October 31st, 2007

Google OpenSocial

The notion of social networks as open platforms are going take a big step forward this week when Google officially announces OpenSocial, a set of common APIs to let developers create applications that run across any OpenSocial compatible site. The APIs will cover many of the essential social networking functions: Profile Information (user data), Friends Information (social graph), and Activities (things that happen).

As first reported on TechCrunch, on Thursday this week Google will unveil details on the initiative along with their launch partners. On the social network side they will be joined by sites supporting the API including Salesforce, Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Newsgator and Ning (with Google’s own Orkut included as well). On the application developer side they will be joined by some of the leading Facebook developers including Flikster, Rock You, Slide, and iLike.

It is interesting that this is not a social network but a compatibility layer across networks. This has the potential to make developers lives easier while at the same time giving Google and Facebook’s competitors a means to dent Facebook’s current momentum.

Check-out the ongoing thread via TechMeme (see also good analysis from Marc Andreessen).

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Posted by John Musser as Google, OpenSocial, Social at 12:08 AM | 6 Comments »

October 30th, 2007

28 European APIs, Mashup the Continent

Out of the over 500 APIs listed at ProgrammableWeb, how many are offered by companies based in Europe? With MashupCamp Dublin in a couple weeks, this seems like a good question. In taking a look at the directory there are at least 28 European APIs (that is, companies headquartered or founded in Europe, even though they now be part of a larger, non-European company, like Skype). These APIs come from a variety of countries including the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Luxembourg, Spain, and Russia.

• 23: Photo sharing service. API is Flickr compatible. European team.
• AMEE: Avoiding Mass Extinction Engine. CO2 caclulations. UK.
• AQL: Bulk SMS messaging services. UK.
• Betfair: Online betting exchange. UK.
• BT: Variety of APIs for messaging and voice. UK.
• Clickatell: SMS messaging services. UK.
• eCourier: Delivery services and package tracking. UK.
• Esendex: Business SMS messaging services. UK.
• ImageLoop: Animated slideshow service. Germany.
• iShareMaps: UK postcode geocoder. UK
• Jaiku: Micro-blogging service. Now part of Google. Finland.
• Joost: Online television and video service. Luxembourg.
• Lokad: Online time series forecasting tools. France.
• Multimap: Global online mapping service. UK.
• Nearby.org.uk: Geocoding service. UK.
• Nestoria: UK and Spain real estate listings. UK.
• Netvibes: Personalized home page and widgets. France.
• OddsMiner: Sports betting XML feeds. UK.
• Panoramio: Geo-centric photo service, now owned by Google. Spain.
• Pikeo: Photo sharing service. France.
• Pingdom: Web site monitoring services. Sweden.
• Skype: Messaging platform. Luxembourg.
• Talis: Library 2.0 reference services. UK.
• TheyWorkForYou: Track the UK Parliament. UK.
• TradeSports: Online sports betting exchange. Ireland.
• ViaMichelin: Mapping, directions, and travel booking services. France.
• Vodafone Betavine: Mobile web services. UK.
• Yandex: Russian search engine. Russia.

If anyone is aware of European APIs in our directory but not included above or other non-US APIs we don’t currently catalog please let us know in the comments or with our share an API page.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Events at 8:04 PM | 3 Comments »

October 29th, 2007

5 Travel APIs - From Comparison to Booking

Did you know you could use Web 2.0 APIs to search for fares or make travel bookings? Here are 5 APIs with functions ranging from travel search to availability checks to booking. And as you can see from our listing of 236 mashups tagged “travel” that travel is a very popular subject for mashups, with out without these APIs.

• ViaMichelin API: Well known map and guide publisher Michelin provides API access to the high quality maps, car and pedestrian itineraries, proximity and integrated booking search engine.
• Kayak API: The search API is an HTTP interface that lets you, the programmer, integrate kayak.com searches and results into your web site, desktop application, or mobile phone application. Below is the mashup Kayak Buzz that answers the question: “Where can I go for under a certain amount of money?” It displays airfares under a user defined amount of money on a Google map.



• Yahoo Travel API: Yahoo Travel offers API access to trip planner data through a REST-like interface. Yahoo Travel Trip Plan APIs let you search for trip plans by Yahoo ID or by search query, or retrieve a specific trip plan by ID. The Yahoo Travel Trip Plan APIs have been designed to operate just like the Yahoo Search APIs and like Yahoo Search, the Travel APIs support both XML and JSON output.
• Superbreak API: From the market leader in provisioning of UK and European short breaks. Use their REST or SOAP APIs to get hotel, rail and theme park details, get availability and make bookings.
• FlightAware API: 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

Travel has certainly been a segment where the Internet has had a huge impact, but overall it’s a fairly entrenched industry so it will be interesting to see how travel APIs evolve.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Yahoo at 12:59 AM | No Comments »

October 26th, 2007

Friendster API and the Social API Battle

The battle of social APIs continues to heat-up with this week’s newest entry to our listings: the Friendster API. Although Friendster has been out of the headlines for awhile, they do have 50 million registered users. According to this TechCrunch report the API is currently open to developers but will not be available to live users until November 30th.

Some details on the platform: the API itself is REST-based and data is returned in XML or JSON, they currently have a widget directory and new third party apps will be listed here, and developers will be able monetize their widgets with their own advertising. Widgets must be registered with Friendster before going live and being listed in the directory.

Initially there are 8 methods available in the API, but they do provide information on friends and their social graphs. There’s also a /depth:/uid1;uid2 method that gets the relation depth between two users. If you have an API key you can use their interactive API test tool.

Developers will start comparing the data that’s available via different social networks. In this case there’s Friendster’s userinfo versus Facebook’s users.getInfo:

• Friendster: GetUserInfo
• Facebook: users.getInfo

And their documentation includes the following authentication sequence diagram showing how to a add a widget from within the Friendster site (interesting because we don’t tend to see very many UML-style diagrams used when documenting Web 2.0 APIs):

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Posted by John Musser as Social at 1:54 AM | 1 Comment »

October 25th, 2007

Smart Editor Wins Hackday Prize

Here’s an interesting mashup concept: Smart Editor, a rich text editor that uses web APIs to gather potentially relevant data from the web as you type. It gets web search results to inform you about related stuff on the net, related news happening around the world, Flickr photos to help you visualize, and Amazon product recommendations. It is built with the YUI Toolkit and four APIs: the Flickr API, the Yahoo Term Extraction API, the Yahoo Search API, and the Amazon E-Commerce API.

This mashup won the “Best Self Expression hack” at the Yahoo Hackday in Bangalor India earlier this month with judges that included Yahoo co-founder David Filo. Yahoo has had good success with their Hack Day events (see our earlier coverage on Yahoo Hacks Become Yahoo Products) and continues to do so with this international edition.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Contests, Yahoo at 12:17 AM | 3 Comments »

October 24th, 2007

Track California Fires via Mashups

Wildfires in Southern California have lead to the largest evacuations in the US since hurricane Katrina and now a variety of organizations have created interactive mashups to provide information and track status. The first comes from the LA Times whose Southern California wildfires map (see our mashup profile here), with marker popups with details including acres burned, current containment, homes destroyed, time started, and status of evacuations.

The second mashup is a Google Maps mashup from KPBS San Diego (our profile here), whose map shows fire areas but also meeting points for evacuees as well as nearby emergency services like hospitals. KPBS has also setup a Twitter page with text updates.

And lastly, this mobile mashup, WAP California Wildfires, built with the 411Sync API lets you track on the California wildfires in real time from your WAP-capable cell phone. Visit 411sync.com from your mobile device and use the keyword “calfire”.

More on mashups being used for this crisis at Google Maps Mania, GigaOm and Wired.

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Mapping, Mobile at 12:46 AM | 4 Comments »

October 23rd, 2007

275 Flickr Mashups

In the past few weeks we’ve seen an influx of new mashups built on the Flickr API, bringing the total number of Flickr-based mashups listed on PW to 275 (click here to see all 275). And it’s not that Flickr is the only photo API out there. Far from it, we have 24 photo APIs in our directory. But a combination of a great service, flexible API and of course rich underlying data make for good mashup material. Here are a few of the newest entries:

• Flickr Wrappr: Uses the DBpedia API and for each of the 1.95 million DBpedia concepts, the wrappr generates a collection of flickr photos that depict the concept, utilizing multilingual labels and geo-coordinates provided in Wikipedia entries.



• Europe Photo Helix: A helix designed of Flickr photos of Europe.



• Flickr Mania: Flickr browser that also lets you geo-tag Flickr photos via a GPS track file.

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Posted by John Musser as Yahoo at 12:10 AM | 7 Comments »

October 22nd, 2007

Enterprise Mashup Challenges

In another one of his thorough and insightful looks at the mashup space, Dion Hinchcliffe outlines The 10 top challenges facing enterprise mashups. Here are some of the key points:

• No commonly accepted assembly model: Lots of tools appearing but lots of differences in the approach they take to building mashups.
• An immature services landscape. Mashups need services and data to work from, but at this point there are a limited number of sources available.
• The splintering of widgets: many differences among vendor offerings and no official standards yet.

Read the rest of “Enterprise Mashup Challenges” »

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Featured, Issues, Tools at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »

October 18th, 2007

MySpace To Open-up Platform

At the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday MySpace’s Chris DeWolfe and Newscorp’s Rupert Murdoch unveiled some of their plans for opening-up MySpace. They’ll be doing this in stages over the next few months:

• In the next few weeks will be catalog of widgets and tools available on MySpace.
• Following that will be an API-based platform. At first this will be in a more limited ’sandbox’ mode available to 1-2 million users.
• Users ratings and feedback will be used to determine which apps move from the sandbox to all users
• Application developers will be allowed to run their own advertising

In the dinner conversation with John Battelle, Rupert Murdoch wryly reminded the audience that despite the current news around Facebook that: “[Facebook] is very different from us. More of a utility. We are different, and despite all the hype, we seem to be growing faster.” More at TechCrunch and O’Reilly Radar.

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Posted by John Musser as Social at 10:07 PM | No Comments »

October 17th, 2007

Amazon EC2, Now in Extra Large

One of the most talked about APIs these days just made some more news: as announced yesterday the Amazon EC2 API providing virtual compute services is now a) out of beta and open to all developers and b) comes in “Large” and “Extra Large” sizes:

Amazon EC2 customers now have the choice of “Small,” “Large,” and “Extra Large” instance types, which are set configurations of memory, CPU, and instance storage (for specific configuration details, see http://aws.amazon.com/ec2). The Small instance is the original EC2 instance type, and remains the default. The new instance types provide more memory, CPU, and instance storage, and are based on 64bit technology. EC2 users can now utilize these different instance sizes to support an even broader set of applications and use cases.

The Large Instance is equivalent to roughly four Small Instances (our original instance), and the Extra Large Instance is roughly equivalent to eight Small instances.

You can read more about their sizes and pricing on their site. The original size, now called “Small”, costs the same $0.10 per instance hour while the large and extra large instances cost $0.40 and $0.80 respectively.

With EC2 and S3 Amazon continues to lead the way when it comes to providing infrastructure utility services for the growing Internet operating system.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon at 12:24 AM | No Comments »