January 31st, 2008

Amazon Web Services Make Earnings News

The just released Amazon Q4 2007 earnings report, besides showing that the company doubled profits this quarter, had a couple very interesting notes related to their growing suite of web services. The first is that bandwidth usage from their web services exceeds that of their web sites:

Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the point at which Salesforce.com began to process nearly as many transactions via their APIs as through their application proper.

And the second piece of news from that division is that “Over 330,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), up more than 30,000 from last quarter.” These two details go hand in hand with more developers signed-up and more usage of the core pay-as-you-go infrastructure services.

You can read more on the Amazon results from BusinessWeek’s Rob Hof, paidContent, TechCrunch and Laurie Flynn at the New York Times.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Infrastructure, Money at 1:21 AM | 2 Comments »

January 30th, 2008

MySpace Platform to Launch February 5th

The social platform battles continue to pick-up steam: the latest news comes from MySpace who are said to be launching their developer platform next week on February 5th. COO Amit Kapur, in interviews with Erick Schonfeld and Adam Ostrow reports that the platform will support OpenSocial from launch and that privacy, monetization, and data ownership will be top priorities for the platform. At the moment, the new developer.myspace.com page has a form that lets you pre-register. We’ll update our MySpace API profile with more details as they’re made public.

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Posted by John Musser as OpenSocial, Social at 2:15 AM | 2 Comments »

5 Demo 2008 APIs

This year’s Demo conference is going on in Palm Desert, CA this week, and although many of the companies are early-stage startups just getting their main product ready for the public, here are 5 that use, or plan to use, APIs for a strategic advantage.

• Ribbit’s new Amphibian product for managing voicemail through an internet interface (covered by Tom Forenski here) is based on Adobe Flex and AIR technology and has 2500 developers signed up working on interesting extensions such as an iPhone on the desktop. Their API is already out there and you can learn more on our Ribbit API profile and our Telephony API Dashboard.
• blist is an easy-to-use tool for creating and managing databases online doesn’t yet publicly have an API, but TechCrunch reported that it will provide one. For more, see this glowing review from Webware’s Rafe Needleman.
• Nirvanix’s Storage Delivery Network product offers an internet storage file system optimized to scale for large media files, and accessed through both SOAP and REST web services (and see 10 more storage APIs here).
• Cozimo is designed for real-time collaboration and review of videos and images, targeted at the creative community, and has a non-public API available for integration into other workflows.
• And finally Seesmic, Loic Le Meur’s highly anticipated “video Twitter” product, is in closed beta and has no developer’s API released (Marshall Kirkpatrick comments on its and others use of the XMPP protocol), but the developer community is so interested that an unofficial developer’s blog was started to share information about the developments, and the official developer’s blog followed shortly thereafter. You can track the status of the API at our new Seesmic API Profile.

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Posted by John Musser as Books, Events at 12:59 AM | No Comments »

January 28th, 2008

Get It In Gears

Tony Ruscoe of Google Blogoscoped reports that Google Gears alert messages indicates that support for Gears offline access to Google Docs is forthcoming. As Tony notes, the “the only official Google integration is for Google Reader (although evidence that offline functionality is coming to Google Calendar has also been spotted).”

As you can see in our launch coverage last May and our Google Gears API profile, Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Essentially it’s a mini-database and server with synchronization of online and offline tasks. The official site describes Gears as “an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features: A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server. A database, to store and access data from within the browser. A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background.”

Here’s one example from our mashup directory, the personal finance site Buxfer that lets you auto-sync your banks and credit cards but also uses Google Gears to let you store your personal finance data locally in a Gears database instead of a remote server.

Google has representative examples that show off the synchronization and coding model. The Google Gears blog has examples like the application suite Zoho, along with an offline editor for Blogger. On the Salesforce.com developer site there is an extensive tutorial for using Gears to access account data. And here’s a mashup example with Gears and the Digg API that can capture Digg stories for offline viewing.

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Posted by John Musser as Code, Google, JavaScript at 10:49 PM | No Comments »

January 27th, 2008

Facebook Extends Their Platform

An announcement by Facebook late on Friday spotlights how they are attempting to stay ahead of the curve in exploiting the social graph, and in doing so, to make their version of your friend’s list the default one that is used across the web. The key is this new JavaScript library that makes it easier for developers to to make Facebook API calls directly from JavaScript from any web site, not just when running on the Facebook Platform:

This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML…This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Along with allowing individual developers conversant in Ajax to bring Facebook friends into their website’s user experience, as John Potter points out, it opens up a role for third-party developers to craft Facebook-friendly widgets that are easily dropped into blogs and sites that don’t have any Facebook programming experience. The release of this library caused a fair amount of buzz over the weekend from folks including Nick O’Neill, Dare Obasanjo, Jeremiah Owyang, Duncan Riley, and Search Engine Watch.

Recent moves in data portability and OpenSocial-style compatibility suggest that we are moving towards an environment that allows some form of opt-in sharing between elements of the social graph, and Facebook wants to make sure that it is easier to identify your groups of friends by starting with their version. The function of allowing you to organize your friends into groups (family, close friends, business acquaintances, etc.) that was added in December is also a step towards making your control over your social graph easier, and adding lock-in to the Facebook data.

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Posted by John Musser as Facebook, JavaScript, OpenSocial, Social, Widgets at 8:51 PM | No Comments »

January 25th, 2008

IBM’s New Lotus Mashups

At this week’s Lotusphere conference IBM announced IBM Lotus Mashups, a new browser-based mashup builder for non-programmers. To be released later this year the application is designed to give users an easy way to build composite apps by combining internal enterprise data and services along with services from the open Web. Here’s a screenshot of the application (via Ed Brill):

The announcement outlines the core functionality including:

• A browser-based tool that provides easy assembly of new mashups
• A rich set of out-of-the-box, business-ready widgets
• A catalog for finding and sharing widgets and mashups
• A builder for the creation of widgets that access enterprise systems

For more, see coverage by Martin LeMonica, CIO Today and this hand-held video recording of the Lotus Mashup demo from the conference this week.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Tools at 1:49 AM | 3 Comments »

January 24th, 2008

Use Bury Recorder To Watch Digg Buries

Another interesting mashup added to our listings recently is the Digg Bury Recorder which is built on top of data pulled from Digg Spy. For a bit of the why and how, creator David Hurth at Ajaxonomy gives this introduction:

If you have been using the popular service Digg you know that it is very easy to submit a story and to see it start to gain traction just to be buried into the dark abyss. What I find particularly frustrating is that you don’t know how many people buried the story and the reason for the bury. If you have seen Digg Spy you have noticed that the application does show buries, but you can’t just track data for a particular story.

In this case you give the application the story’s URL and click “Watch for buries”. An Ajax UI automatically refreshes to give a dynamic history of all buries for a given story. In the background the server code fetches and parses JSON data from Digg Spy every 20 seconds to get the updates. One added bonus with this application is that it’s open source so you can download the code, see how it works, and if so inclined create and host your version.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Code, Social at 12:43 AM | No Comments »

January 23rd, 2008

3 New Mashups for Finding Music Videos

Want to find videos, music samples or the latest news for your favorite band or musician? Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a fair number of new mashups added here designed to help you search for music artists and information about them. The data mashed-up includes music tracks, photos, news, artist history, and videos, with video search becoming increasingly common. Here are three of the latest from the last week alone (APIs used in this set include Last.fm, YouTube, MusicBrainz and the Amazon E-commerce API):

• musicmesh: Use musicmesh as a web-based music exploration tool. Browse through a dynamically generated graph of albums that are similar to your seed album. Listen to tracks and watch videos as you browse.



• Coast Rack: Coast Rack searches for artists tracks and their videos from sources including Last.fm, MusicBrainz, and YouTube.



• Visual YouTube: Enter your search terms into Visual YouTube and then see 50 thumbnails of videos. Hover over one for a description and click it to play the video. Also lists web, news, blog, image, and book search results.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Music, Video at 12:29 AM | No Comments »

January 22nd, 2008

iGoogle’s New Themes API

If you’ve ever wanted to create your own custom iGoogle theme, there’s now an API from Google that will let you do it. As you can see in our new Themes API profile it’s fairly straightforward. As “Creating your own theme isn’t rocket science. If you can create a webpage, then you can create a theme. There are only three steps involved: designing images for the header and footer, entering metadata and color information in an XML file, and submitting the theme.” In addition to allowing a static image, the API allows a theme to change over the course of a day in order to “reveal a visual storyline, message, or anything else.”

To jumpstart development Google released an initial set of designer-created themes. Here’s an example from designer Mark Frauenfelder over at Boing Boing that tells a story and changes throughout the day. You can see our Adventure in Lollipopland profile here.

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Widgets at 12:03 AM | No Comments »

January 21st, 2008

MyBlogLog API Launches

Besides making big news last week by announcing support of OpenID, the folks at Yahoo also launched the MyBlogLog API. This promises to be an interesting API with lots of social applications. It’s initially launching in limited beta but you can sign-up now and get access to the code, the docs and an interactive test console. In their announcement Yahoo’s Jason Levitt describes what to expect:

You’ve seen those catchy Recent Reader widgets all over the web, and maybe you’ve even added your profile and web sites to MyBlogLog.com. Now, the MyBlogLog team is happy to announce that the MyBlogLog API is opening up for an invite-only beta which you can signup for here. You can use the API to retrieve lists of readers, tags, and members of MyBlogLog communities, search for members, get a member’s profile data including sites authored, tags, and identities on other sites, and more.

And along with our new MyBlogLog API profile we also have our mashup listing using the API, Kent Brewster’s proof of concept mashup, that “Gets current visitors for a site, queries the API for tags and user IDs on outside services, and displays current Twitter status, if one exists.”

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Posted by John Musser as Social, Yahoo at 12:32 AM | 3 Comments »