March 31st, 2008

LyricWiki API: Get Song Lyrics via Code

LyricWiki.org is a terrific, free archive of song lyrics. How large? At the moment it has over 669,000 content pages. It’s a broad and deep catalog. Search for Alanis Morissette and you’ll see that she released three albums prior to her famous “Jagged Little Pill” in 1995. With such a useful database it’s fortunate for developers and web site owners there’s the LyricWiki API. This well documented SOAP-based API provides methods that enable programmed search, get, and post operations.

The LyricWiki API lets you search for songs, artists, and albums. You can get the lyrics for a specific song; get an artist’s discography; or get a track listing for a specific album. You can also post new information into the LyricWiki archive: a new artist, an album, and song lyrics. The API exposes many of their site features like Song of the Day and Album of the Week.

These two recent mashup entries show how developers are using this API, including Lyrics Muse (profile) which enables last.fm users to quickly see lyrics for the music they’re listening to.

If you’ve got a music-related site, and you’d like to provide your visitors with lyrics, applying the LyricWiki API will give you and your site visitors access to what may well be the largest lyrics archive on the Web.

For more music-related APIs and mashups check the ProgrammableWeb Music Dashboard.

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Posted by KevinFarnham as Music at 12:19 AM | 2 Comments »

March 28th, 2008

Mashups in Learning-Focused Organizations

The New Media Consortium (NMC), “an international not-for-profit consortium of nearly 250 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies,” highlighted data mashups as an important emerging technology in its 2008 Horizon Report. The report estimates that it will take 2 to 3 years (PDF) for mashups to become part of the mainstream for “teaching, learning, or creative applications.”

Following upon the report is the online 2008 NMC Symposium on Mashups scheduled for next week, April 1-3. On the program are such talks as “The Future is a Monstrous and Marvelous Mashup”, “Learning From the Mashup: Are We Blending Our Future, or Throwing Our Future in the Blender?”, “Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist”, and “Information Visualization Using Mashups and Web 2.0 Tools”.

Might the NMC report and symposium be a sign that mashups are finally being embraced by forward-looking learning-focused organizations? In the meantime, check out the 4 education-related APIs and 36 “education” tagged mashups already in ProgrammableWeb.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Events, Gov at 1:04 AM | 2 Comments »

March 27th, 2008

Amazon Enhances EC2, Embraces Failure

Amazon’s web services team has just announced two enhancements to their successful EC2 cloud computing service that makes it even more desirable and useful by making it more fault-tolerant: the ability to place instances in multiple locations and “Elastic IP addresses”.

As you can see below, both of these are key pieces of the puzzle in how to build dynamic systems in the cloud that can deliver both scalability and fault-tolerance. As O’Reilly Radar’s Jesse Robbins points out “Datacenters and geographic regions are Single Points of Failure (SPOF) too. Failure Happens, and it’s far better (and cheaper) to build services that are resilient to failure than to try to prevent them from happening. This is a big step in the right direction.”

• Elastic IP Addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing, and now make it easy to host web sites, web services and other online applications in Amazon EC2. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your AWS account, not with your instances, and can be programmatically mapped to any of your instances. This allows you to easily recover from instance and other failures while presenting your users with a static IP address.
• Availability Zones give you the ability to easily and inexpensively operate a highly available internet application. Each Amazon EC2 Availability Zone is a distinct location that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones. Previously, only very large companies had the scale to be able to distribute an application across multiple locations, but now it is as easy as changing a parameter in an API call. You can choose to run your application across multiple Availability Zones to be prepared for unexpected events such as power failures or network connectivity issues, or you can place instances in the same Availability Zone to take advantage of free data transfer and the lowest latency communication.

Amazon’s blog post points to a useful series of new articles on EC2 by the team at RightScale: DNS and Elastic IPs and how they come in to play when upgrading a server, setting up a fault-tolerant site using the Availability Zones, and now support the new Elastic IP and Availability Zone. Includes good details, walk-throughs and illustrations like below.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Infrastructure at 11:43 AM | 1 Comment »

Microsoft Partners with Social Networks on Data Portability

This week Microsoft made data portability news by announcing a partnership with five of largest social networks to allow users to export their contacts from Windows Live directly into those services. Partner networks include Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5 and Tagged (the Facebook export works now, with the others coming soon). Underneath the covers the integration is based on the Windows Live Contacts API and in conjunction with the announcement Microsoft has launched www.invite2messenger.net where users can invite friends from partner social networks to join their Windows Live Messenger contact list.

The stated objective is to create a “secure two-way street” in which users control how and when their data is shared:

We think customers should be able to share their data in the most safe and secure way possible, but historically this openness has been achieved largely through a mechanism called “screen-scraping,” which unduly puts customers at risk for phishing attacks, identity fraud, and spam. Now with the Windows Live Contacts API, we have provided an alternative to “screen-scraping” that is equally open but unequivocally safer and more secure for customers.

Certainly screen scraping is an anti-pattern that’s gotten a lot of attention recently. And it’s become such a common way for sites to access users’ contacts that it’s created a good business for companies who provide address book scraping libraries like Octazen Solutions.

Moves like this from Microsoft and Google’s recently launched Contacts API are solid steps along the path to interoperability of social network data. For more lively discussion on this topic there’s the upcoming Data Sharing Summit and Workshop on April 18-19th in SF and Mountain View on May 15th.

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Posted by John Musser as Facebook, Microsoft, Social, Standards at 12:22 AM | No Comments »

March 26th, 2008

FriendFeed Launches API

FriendFeed, the popular activity stream aggregation service have just announced their API. FriendFeed is a service that allows users to create content streams akin to the Facebook newsfeed by telling it what third-party services they use like Flickr, Twitter and del.icio.us. Friends and family can then share and subscribe to each others feeds. Given how white hot this platform is at the moment we can expect developers to jump on this API quickly. As ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick points-out this API has lots of potential and might be as popular with developers as the Twitter API, which drives them 10x more traffic than their site does.

The new FriendFeed API is REST-based and provides access to these feeds in a variety of data formats including XML, JSON, RSS and Atom. It supports a variety of read functions as well as the ability to write new links, messages, images and comments. More technical details in our new FriendFeed API profile.

Other details from the launch:

• For users, a “remote key” is used to grant access. “A remote key is a kind of password that you can give to third-party applications and websites to let them interact with FriendFeed on your behalf. There are limits to what can be done using a remote key, which means it’s a lot safer than giving a site your FriendFeed password.”
• Support for OAuth is coming
• They’ve provided PHP and Python libraries to help get developers up to speed quickly
• Other API resources include an FAQ and forum

FriendFeed itself is a mashup in that they use both RSS feeds and third party APIs to aggregate the data in their streams. As time goes on we’re seeing more services that both consume the APIs of others as well as publish APIs of their own.

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Posted by John Musser as Social at 12:36 AM | 1 Comment »

March 25th, 2008

Google, Yahoo, MySpace Form OpenSocial Foundation

In another big move for the OpenSocial inititive, Google, Yahoo and MySpace announced today the formation of OpenSocial Foundation. As reported earlier this month, Yahoo was expected to join OpenSocial, and indeed now it’s official: “It’s no longer a trial balloon — it’s for real. We are taking this opportunity to help ensure websites and developers feel confident using OpenSocial as the building blocks for their new social apps.” But clearly this news goes well beyond Yahoo’s participation, it’s another step in moving OpenSocial into the common fabric of the web.

Other details from the announcement:

• All specifications are avilable under a Creative Commons license
• The new official home for OpenSocial specificiations and developer community will be opensocial.org
• The foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework
• The OpenSocial Foundation Proposal outlines their goal “to ensure the sustainable and open development of the OpenSocial initiative and related intellectual property”
• OpenSocial Foundation Intent Agreement is being shared publicly as well
• Shindig will continue to be the open source reference implementation

Where’s Facebook on this news? CNET’s Caroline McCarthy reports on a statement from Facebook that “As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation. The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience.”

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Posted by John Musser as Google, OpenSocial, Social, Standards, Yahoo at 11:16 AM | No Comments »

Imeem Opens Music-centric Social API

Imeem, the third largest social network in the US, has just opened their “imeem Media Platform” for third party developers. Besides having access to Imeem’s 24 million users, the thing that will likely attract developers to this platform is their video, photo and, most importantly, music content. This is because Imeem has licensed millions of songs from the major music labels and these will be directly available via the platform. The API is Flex and ActionScript3-based (for more more technical details check our Imeem API profile).

The feature for this set of web services and client libraries includes:

• Access media on imeem, including music, videos, and photos
• Access to imeem’s social graph, including users, friends, and associated profile data
• Fully customize a skinless imeem media player
• Upload music, videos, and photos and modify associated metadata
• Search imeem’s media content by keyword, artist, title, or album
• Access imeem’s most frequently played music and videos and recommended content
• Create, edit, and manage new playlists or access millions of music, video, and photo playlists created by imeem users

Other notable details of the launch:

• The platform itself exposes the underlying infrastructure for hosting, transcoding and delivering media.
• As has become increasingly common lately, the platform is initially available in a sandbox mode that’s available to developers only, not the general public.
• OpenSocial compatibility is not part of this launch and is scheduled for the coming months.
• Imeem’s announcement includes suggestions of possible sample apps ranging from recommendation engines to customer players (ala Winamp, an Imeem inspiration) to quizzes.

As we’ve seen with 142 web music mashups and 25+ music APIs, there’s no shortage of developer interest in music applications, and combining this will Imeem’s social network could prove to be a winning combination.

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Posted by John Musser as Music, OpenSocial, Social, Video at 1:19 AM | No Comments »

March 24th, 2008

TiVo to Become a YouTube Mashup

“Pick up the remote, turn on the television — and watch YouTube.” That’s what the New York Times reported in one of the more interesting side notes as part of the big YouTube API release earlier this month. The report highlighted the new partnership between TiVo, makers of the popular digital video recorder, and YouTube. By leveraging YouTube’s platform, TiVo users will have direct access to web videos from their televisions. As noted in the TiVo case study on the YouTube API site:

TiVo users will be able to watch high quality YouTube videos on their television. By using the YouTube search APIs users will be able to search and instantly stream any video from the YouTube repository. By using the YouTube write APIs users will be able to participate in the YouTube community and rate, flag and share videos. Lastly users will be able to log into their YouTube accounts from their TiVo boxes and access their favorite YouTube channels and playlists.

We’re starting to see an increase in these sorts of business and technology partnerships being facilitated by APIs and platforms. While the consumer-facing mashups created by individuals and small companies may be most common, they’re often not where the bigger payoff is for API providers. Take for example other YouTube case studies including Casio, Slide, and Electronic Arts.

For the upcoming TiVo service, due later this year, keep in mind that as Brian Stelter at the Times reported, the YouTube integration will not be available to all TiVo owners:

The YouTube product will be available only to a subset of TiVo users who have up-to-date hardware and a broadband connection. Of the four million TiVo users nationwide, more than half receive their set-top box from a cable operator. Of the 1.7 million who purchased their box directly from TiVo, about 800,000 have the broadband connection. The company’s Series 3 and HD set-top boxes will support YouTube connectivity; earlier versions of the hardware did not support online video playback.

We’ve seen no letup in the pace of new YouTube web mashups. There are 230 now listed here of which 95 have been Mashup of the Day. Most recently these include globally diverse entries on topics ranging from Brazilian music (with the Last.fm API too), airports in Finland and band info from Portugal and other countries including the US using 5 different APIs to get photos, videos, news, etc (shown below).

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Video at 2:04 AM | No Comments »

March 20th, 2008

Google Releases Language Translation API

As of today, the powerful Google Translate service that lets you translate between 13 different languages and 29 language pairs is now available as a handy JavaScript-based API. Given the breadth of the engine it’s built on, it already supports languages including Russian, Korean, Arabic, Italian, Greek, French and Spanish. It’s a simple but powerful API, given the number of uses this can be put to. Our new Google Translate API profile has more technical details.

As their announcement makes clear, it’s a very easy to use API with two main functions: language detection and language translation. The language translate() function just needs a string to translate, the source and destination languages, and a callback function. The detect() function takes a block of text and a callback.

Since language detection is very hard problem and not always perfect, the API provides two useful properties of a true/falue value “isReliable” and a 0-1.0 “confidence” value which together give an indication of how certain the language detector is in each case.

For some ideas on what uses this can put to, check-out our listing of 7 translation-related mashups in our directory now. These include the mashup shown below, Universal Chat Translator for Skype (download here), a plug-in built on the Skype API that translates chats in real-time:

Note that the API documentation makes it clear there are more features coming before long: “We plan on adding more exciting capabilities to the AJAX Language API in the future, so stay tuned.”

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Posted by John Musser as Google at 7:36 PM | 6 Comments »

Amazon Launches Fulfillment Web Service

Today the Amazon Web Services team announced their new Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (Amazon FWS). As Amazon’s Jeff Barr explains in Our Most Fulfilling Web Service Yet this API “allows merchants to tap in to Amazon’s network of fulfillment centers and our expertise in logistics. Merchants can store their own products to our fulfillment centers and then, using a simple web service interface, fulfill orders for the products. That’s right – make a web service call, ship a product to a customer!” Our new Amazon Fulfillment API profile has an overview and more technical details.

Overall the service has two complementary sets of APIs: Inbound and Outbound:

The Inbound service gives merchants the ability to create and send shipments to an Amazon fulfillment center (FC). The getInboundShipmentPreview function is used to locate one or more Amazon FCs to receive a particular product. The service may choose to send products to a variety of FCs in order to balance supplies across the entire network. Next, the putInboundShipment function is used to inform Amazon that the merchant will be shipping the product to the indicated FCs. Once the products have been shipped, the setInboundShipmentStatus function is used to inform Amazon that the product is actually on its way.

The Outbound service gives merchants the ability to ship products from Amazon FCs to their customers. This service revolves around the concept of a fulfillment order. The order contains a destination address, a shipping speed, and a list of item/quantity pairs to be shipped. The createFulfillmentOrder function is used to initiate the shipping process. There are also functions for listing all orders, cancelling orders, and getting the status of an order.

The APIs themselves are SOAP based. In order to use them you’ll need a merchant account with Amazon because only merchants can list an item and you need an item to sell in order to have Amazon fulfill it.

With 15 different APIs available, Amazon continues to expose both more and more of their core eCommerce services as well as their hosting infrastructure, and in so doing continue to push the web service frontier.

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Posted by John Musser as Amazon, Shopping at 1:35 PM | 2 Comments »