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December 31st, 2007

Amazon’s EC2 Open Source Firefox Plugin

Developers using Amazon’s EC2 API might find this interesting: Amazon has created an open source project on SourceForge for ElasticFox, their Firefox extension that lets you create and manage EC2 instances from a GUI in the browser. The utility lets you launch AMIs (Amazon Machine Instances) and then find, control, replicate and shutdown running instances. A handy right-click menu lets you quick launch more like ones already running. Having the source available will let developers extend this as needed. For more see the Amazon AWS blog and at our mashup profile here.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Infrastructure, Source at 12:03 AM | 2 Comments »

December 28th, 2007

Microsoft’s SSL for Secure Map Mashups

If you’re interested in creating secure maps mashups the Microsoft Virtual Earth team has a new feature for you: SSL support. As .NET developer David Barkol points out: by providing SSL support the Virtual Earth API now offers something not yet available in Google Maps. This means developers can include a version of the VE map control from a https://dev.virtualearth.net address for any SSL-enabled applications they’re building without having to resort to requiring specific browser settings or server-side proxies.

David notes that “if you’ve ever placed a Virtual Earth map or Google map on an HTTPS page then you’re probably familiar with the mixed content message that appears when the page loads” and that this new VE capability directly addresses this problem:

While SSL support is not required for many mashups, this level of security will become more relevant as map mashups evolve into integral elements of enterprise applications, commercial mashups, and other higher-value apps.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Mapping, Microsoft, Security at 12:53 AM | 2 Comments »

December 27th, 2007

API of the Year: Facebook Platform

The statistics are impressive - nearly 12,000 applications produced on the Facebook Platform since its launch on May 24th of this year and according to Adonomics those applications were used over 36 million times in the last 24 hours.

It’s success prompted Google to push out its OpenSocial platform, expected to be widely deployed in 2008, and in turn Facebook has recently opened its platform for use in other social networks, starting with Bebo.

Why the runaway success?

Openness: It’s a validation of the open API model that has been driving innovation on the Web over the last few years. Open the gates to your customers and let them decide what works. In the Facebook Platform any developer with a good idea and access to mainstream programming skills can join the party and try out ideas, and over 100,000 developers have done so.
Audience: API-driven access to an audience the size of Facebook’s lead many to jump on board in a hurry. And in many ways the early Facebook developers have been targeting the traditional, younger Facebook audience and gave rise to apps like Flirtable, Vampires, Bumper Sticker, and Send Hotness in the top 100 apps. It’s notable that established brands have not gotten much footing in the application space, and to do so they may want to partner with the trailblazers.
Money: Openness and youthful enthusiasm are good, but Facebook coupled that with the promise of potential riches by allowing developers to monetize without interference their portion of the page. Although the revenue models are completely unproven outside of the top applications, the potential has led to a sense that there is a ‘land grab’ for user attention, and the development costs are low enough so that developers are worrying about building the audience first and making money off them later.
Viral Features: A variety of avenues for viral distribution ranging from the news feed to notifications have led to headline-worthy growth for some applications. Even though a few of these options may have been dialed-back by Facebook there’s still opportunity to use this platform for rapid, network-effects growth.
Plug-in model and Constraints: Facebook facilitated the rapid adoption of the outside developer applications by building a plug-in style platform and having developers conform to a specific user experience, in the profile, the news feed, the application’s canvas page, and the installation and privacy procedures. This gives users the confidence to install and sample many apps, knowing that the learning curve of understanding and evaluating an app is in minutes. The level of viralness seen in the applications would never have happened without these constraints.
Metrics: The traditional cycle of product development - analyze, develop, test, and rework before release - has been turned on its head in the Facebook environment, where many of the strongest applications were designed and released in a matter of days. This was done with the knowledge that by paying careful attention to the usage metrics supplied by Facebook, the applications can be rapidly tweaked and reconfigured, with the audience subliminally influencing the product’s direction.

Of course there are drawbacks and minefields ahead - the predictable backlash against ‘too many apps’, privacy concerns, rapidly evolving technology platform, the preponderance of low-commitment apps, and the difficulty developers have making money in the long tail. Given the growing competitive challenges its success in 2008 is not guaranteed. But as a provocative game-changer, the Facebook Platform wins the API of the Year award for 2007.

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Posted by John Musser as Facebook, Social at 10:18 AM | 6 Comments »

December 26th, 2007

New APIs: Email, Travel, Recommendations

There has been an uptick in new APIs added to our directory and we now have 579 API’s listed. We continue to see lots of variety in the API styles (REST, SOAP, JavaScript) as well as the markets (email, e-commerce, reference, others). Here’s a quick roundup of three of the latest:

MailChimp API: Last month we covered 16 email APIs and here’s another for that list: the email marketing service MailChimp. As they describe “Sync campaign stats and subscriber information between MailChimp and your database. This helps you download a list of unsubscribes to clean your inhouse lists, build client portals and pull campaign stats from MailChimp if you send emails on behalf of clients, aggregate and compile campaign stats, send ‘we also recommend this…’ campaigns, and pass account status data to MailChimp so that only active members get your emails.”
AgentFactor Travel API: A travel booking engine with wholesale fares and routes whose affiliate service for partners includes an API. Note that they provide API documentation only to registered affiliates.
QuarkRank API: A recommendations aggregation service with API and widget access to their “intelligent engine which crawls the web for opinions on various products/services and automatically summarize them feature-by-feature using its proprietary natural language processing technique.”

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Shopping at 12:40 AM | No Comments »

December 21st, 2007

Christmas Mashups

Just in time for the holiday break here are two seasonal mashups, both with a good sense of fun. One is even a bit utilitarian if you ever happen to need to know how far it is from a given point on the earth to the North Pole. (You can also find 7 other holiday-themed mashups here).

How Far Does Santa Have to Travel: You can find out how far it is between the North Pole and your house by using this tool which displays a map and the measured distance.

Tacky Christmas Lights: Locate the biggest Christmas light displays. Decorators register their display and this service provides an interactive map and custom driving directions.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Mapping, fun at 1:44 AM | 2 Comments »

December 20th, 2007

How to Tell if a User is Logged In to Netflix

Even wonder if the sites you log into on a regular basis might inadvertently let any of that information leak? If you want to see a very real, interactive example of just how prevalent this might be, just check-out JavaScript guru Kent Brewster’s series on “How to Tell if a User is Logged In to X”, where “X” is one of the leading online services millions of us use every day. Last week the “X” was Facebook and today “X” is Netflix. Because the examples are live and work with you and your own account they get your attention.

Read the rest of “How to Tell if a User is Logged In to Netflix” »

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Posted by John Musser as Issues, JavaScript, Popular, Security at 12:51 AM | 2 Comments »

December 19th, 2007

OpenSocial Shindig Released

If you are interested in hosting OpenSocial compatible widgets in your web site you’ll probably want to keep an eye on the open source project Shindig. What is it? As Google product manager Dan Peterson describes in Let’s get this shindig started: “Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator (as per the formal proposal) that aims to provide an open source reference implementation of the entire OpenSocial stack — Shindig’s goal is to allow new sites to start hosting social apps in well under an hour’s worth of work.” This source “is based upon code that has been powering Google Gadgets and iGoogle for the past few years and is meant to bootstrap the Shindig project.”

It’s a multi-part project and this first commit includes code for the first two of the four components below:

Gadget Container JavaScript — core JavaScript foundation for general gadget functionality (read more about gadget functionality). This JavaScript manages security, communication, UI layout, and feature extensions, such as the OpenSocial API.
Gadget Server — an open source version of gmodules.com, which is used to render the gadget xml into JavaScript and HTML for the container to expose via the container JavaScript.

OpenSocial Container JavaScript — JavaScript environment that sits on top of the Gadget Container JS and provides OpenSocial specific functionality (profiles, friends, activities).
OpenSocial Gateway Server — an open source implementation of the server interface to container-specific information, including the OpenSocial REST APIs, with clear extension points so others can connect it to their own backends.

This initial release has not yet been tested for “production-level traffic” but can help folks get started. If or how you use this also depends on your team’s skillset: “While the initial contribution of the Gadget Server was written in Java, Shindig is language neutral. Ning is planning to contribute an initial version of a PHP Gadget Server, and we’ve heard rumors of C#, Perl, and Ruby.”

With Facebook now licensing their code and Google working to foster a community around OpenSocial and Shindig it looks like news in the social API space won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

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Posted by John Musser as Code, Facebook, Google, OpenSocial, Social at 12:18 AM | 4 Comments »

December 18th, 2007

292 Flickr Mashups

The Flickr API continues to be one of the most popular Web 2.0 APIs and with a flurry of new photo mashups here lately, we now have 292 Flickr mashups listed. Overall they run a very wide range of creative applications, here are three of the most recent entries:

flickrbackup: A Java-based Flickr backup utility that lets you back up all your photos on Flickr.

Feel Image: Search multiple photo sharing sites. Has technology that quantifies colors like red or blue in images, making it possible to show search results by color. Search phrases like: red flower in spring.

Custom iGoogle Skins: This new version of the skins gadget integrates Flickr and iGoogle to being you random images from a user specified Flickr group.

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Posted by John Musser as Media, PopularAllTime, Yahoo, photo at 2:10 AM | 4 Comments »

December 17th, 2007

The Amazon SimpleDB API

Amazon has once again lead the industry by launching their latest infrastructure API, SimpleDB, a programmable database in the cloud (you can see more at our new SimpleDB API profile). It’s a forward thinking approach for a pay-as-you-go, scalable database that is very much in line with Amazon’s other popular infrastructure services like the S3 API for storage and the EC2 API for virtual computing. As they describe it:

Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity. Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema, automatically indexes your data and provides a simple API for storage and access. This eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon’s proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.

Pricing is based on machine utilization ($0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed), data transfer ($0.10 per GB - all data transfer in, $0.18 or less for data out), and structured data storage ($1.50 per GB-month).

Like S3, there’s “Simple” in the name for a reason as it’s not aiming for multitudes of features but rather focuses on performing a core infrastructure service well. For example the core data structure is like a hash or dictionary, not a full-blown relational model. There’s already been lots of discussion and debate about some of the tradeoffs here like the schemaless model, the 1024 character limit per attribute, and the need to zero-pad integers because queries are lexigraphical (see TechMeme for more). It’s likely that the outside developer community will probably build wrappers, libraries and frameworks to work around and adapt these.

It’s very clear that database storage in the cloud is a service that will eventually be offered by most of the major API providers. In order to track this we’ve now added a Database line item to our API Scorecard.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon at 12:39 AM | 1 Comment »

December 14th, 2007

Our Dumb World Map from The Onion

Just a little Friday note to highlight one of the most fun map mashups to date, the The Onion’s Our Dumb World map (our profile here). As they describe “Click on the Onion pins scattered around the globe to reveal mind-expanding factoids about the lesser, conquerable nations of the Earth. Come back each week to learn more about how little you know.” You can also download this as a Google Earth KML layer. [via O’Reilly Radar]