July 31st, 2007

Beware Mashup Spam

In an interesting, perhaps inevitable, twist on maps mashups it looks like some companies have started using mass uploads to Google Maps to generate business. Using new variations on classic spammer techniques they get their companies to show up more often in Google’s results. How? In cases cited on SearchEnginewatch and by Mike Blumenthal they’re using non-existent PO boxes with 800 numbers in towns they don’t operate from or by using fake street addresses. Sometimes there are hundreds of these bogus listings in a single metropolitan area.

Just take a look at the example below, where “Rent a Geek, Inc” has multiple listings in the Chicago area. At first blush this seems fine until you notice that they’re always located at “100 Main Street” in each town.

Over in this Google Groups thread is where part of this discussion started:

Am I wrong in thinking that local business listings are ONLY for businesses that are local?

I noticed a new listing in my ZIP code. They are using a toll-free number and a non-existent PO Box as contact info.

They are listed in EVERY ZIP code (that I checked). Every listing has the exact same toll-free number and exact same PO Box address, but each is in a different ZIP.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=x….

TechPros has the exact same listing in every ZIP code. Not very local, is it?

This is not the first time that web service APIs have been used by spammers. Splogs, or spam blogs, are often built using tools that make use of blog platform APIs. As you can see in this post from the Blogger team back in 2005 they implemented algorithms and a CAPTCHA test to try and fight splogs.

Like every online technology that has come before it looks like we’ll start seeing more new and ‘creative’ applications of APIs and mashup techniques to generate spam. Coming soon to a mashup near you.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Issues, Mapping at 4:09 PM | 4 Comments »

Challenges in the Mashup Tools Market

It’s not always easy being in the “mashup tools” marketplace these days. While the rapid growth of hundreds of open APIs presents new opportunities for mashup tool vendors, it’s not simple to find the right markets, users and scenarios to guarantee success.

First of all there’s already lots of competition. Just see in Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent summary of 17 products in a bumper crop of new mashup platforms. Dion includes products ranging from UI-centric tools like Microsoft Popfly and JackBe to scraping tools like Dapper and Kapow to enterprise-centric tools like IBM’s QEDWiki, Proto, BEA AquaLogic and RSSBus. (For even more tools, see also Read Write Web’s profile of Iceberg, Tibco’s new PageBus, and this set of mashup resources at Mashable.)

Even without the compeition, finding the right market is a challenge. Take for example last week’s post from Teqlo CEO Peter Rip entitled The Teqlo Adventure. Peter lays-out a variety of the issues this mashup tools startup has had to confront:

First, let me admit we went down a mashup rat hole. We have a general technology for snapping together web services. “Because they can” is an insufficient answer to “why do people want to create mashups?” We failed to commit to solve a specific problem for a specific market, preferring instead the broad appeal of generality. This has changed.

No one led us down this rat hole. We led ourselves. When we realized we had to make a radical shift, we had to reignite the fire with limited fuel. We made personnel changes because the fuel demanded it, not to penalize or blame anyone. So we did the right thing. We cut, refocused, questioned everything, and sharpened our edge.

The first thing we did was toss out any pretense of solving everyone’s problem. There is an old proverb that I just invented for this situation — “The boiling of the ocean begins with a single puddle.” We had to define our puddle. So we did.

Peter goes on to outline how they’ve been working on better defining their core customer and how their service will be re-appearing to focus on a specific application of web-based workflow. More details coming soon.

Earlier this month at MashupCamp there was a lot of talk about tools and the challenges in sorting-out the players, who fits where, what tools should be used by what type of user (is it a developer or an Excel jockey?), how to get them to integrate nicely together, etc.

It’s still in the early going for all of this web-as-platform stuff, not just the tools but the APIs, the applications and the business models. Not only that, things can change very quickly, just ask Facebook’s competitors.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Money, Tools at 12:39 AM | 13 Comments »

July 30th, 2007

New APIs: Slides, Clicks, and Kash

Besides the APIs we highlighted in last week’s Games, Shopping and Bible post, here’s another mix of new APIs added in the past few days:

• SlideShare: The very popular online service for sharing presentations on the web now offers a REST-base API. It allows for: Uploading presentations, retrieving embedcodes for slideshows, retrieving slideshows for users, retrieving slideshows for tags, and retrieving slideshows for groups.
• Clicky: This new web site analytics service has an API that “lets you you to extract a range of data from your web site traffic to analyze, store, manipulate, or display within your own web site or application. Nearly every piece of data that you see using our web site, you can also access via the API. The API accepts requests via standard HTTP GET, and can respond with XML, JSON (JavaScript), or PHP.”
• KashFlow: A UK-based online bookkeeping application has a web service API that lets you write code to query, modify and enter data into KashFlow accounts.

You can always view the latest API listings on our New APIs Page or via the API Feed. Note that the API Directory now offers an Advanced Search feature that lets you search for APIs by a combination of tag, category, company and date.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as APIs at 1:19 AM | No Comments »

July 27th, 2007

5 Mashup Contests on Now

If you’re interested in the chance to win cash and prizes for creating mashups then check out our Mashup Contests Page. At the moment there are 5 mashup contests under way with prizes up to $10,000. Keep in mind that 2 of these end next week:

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Examples at 2:30 AM | 7 Comments »

July 26th, 2007

Pownce API Coming Soon

Pownce, the widely discussed new service from Digg founder Kevin Rose for sharing messages, links, files and events, will soon be getting an API. As announced in their blog yesteday the API is due in September. As they note:

The lack of an API has been a major criticism leveled against Pownce from day one. The problem isn’t that we don’t have one, though–it’s that the existing API (built exclusively for the purpose of communication with the desktop app) just, well, sucks.

Some enterprising souls, however, have unlocked the secrets of our bizarre auth scheme and begun to write client libraries for the undocumented API. This was to be expected.

Of course, now that we have widely distributed clients (namely the desktop app) that rely on the existing API, we can’t really change it. But what we can do is create a new, public API, document how it works, then endorse and encourage its use by third parties.

And you’re invited to help define the requirements by participating in their Google Group to discuss options like “response formats (XML or Atom?) and authentication schemes (HTTP Basic over SSL? WSSE? Frob/token? AuthSub-style?).”

Share This

Posted by John Musser as APIs, Social at 1:35 AM | No Comments »

July 25th, 2007

Best New Mashups: Wishlists and Earmarks

Our ProgrammableWeb mashups directory now lists 2128 applications which are using 243 different web services. Here’s a sampling of some interesting recent additions, only one of which is using maps:

• Visualizing Earmarks: Graphically illustrates how Congress awarded earmarks in 2005 by agency, state and organization, as well as a searchable database of the earmarks and their recipients. Java applet built by the Sunlight Foundation with IBM Many Eyes visualization tools.



• Wishpot: Wishpot is a free social and mobile shopping service that lets you save and share interesting things you find in stores and online. Strong mobile interface. Integrates on top of the Amazon eCommerce and Shopping.com APIs.



• Zoho and Omnidrive: A good, useful integration of two online office/enterprise services with the Zoho application suite integrated with the Omnidrive online storage solution. If you have your documents online in OmniDrive, you can view and edit these documents just by double clicking on them. The documents then are opened in Zoho Applications. (In a similar productivity vein, see the Google Spreadsheets Editor that lets you edit spreadsheets from the iGoogle homepage.)
• New 7 Wonders of the World: Nice map of the New 7 Wonders of the world along with YouTube video for each of the 7 wonder.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as BestMashups at 2:11 AM | 1 Comment »

July 24th, 2007

New APIs: Games, Shopping and the Bible

Here’s an update on some of the newest of the 475 APIs in our directory. These three cover quite a range of subject matter: games, shopping and religion. Here’s the details:

• EVE Online API: One of the largest game online game worlds, EVE Online, offers a REST API for accessing game data. If you are not familiar with EVE Online, Wikipedia has details: “EVE Online is a player-driven persistent-world massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) in a science fiction space setting in which players pilot a wide array of customizable ships. It is developed by the Icelandic company CCP Games. From their site: The world’s largest game universe. The EVE API is a platform created to allow third party tools (programs, web sites, etc) to access character and corporation data for the purpose of enhancing the EVE experience.”
• AvantLink: Affiliate marketing network AvantLink offers an API into their cost per action (CPA) shopping service. (Note that there are now 25 “shopping” APIs in our directory.)
• Bible Gateway: Use this SOAP-based service to get the Verse of the Day from BibleGateway. As a developer you now have a choice among 3 different bible APIs.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:15 AM | 5 Comments »

July 23rd, 2007

Mashup Camp 4 Wrapup

Another eventful Mashup Camp wrapped-up on Thursday with announcement of the winners of both the traditional Speed Geeking competition as well as the new Best Business Mashup contest. The first place prize for the now classic Speed Geeking contest went to the creators of video aggregation service chime.tv, Taylor McKnight and Chirag Mehta. For McKnight this was a return to the mashup podium as it was his PodBop that won the top prize back at the first Mashup Camp. More details on this winning mashup including video on ZDNet.

Read the rest of “Mashup Camp 4 Wrapup” »

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Contests, Enterprise, Events, Tools at 12:05 AM | 3 Comments »

July 19th, 2007

Mashup Camp Mashups

There are some very interesting entries in the best mashup competition at Mashup Camp 4 this week. Here is a sample:

• Twitterlicious: Twitter mashed-up with Del.icio.us. When you are viewing your or a friends timeline, you have the option to clip the tweet. This saves the tweet URL tweet in your del.icio.us account as a private link with a specific tag so you view it later. For more, you can check-out this good video from Mashup Camp organizer David Berlind with Twitterlicious developer Myk O’Leary.



• Bookmark Cleaner helps you keep you del.icio.us bookmarks clean and safe. It allows searches like: A malware and phishing site search A search for cleaning bookmarks with a particular tag and a search for links that no longer exist, aka 404 not found.

One of the leading candidates is new Flash-based video aggregation service Chime.tv that we profiled last week in New Mashups for Video and Music Search.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Events at 12:38 AM | No Comments »

July 18th, 2007

Intro to Mashups at Mashup U

Giving the kick-off presentation at Monday’s Mashup University portion of this week’s Mashup Camp 4 was an Introduction to Mashups from expert “masher-upper” John Herren. From the look of John’s slides posted on SlideShare it was very good general introduction to the topic. Herren used the notion of a Mashup Pyramid, shown below, as a means to visualize and structure the talk and this space. The pyramid builds from data feeds to APIs to code libraries to GUI tools to platforms:

See David Berlind’s post for some photos from the first day at Mashup Camp including John’s talk.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Events at 3:20 AM | 1 Comment »