February 29th, 2008

An API for World Time

There are many sources out there for getting global time and timezone information online. Now there’s an service getting local time anywhere in the world from the small startup WorldTimeEngine, a service which is both a mashup as well as an API. Their basic web site centers around a search box where users can search on names and geographic locations like “india” or “10 downing street, london” or “51.50, -0.126236″. The result of the search is itself a mashup that shows a the location plotted on a Google Map along with a variety of time-related data like timezone, UTC/GMT offser, DST, and geographic coordinates. The example below is from our mashup profile:

Their RESTful web service API returns the local time in an XML data structure based latitude and longitude coordinates. You can view more details in our WorldTimeEngine API profile. The API is available for commercial use via a subscription model at £72 per year (and it’s one of the first APIs we’ve seen where you can buy usage on the spot using Google Checkout).

Share This

Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Mapping at 1:43 AM | No Comments »

February 28th, 2008

Microsoft’s Flurry of API News for MIX08

Microsoft made a flurry of API-related announcements today in advance of next week’s sold-out MIX08 event in Las Vegas. The key details are outlined in this blog post at dev.live from David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President of Windows Live Platform Services. Today’s news covers five of their Live APIs, development tool support for web APIs, and a bit of insight into their overall technology strategy for the Live family of APIs (they currently have over 20 APIs). Over the past couple of years Microsoft has increasingly been using MIX as a launching ground for their online platform technologies (see our MIX07 coverage here).

• AtomPub: Perhaps most notable overall is the official statement that “Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023).”. They’re starting with the Windows Live Spaces Photo API, their Application-Based Storage service, the Astoria ADO.Net Data Services, with “a few more surprises in this area announced at MIX”. Since Google’s GData is also Atom-based, this means two of the biggest web API providers are both supporting the same underlying REST-based model in their web services. Of course the devils in the details and over time we’ll see how the implementations will inevitably vary across vendors.
• Windows Live Messenger Library (WLML): The next biggest part of the announcement is this new JavaScript API built on top of the Windows Live Messenger platform (and their 300 million+ users) that allows web sites to create their own customized chat experience. You can get details on the API in our new API summary and on the MSDN site.The screenshot below shows a custom app on the right interacting with the standard Messenger on the left. The API supports all of the core Messenger features like text chat, user status, pictures and contact list management. It’s a secure model where sign-on is done through Windows Live ID so the site hosting the application should never have access to the user’s password. The library is compatible with IE and Firefox on Windows and Mac. What about usage limits? It’s free up to 1 million unique users per month. Note that this is a different, more powerful interface into Messenger than their existing Windows Live IM Control.



• Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication: This updated API and new web control give third-party applications a secure way access users Windows Live data while giving users granular permission of what can be accessed and for how long (see API our Live ID profile here). In order to use the service developers must first sign-up for an Application ID. They then supply this at runtime when a user wants to access their Live data (the process of “requesting consent”). At that point users are sent to a Windows Live login page or iframe where they login and grant access based on function and/or time. This gives the app a “Consent Token” which in turn contains a “Delegation Token” which can be used by the app to access specific Live APIs and functions. These tokens expire and need to be refreshed by the application. This will be an important API in the Live platform stack given how many other services will leverage it. The slide below shows the interaction between this services and an app using the Photo API.



• Windows Live Photo API: In a major upgrade to their Windows Live Spaces Photo API. The API lets third-party sites build photo applications on top of Windows Live Spaces. Because of the large size of the Live Spaces user base, the API gives developers programmatic access to 4 billion photos. Underneath the covers the API now supports both a WebDAV and an AtomPub model. The APIs let you upload, download and delete photos and to create, edit, and delete albums. One of the changes to the API and photo hosting model is that third-party developers don’t need to host or proxy the images but instead can manage the photo metadata but leave the storage and serving to Microsoft. And note that it uses Windows Live Delegated Authentication in which users delegate permission to read or read/write photos on a site-by-site basis.
• Application Based Storage API: Details on this will be released at MIX next week but this is “an experimental API which allows application developers to store a small amount of state/configuration data in the Windows Live data centers on behalf of a user. This API has an AtomPub service end point so developers will be able to call this using ADO.NET data services or other AtomPub compatible tools. The real value kicks in here if an application was to have hundreds of thousands of users as the storage is offloaded to Windows Live infrastructure.”
• Last but not least are updates to Silverlight Streaming including WebDAV support as well as new code samples at mslivelabs to help developers get started including an update to their existing Tafiti app (our PW mashup profile) along with source.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Events, Microsoft at 12:01 PM | 8 Comments »

February 27th, 2008

2800 Mashups

Every day of the year we get new mashups get added to our directory and as of yesterday the total was an even 2800 mashups. To build these, developers have used 315 different web service APIs. Which includes a lot of APIs that are not maps. One way to see this is by using the APIs by Mashups view which shows an ordered list of how many mashups we have cataloged per API. The pie chart below shows the distribution by API over the past two weeks:

This includes a few of the most frequently used APIs like Google Maps, Flickr, Virtual Earth and Amazon e-Commerce as well as a couple that are less often at the top of the charts like 4 new Digg mashups and 3 new Technorati mashups.

And once again, the YouTube API continues to become increasingly popular, now with 221 YouTube mashups here. The latest entry, shown below, is for Kent Brewster’s Blog Juice that combines 9 different APIs including the new MyBlogLog API (our earlier coverge here).

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Site News at 2:15 AM | 1 Comment »

February 26th, 2008

Environmental Activists Discover Mashups

In her recent article “Using Web2.0 tools for Environmental Activism”, Global Voices Online writer Juliana Rotich looks at how environmental activists are taking advantage of modern Web tools to share information and raise funds. From blogs to services like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, the Web is becoming an important channel for spreading news and information about environmental issues. And mashups are no exception.

Environmental Mashups

Environment-related mashups cover a broad spectrum of topics, including pollution, hurricanes, climate change, industrial activity, and “green” hotels. There are currently 24 mashups tagged “environment” and 13 mashups tagged “green” on ProgrammableWeb.

The Climate Change 2030 mashup presents data from the Architecture 2030 study of climate-induced rise of sea level for coastal United States cities. You can select a city and view an image of the city today and a corresponding image of the city showing areas that would be flooded after a forecast rise in sea level.

Environmental APIs

As we covered earlier, Green APIs are coming and today we have two environment-related APIs in the directory: the AMEE API, the Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine for CO2 data and calculations, and the CARMA, Carbon Monitoring for Action, is a massive database containing carbon emissions data of over 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies worldwide.

Making a difference and going Green

The Greenspace UK Carbon Emissions Map and UK Carbon Footprint Project graphically illustrate UK carbon emissions data and provide ideas for minimizing your own emissions. The Air Travel Emissions Calculator (shown left) and Carbon Emissions Compute mashups enable you to evaluate the impact of your US air and automobile travel. The Green Hotels mashup helps you find hotels that employ environmentally-sensitive policies.

There are many other interesting and informative environment-related mashups, including the LA Times Wildfires Map, the EPA Superfund Site Locator, Planet Hazard, and the Find Pollution Map mashup. To our benefit, more environmental mashups are being created all the time.

Share This

Posted by KevinFarnham as BestMashups, Green at 2:22 AM | 3 Comments »

February 25th, 2008

Google Releases Static Maps API

If you want a dead-simple way to create custom maps without needing to worry about JavaScript or programming then the just announced Google Static Maps API may be your answer. Google’s new API allows you to generate the maps using a regular URL (ala REST) along with parameters specifying location, size, etc and it returns a unique GIF image with that map. We have created a Static Maps API profile with the details. Here are some notes from their announcement:

The Google Static Maps API returns a GIF-format image in response to a HTTP request via a URL. For each request, you can specify the location of the map, the size of the image, the zoom level, the type of map, and the placement of optional markers at locations on the map. You can additionally label your markers using alpha characters, so that you can refer to them in a “key.”

You embed a Static Maps API image within a webpage inside an img tag’s src attribute. When the webpage is displayed, the browser requests the image from the the Static Maps API and it renders within the image location.

A few other details of note:

• Usage: A Google Static Maps API query request looks like the following and takes parameters like size (width and height in pixels), zoom-level, type (roadmap or mobile), and any marker placements:

http://maps.google.com/staticmap?parameters

• Usage limits: There’s a query limit of 1000 unique image requests per user per day. For developers that may expect to hit this limit the best strategy is to use a caching mechanism to store generated images on their own servers.
• API key: The only requirement to use the API is to sign-up for an API key, which works for both this as well as the standard Google Maps API.
• Google offers a wizard to help walk you through the process of creating a Static Maps map.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Google, Mapping at 2:11 AM | 3 Comments »

February 23rd, 2008

Thanks to Our Sponsors

We couldn’t keep making ProgrammableWeb the resource it is without the help of our sponsors and partners. A big thanks for their support.

• Mashery: Launching and running a successful API is harder than it looks and Mashery’s on-demand API services can help you get there more quickly, with lower costs and better results. See what shopping.com, Compete, Reuters and LinkedIn already know.
• OpenKapow: The online mashup builder community that lets you make mashups from any site, with or without an API. Built using their enterprise grade Kapow Mashup Server.
• StrikeIron: Offers 100+ commercial APIs via their Data as a Service platform. Win a 50″ HD flat screen TV by using their API for NCAA basketball data from The Sports Network to create the winning mashup in their new Mashup Madness Contest.
• BT: Mashup the phone network with BT’s Web21C SDK industry leading platform. BT offers six sets of APIs including voice, SMS messaging, and conference calling.
• Xignite: Xignite (pronounced “x-Ignite”) provides financial web services for mission-critical corporate applications, offering over 50 commercial APIs covering market quotes, news, corporate data, industry information, analytics, and statistics.
• Lat49: Got maps? Then get paid using Lat49’s online mapvertising system that brings geographically relevant advertising to users of online maps. Publishers get new monetization options and advertisers can leverage dynamically served ads on maps from the major map providers.
• Bungee Labs: The Bungee Connect application platform is a single environment for the development, testing, deployment and hosting of amazing web applications. Use this scalable on-demand platform to build highly interactive user web applications faster and more cost effectively.
• O’Reilly Media: Two great O’Reilly conferences are coming-up in San Diego March 3-6 ETech and Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) West. GSP West will have a an AppNite Live Demo Contest with 10 prizes. ProgrammableWeb readers can save 30% off GSP using registration code gspw08pgw and save 20% at ETech with code et08pgw.
• Adobe: Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing skills to build and deploy engaging web applications on the desktop with support for building Ajax, Flex and Flash.
• eBay: Developers are using the eBay APIs to create innovative applications and in two weeks eBay will announce up to five grand prize $10,000 winners who built the coolest Adobe Flash widgets for the eBay Affiliate Community using Flash or Flex.
• Userplane: Provider of communication software for online communities, Userplane offers open APIs for their full suite of services from chat to messaging. Use Userplane Money to start for free and rev-share the ad income.

If you are interested in sponsoring ProgrammableWeb please contact us for details.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as General at 8:44 PM | No Comments »

February 22nd, 2008

New Mashups via Pownce, Twitter, Technorati

What happened on the Programmable Web this week? Besides the 8 new API listed there were also 34 new mashups that in total used 31 different APIs. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Powncified: This is the first mashup listed here built using the Pownce API. Powncified tracks the most popular links that are sent publicly on Pownce each day.



• popuri.us: A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking from Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc., social bookmarks like del.icio.us, subscribers on Bloglines, etc. Built using the Alexa Top Sites, del.icio.us, and Technorati APIs.



• TwitPic: This app lets you share your photos on Twitter. Uses the Twitter API and Flickr API.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as BestMashups at 1:33 AM | No Comments »

February 21st, 2008

25 Music APIs

[Editor’s note: Today’s post comes from Kevin Farnham, who we are very happy to have joining us as a regular contributor here at ProgrammableWeb.]

Whether you’re a performer or a listener who enjoys discovering great new music, there are many music APIs available to help you accomplish your objectives. Last.fm is among the most popular music destinations on the Web. Its API provides you with data about Last.fm members, artists, albums, tracks, and more. More than 36 Last.fm Mashups are available, and the list keeps growing. With the recent addition of the handy LyricsFly API and its database of lyrics for 314,000 songs, there are now 25 music APIs in the ProgrammableWeb directory (as well as 135 music-related mashups).

But Last.fm is just one example. There are APIs that help you discover music you may like, APIs that provide detailed metadata about music, and APIs that let you store and manage your music online. Other APIs provide online radio and music subscription services. There are APIs for customizing music players, finding live music, and even for selling your own music. So many that ProgrammableWeb has just added a place to track them: the Music API and Mashup Dashboard.

Managing Your Music

Managing your music collection no longer means maintaining an orderly stack of CDs. Today we enjoy music from so many different locations and on so many different kinds of devices, that it can be easy to forget where it all is. In addition, music is available everywhere, but how can you find music that you will like?

These are the types of problems that developers are trying to solve with music APIs. Here’s a breakdown of what’s available and what problem the APIs address.

Music Discovery

How do you find new music that you’re likely to enjoy? And once you find it, how do you bring it into your music collection and manage it such that you’ll be able to find it later on? We’ve already talked about Last.fm. But a lot of other good solutions are also available.

Like Last.fm, the OpenStrands API takes a Web 2.0 approach to music discovery: the API provides programmable access to the MyStrands.com community’s recommendation, tagging and playlist services. Other music search tools include the Digital Podcast API, which lets you search for music using keywords, the SeeqPod API, where you enter the name of a song you like, and API returns a list of recommended songs, and the Yahoo Audio Search API, which enables structured and unstructured queries for finding audio files and correlated music data.

The MusicDNS API deserves special mention: it will automatically compare your music with all the music in its database using algorithms, then identify artists whose work is similar to your own.

About the Music (Music Metadata)

Once you’ve found music you like listening to, you may want to find out more information, about the songs, the artists… Several APIs provide information about music — that is, metadata. Freedb / CDDB provides information about music CDs: artist, CD-title, track list, and other information. The interesting thing is that a track for which you’d like to find information can be on a CD in your computer’s CD-drive, or on many different Freedb-compliant devices.

The MusicBrainz API, Tunelog API, and Discogs API all take a Web 2.0 approach, providing access to a large database of music metadata that is maintained by or based on the collective actions of the MusicBrainz, Tunelog, and Discogs communities.

Media Management and Online Broadcasting

Several APIs are help you manage your music. The Faces.com API and Ipernity API let you share music, pictures, and video with your friends and other members of the site.

Sharing your media is not all that different from broadcasting it, today. But some sites prefer the term broadcasting, implying more professional content. The Orb API allows you to broadcast your music, videos, photos, and more. Meanwhile, the RadioTime API enables you to find and enjoy over 60,000 online radio stations around the globe.

The Rhapsody API and subscription music service lets you programmatically manage your Rhapsody playlists, search for music, and access your Rhapsody RSS feeds.

Music Players

There’s music, then there’s how you listen to it. The Yahoo Music Engine API, the Winamp API, and the MP3Tunes API each offer the ability customizable their respective music players via code.

Music Events

After listening to some tunes by a new artist, you may want to see them perform in person. The Eventful API, JamBase API, and Gruvr API all let you search for concert information and other events. Eventful goes a step further by letting you “demand” an appearance by a performer in your area. Gruvr’s API lets you integrate live music maps and concert schedules into your own site.

APIs For Performers

If you’re a performer, then you’re sure to be interested in the above APIs. You’ll want to have your music available wherever listeners are searching for new music. You want to submit your songs to MusicDNS.org so that people who like your kind of music will be more likely to discover your own music. You’ll certainly want to publicize your performance calendar using the APIs for Eventful, JamBase, and Gruvr. And when it comes to selling your recordings, investigate the SNOCAP API, which will help you set up your own music store.

Music Mashups

Music APIs make a wide variety of music mashups possible. One of the earlier and more popular music mashups in our listings is MusicPortl, which collates information about a specific artist from across the entire web, creating a page that includes biographical information, photos, album releases, videos, blogs, and more. MusicPortl applies seven different APIs to provide all this information: Amazon eCommerce API, Flickr API, Last.fm API, MusicBrainz API, Ontok API, Technorati API, and the YouTube API.

Many music-related mashups aggregate artist data from around the Web into a unified search interface. One of which is FoxyTunes, which was acquired by Yahoo! earlier this month and you can see our listing with APIs used here.

Of the 135 music-related mashups listed, some of the more popular include: TuneGlue, ZonTube, KEXPlorer.com, MusicTonic, One Hit Wonders Map, JukeboxTube, Indie Tube, NPR Station Map and Mashup Camp winners PodBop and the Hype Machine.

We’ll cover more of these in an upcoming post.

Summary

The variety of music-related APIs is enormous, and the number of music APIs keeps growing. Click here for an updated list of currently available music APIs.

• Digital Podcast - Podcast search
• Discogs - Music database
• Eventful - Events discovery and demand
• Faces.com - Photo and media sharing service
• Freedb / CDDB - Online CD catalog service
• Gruvr - Live music and concert information
• Ipernity - Media sharing service
• JamBase - Live music and concert information
• Last.fm - Music playlist management
• LyricsFly - Lyrics database
• MP3Tunes - Music services
• MusicBrainz - Music metadata community service
• MusicDNS.org - Music fingerprinting service
• MusicMobs - Social music service
• OpenStrands - Music recommendation and discovery
• Orb - Digital media remote access and management
• RadioTime - Music and talk radio service
• Rhapsody - Online music services
• SeeqPod - Music recommendation service
• SNOCAP - Digital music marketplace
• Tunelog - Music metadata management
• WebJay - Music playlist management
• Winamp - Customizable music player
• Yahoo Audio Search - Music search services
• Yahoo Music Engine - Desktop music player

Kevin Farnham runs Lyra Technical Systems, a small software consulting and publishing company where he often works with O’Reilly Media, currently as Community Manager for the Threading Building Blocks open source project and was previously the Managing Editor for the AOL Developer Community. On the software engineering side Kevin specializes in mathematical modeling, simulation, and scientific data analysis.

Share This

Posted by KevinFarnham as APIs, Music, Popular, Site News at 4:18 AM | 8 Comments »

February 20th, 2008

Viacom’s Flux Goes OpenSocial Compatible

As Caroline McCarthy reports, Viacom’s social networking platform Flux will officially support Google’s OpenSocial. The Flux platform now has a more complete developer center with documentation, sample code and support forums. We’ve added a new Flux API Profile to our listings with more details. The screenshot below shows a sample application and code snippet of Flux code for displaying videos.

The Flux service was launched in September of last year to provide a free mechanism for partners of entertainment giant Viacom to add social networking features: “content sharing, member profiles, customized page layouts, photo and video uploads, easy technical integration” to their own sites. A user who signs up for one of the Flux sites then can use that name and password on any other Flux site. In that sense it operates like Ning - it’s not a destination network, but a “network of networks,” albeit one that anticipates that sites will proliferate around musical artists, record labels, media companies, DJ’s, and other cultural influencers.

In November Michael Arrington reported on the feature differences between Flux and Ning from a site owner’s perspective, and earlier this month he analyzed their respective traffic patterns.

Much like Facebook’s FBML, Flux has its own markup language called FML, the Flux Markup Language, to simplify site management, templating of pages, and to access the social graph. In comparison with FBML, the examples offered in the developer network seem geared more towards easy page templating for collections of videos and photos, and integration with discussion forums, profiles, and blogs.

With the Flux read-only REST-based API, a developer can access the members of a community, and that member’s friends, images, posts, and videos. From the site: “The Flux Data Access API (DAAPI) provides the mechanism for retrieving publicly available community data. FML uses DAAPI queries to make requests for data. The output is offered in multiple formats (XML, Atom, JSON) for convenience. The DAAPI can be used both inside the community and externally (for integration of outbound widgets and promotions).”

Flux can be used at three different levels: fShare for external widget distribution of content from a Flux community, Flux Lite for simple member profiles, and Flux Custom for the full suite of tools.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as OpenSocial, Social at 12:29 AM | 2 Comments »

February 19th, 2008

Platform as a Service via Bungee Connect

Utah-based startup Bungee Labs is in the news today having taken the wraps off Bungee Connect, their web-based application development and hosting platform. Bungee aims to provide an end-to-end environment for developing applications in the cloud: from editing code through to debugging, deployment and runtime. Nothing installed locally, everything happens on their infrastructure. They’ve worked to make the programming experience familiar to developers as you can see in the screenshot below showing their browser-based code environment:

The service will be priced on a utility model where billing is based on the amount of time an application is used. Like Amazon’s utility services there are no upfront costs or fixed fees. Target customers are developers in small to medium sized companies or departmental groups in larger organizations. Note this platform, with its C-like language BungeeLogic, is designed for developers, in contrast to tools like Microsoft Popfly or IBM’s QEDWiki, both of which are targeted outside of traditional IT.

This launch is notable because there’s clearly a race on in this new market that’s now being called “Platform as a Service”. Players include companies like Salesforce.com and Etelos, and it’s widely expected before long a variety of major vendors including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others will be increasing their offerings in this area. Whether that means discrete pieces like development tools, or deployment and runtime infrastructure, or metering and billing, we expect to see a real battle for developer’s hearts and minds on this front. For more, see coverage from ZDNet’s Dan Farber on this announcement.

In addition to the public beta, Bungee is also releasing a fairly sophisticated reference application shown below called “WideLens”. This mashup is a calendar application that reads and writes in realtime to sources including Microsoft Exchange, Google Calendar, Salesforce.com, Facebook, MySQL and iCalendar feeds. Running an application like this would cost somewhere between $2 to $5 per user per month.

/>

Bungee Labs is a ProgrammableWeb sponsor.

Share This

Posted by John Musser as Tools at 3:11 AM | No Comments »