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Web API Sites

August 30th, 2007

YouTube API Reborn

Developers of web mashups using video content now have some more powerful tools at their disposal. As announced this week, the YouTube team have overhauled their entire API. Rather than the older REST/XML-RPC API it’s now a member of the GData family of protocols. Our YouTube API profile has been updated accordingly. This is a good change and will only further fuel interest in this API. (Not that the API has suffered for lack of interest to date given that we have 158 YouTube web mashups listed here. Video is hot.)

Some key details from the announcement:

You’ll be able to do all the things you could with the old API (search through videos, get user information, and list playlists). On top of that, we’ve added more flexibility with filtering, querying, and alternative outputs (e.g. if you want output in JSON). Brand new feeds include video responses, full comments list, and related videos.

Additionally, the Google data client libraries are now at your disposal. The Java client library even has YouTube-specific extensions, and you can check out the Java developer guide for sample code and explanations. More documentation in different languages is on the way.

This new API also fulfills many of the feature requests you’ve been asking for, e.g. you can now filter search results by upload date, view count, and rating as well as relevance. Visit the wiki for a full list of completed requests.

The old API will be supported through this time next year and they’re providing a migration guide to help transition existing applications.

This release is a read-only API but apparently they’re hard at work adding write capabilities including programmatic video upload. Interesting to note that the new version does not require a developer ID.

And in case you missed it, ProgrammableWeb now offers the ability to filter APIs by protocol. So for example you can see just GData-compatible APIs. Which in turn highlights the fact that they’re not all from Google.

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Video at 2:36 AM | 3 Comments »

August 29th, 2007

Best New Mashups: Mosaics and Free Calls

Since our last best-of roundup there’s been a lot of new mashups listed here at PW. Good variety of APIs being used to develop some creative and useful applications:

Mosaickr: Lets you create mosaics of photos from Flickr. Each mosaic is one large image composed of small tile images.

MyToGo for Skype: Allows any phone to call Skype names for free or call telehone numbers using Skype from any phone at Skype rates. No client software on phone is required. Works with iPhones.

And speaking of mashups using the Skype API, the Skype Mashup Competition ends this week so get your entries in ASAP and win a trip to Prague.

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

August 28th, 2007

Encode Videos with the HeyWatch API

One of this week’s new API listings is the HeyWatch API. This video encoding service lets you encode videos for a wide variety of formats and they now offer a REST-based interface that lets you do direct application integration. Videos can be uploaded directly from your local machine or accessed via sites like YouTube. The commercial service fees are based on ‘encoding credits’ at $.10 each. Mobile and gaming device support includes encoding videos for Nokia, PS3, Wii, Zune and other platforms.

heywatch

If you’re a Ruby developer you they also give you this code at RubyForge.

Speaking of which, we now have listed over 20 Ruby gems and code resources including wrappers for many of the major APIs.

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Posted by John Musser as Ruby, Video at 1:38 AM | No Comments »

August 27th, 2007

Create Your Own Database With MS Astoria

Back in May we reported on Astoria, Microsoft’s promising data services API designed to enable database programming “in the cloud” using a REST-style model. At the time you could only use their read-only examples but now you can create your own read-write database with it. Astoria program manager Mike Flasko announced this next piece of the Astoria service on their blog:

Web developers can create custom structured data stores (up to 100MB in size) on the web and access them from anywhere that they have Internet access. These data services can then be the storage or data source for mashups, or the backing store for Internet enabled applications, or be applied to any other scenario where a rich data service on the web is required, independently of where it is hosted.

This type of web-based database service has plenty of potential and it will be very interesting to see how this one evolves. [via]

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Posted by John Musser as Microsoft at 12:41 AM | 1 Comment »

August 24th, 2007

Track Flights With This API

One of the more unique APIs listed here lately is the FlightAware API. It’s a commercial SOAP based API for live and historical flight data. As of the other day, the home page notes “Tracking 5,163 airborne aircraft with 49,337,567 total flights in the database. FlightAware has tracked 38,249 arrivals in the last 24 hours.” Here’s some details:

Using the FlightXML API, programs can query the FlightAware live flight information and historical datasets. Queries for in-flight aircraft return a set of matching aircraft based on a combination of location, flight or tail number, origin and/or destination airport, aircraft type, and/or a low-to-high range of altitude and/or ground speed, among others.

For each matching aircraft, data returned includes the flight or tail number, the aircraft type, origin and destination, time the last position was received, and the longitude, latitude, groundspeed, and altitude of that position. Matching flights’ flight tracks can be requested as well. For airports, FlightXML queries can return a list of scheduled flights, flights that have departed, flights that are enroute to the airport, and flights that have arrived at the airport.

What’s also interesting is the pricing model:

FlightXML is priced on a volume-basis with a per-transaction fee. There are three classes of transactions based on the complexity of the request. The more queries that a user account makes per month, the less the per-query fee is.

The classes of queries separate the most complex queries for FlightAware to deliver from the more simple queries. For example, requesting a list of aircraft en route to LAX would be a higher class query than requesting the name and location of an airport. Requesting the heading of an aircraft based on two positions would be an even lower class query.

At the lowest end of the volume scale (from 1 to 9,999 queries a month), each query is only $0.012. Therefore, if your application made two queries every 10 minutes, your monthly bill would be $87.84. However, if your application made five queries every 5 minutes, your monthly bill would be $219.60.

Would be good to see more commerical API providers publish their pricing.

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Posted by John Musser as Money at 1:21 AM | No Comments »

August 23rd, 2007

500 Web APIs

With this week’s addition of Google’s latest APIs we now have an even 500 APIs cataloged. Over the past two years this list has grown 10 fold from the original 50 we had listed in 2005. And connected to these are 2250 mashups built using hundreds of API combinations.

Using our Top APIs for Mashups pie chart you get a sense of which APIs have been mostly frequently used in our mashup sample with the top 10 APIs being Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, VirtualEarth, Yahoo Maps, eBay, 411Sync, del.icio.us and Yahoo. You can get a sense of this by viewing our directory of APIs by Mashup Count.

If you view them sorted by category here’s the breakdown of those categories with the most competing APIs (top 20 categories):

If you want to get a sense of which major providers offer the most APIs, check the API Scorecard.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Site News at 1:38 AM | 7 Comments »

August 21st, 2007

New Google APIs for Researchers

If you’re a researcher Google has a couple new APIs for you and we’ve just listed them here: the Google Search API for Researchers and the Google Translate API. Google describes this search API as:

The University Research Program for Google Search is designed to give university faculty and their research teams high-volume programmatic access to Google Search, whose huge repository of data constitutes a valuable resource for understanding the structure and contents of the web.

Our aim is to help bootstrap web research by offering basic information about specific search queries. Since the program builds on top of Google’s search technology, you’ll no longer have to operate your own crawl and indexing systems.

As noted, the API is available only to members of the academic community.

A similar program is now in place for Google Translate (which initially supports translations between English and Arabic, Chinese or Russian):

The University Research Program for Google Translate provides researchers, in the field of automatic machine translation, tools to help compare and contrast with, and build on top of, Google’s statistical machine translation system.

A translation request returns either: A single translation, the highest scoring output of Google Translate; As above but with detailed word alignment information; A list of the n-best translations with detailed scoring information

These options can support research into n-best reranking (machine learning), additional translation components, system combinations, and who knows what else researchers may come up with.

Google continues to roll-out new web services — there are now 27 Google APIs in our directory. [via]

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Posted by John Musser as Google at 1:24 AM | 4 Comments »

August 20th, 2007

Rate of New APIs Increases

Aren’t things supposed to slow down during the hazy, lazy dog days of August? Apparently not when it comes to new web APIs. The past few weeks has been one of the busiest, if not the busiest, stretches of new API listings we’ve ever seen. One new API listed every day this month.

Here are a couple of the latest additions:

Getmapping API: This API gets you “access to Getmapping’s complete archive of aerial photography of Britain, at a variety of zoom levels up to 12.5 cms per pixel. Because of the increased clarity provided by the photography, mobile users will be able to see details on the ground as small as garden furniture and road markings anywhere in the country.”
Cogmap API: Use this API to get organization chart data in XOXO XML format. What’s XOXO? As you can see at microformats.org it’s Extensible Open XHTML Outlines, an outline format written in standard XHTML and suitable for embedding in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:28 AM | No Comments »

August 16th, 2007

New APIs: Books, Email and User Reviews

Following-up on this week’s earlier review of News, Social Media, and SMS APIs, here’s what else is newly listed: an API for book searching, an API for email management, and an API for managing social reviews.

Random House API: The book publisher Random House describes their API as “a set of programming tools that allow internet applications to view and search digitized book content. Through the Insight Service, keyword searches can get inside actual book content and find matches against the full text of the book. Insight can then serve up the pages of the book in different formats depending on the needs of the developer: for example, pages can be displayed in high-quality image formats for optimal viewing or speedy little thumbnails for quick review.” For more, see Alex Iskold’s good analysis at Read/WriteWeb.
Publicaster API: Blue Sky Factory offers this SOAP-based API for managing their mailing list services. Note that there are now 15 APIs on PW tagged email.
coRank API: This REST API ties-into coRank’s core service for setting-up collaborative sharing and review sites.

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

August 15th, 2007

The Mobile and Telephony Mashup Market

How do you keep track of the ever expanding API universe that, with nearly 500 APIs, is over 10 times larger than it was when ProgrammableWeb launched just two years ago? Try using ProgrammableWeb’s newest major feature: Markets. Markets is a set of new content areas that gives you a way to track APIs and mashups by industry segment, aka vertical. We’re starting with three markets, each with it’s own distinct section that aggregates topic-specific news, APIs, mashups, tutorials and other resources:

On the Mobile / Telephony side alone you’ll notice that there are over 25 different APIs that fall under the Telephony and Messaging categories along with 104 ‘mobile’ mashups and 113 tagged ‘messaging’.

This is a rapidly evolving marketplace with lots to follow. In order to make sure we have the right expertise to cover this topic, I’m excited to annouce telephony expert Thomas Howe as ProgrammableWeb’s first content partner. Besides bringing 20 years experience in that industry, Thomas also knows the API and mashup world very well: earlier this year he won the O’Reilly ETel 2007 Mashup Contest with After Hours Doctor’s Office. This innovative and useful application transcribes office voicemails left by patients for doctors into text and then sends them via SMS to the doctor. It was built with a variety of APIs including StrikeIron SMS Pro and Amazon Mechanical Turk and you can read more about the development of this mashup in our first telephony mashup case study.

To get you started in this segment Thomas Howe has written a great introduction: Mobile/Telephony APIs and Mashups: The Big Picture. It gives a clear and concise overview of mobile APIs, call control APIs, messaging APIs and business models.

Stay tuned for more on our Markets sections and keep in mind that three’s just the beginning. Social, video, government and enterprise are on the horizon.

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