes…The value of the appkey argument must be a valid URI (see IETF RFC 2396) that identifies the application making the request.”

They also offer tookits for Flash and PHP.

In addition they’re launching a contest “for the most creative and innovative visualizations and applications developed by our community using the API and Flash toolkit. All of the top 10 finalists will get prizes, with a Grand Prize featuring a Falcon Northwest gaming PC, the full catalog of EA PC games, and the Adobe CS3 Master Collection.” This contest has been added to our ProgrammableWeb Contests page.

As Kevin suggests, “Digg on”.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Contests at 12:38 PM | 5 Comments »

Google AJAX Feed API

Google this week announced the release of the Google AJAX Feed API. What is it? It’s a JavaScript library that lets you mashup RSS and Atom feeds entirely on the client, thus no need for server-side coding. In addition, one of the useful core features is that it can automatically map XML attributes to a JSON result format. To get a sense of what it can do, one of their example mashups has been added to our listings: the Google AJAX Tune Bar that lets you add iTunes RSS feeds to any page.

If you’re familiar with JavaScript programming you’ll note that typically this sort of client-side mashup would have some limitations due to browser security constraints restricting data to only come from the same server a given page was delivered. But Google works-around this by having their servers act as a proxy cache for all feed requests made via the API. Which leads to a couple of other implications: “The AJAX Feed API, like Google Reader and the Google personalized homepage, caches individual entries within feeds and reconstructs feeds based on those entries. Consequently, feeds from the AJAX Feed API may not reflect the exact XML file from the URL you request. In many cases, you can request more entries from the AJAX Feed API than are currently available in the live feed.”

It is also interesting that we’re seeing more JavaScript-based APIs from Google, including the AJAX Search API and the ever-popular Google Maps API. We’ll probably see more in the future given that they’ve introduced a new base url of google.com/jsapi and a generalized JavaScript API load process: “Loading the API requires two steps because Google is moving to a new model of loading AJAX APIs to make it easier to include multiple Google APIs on your pages. Subscribe to the Google AJAX APIs Blog for announcements as we start rolling out this new AJAX API loading mechanism.”

This is one of those very useful but somewhat subtle APIs that has more power than may be initially apparent.

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Posted by John Musser as Google at 12:41 AM | 5 Comments »

April 18th, 2007

Adobe Flex Meets Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com and Adobe announced this week the Flex Toolkit for Apex which allows Flex-driven Flash applications to be integrated into Salesforce apps as first class citizens. This opens the door to a new class of rich Internet applications now delivered through an on-demand enterprise platform.

Third-party Flex applications are packaged-up and served from the Salesforce servers and so no additional infrastructure is needed. The toolkit shares the same single sign-on as the a regular Salesforce app which makes the experience more seamless. I spoke with Adam Gross, Salesforce.com’s VP of Developer Marketing, who demonstrated a couple of interesting applications that highlight the ability of the Flash and the Salesforce app to exchange data in realtime: one was a drag-and-drop calendar application and the other was the interactive charts of sales data shown below.