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Web API Sites

April 30th, 2008

Make Phone Calls With AOL’s New API

AOL has just launched a new telephony web service for developers: the Open Voice API. As noted in the announcement, this API is intended to “provide third-party developers and VoIP device manufacturers with open standards protocols that will enable them to easily integrate the AIM Call Out service into softphones, as well as SIP-enabled hardware and cell phones with wi-fi connectivity.” The new platform works in conjunction with the AIM Call Out service that offers discounted global calling:

AIM Call Out is a pay-as-you-go outbound voice calling service built right into AIM that lets users make calls to landline and cell phones in more than 200 countries. This service complements the existing AIM Talk service, a free PC-to-PC voice calling service available to AIM users.

AIM Call Out offers low per-minute rates with no connection fee or monthly charge. Users pay for call credits in increments as low as $5. AIM users can visit http://call-out.aim.com/rates for a complete list of long distance rates.

Users can also make phone-to-phone calls using the Web Connect feature within the AIM Call Out service. Users simply enter their phone number and then the phone number of a friend. In a few seconds, the user’s phone will ring and then connect them to their friend’s phone.

As you can see on the AIM Call developer’s page, the API itself supports a host of SIP-related standards. We’ve now added a new Open Voice API profile to our directory.

Telephony and communications APIs have become a highly competitive space. How competitive? There are now over 20 APIs in the Telephony category alone.

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Posted by John Musser as AOL, Telephony at 12:48 AM | No Comments »

April 29th, 2008

Semantic Search the US Library of Congress

As the national library of the United States, the Library of Congress has created vast amounts of metadata to describe books and other documents in its collection. Among this metadata is the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), a “controlled vocabulary” for classifying documents by subject. In order words, experts at the Library of Congress have come up with a (large) list of subject headers from which catalogers of documents can choose. As an example, if you look at the Library of Congress record for Tim Berners-Lee’s book Weaving the Web, you’ll that it is classified under “World Wide Web“, specifically “World Wide Web–History“.

Since the Library of Congress isn’t the only entity that classifies documents, you can imagine that other entities (and not just libraries) would interested in reusing the LCSH vocabulary. But how should the Library of Congress make LCSH available so that it can be easily reused?

That’s where the recent release of lcsh.info comes in (see also the lcsh.info ProgrammableWeb Profile):

This is an experimental service that makes the Library of Congress Subject Headings available as linked-data using the SKOS vocabulary. The goal of lcsh.info is to encourage experimentation and use of LCSH on the web with the hopes of informing a similar effort at the Library of Congress to make a continually updated version available. More information about the Linked Data effort can be found on the W3C Wiki.

Let’s look at what you can do with lcsh.info through a couple of examples. First, we return to the subject heading World Wide Web, this time accessible from lcsh.info as

http://lcsh.info/sh95000541

Note the form of the URL: http://lcsh.info/{lccn} where lccn refers to the Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN), an identifier of the subject heading. In this case, the LCCN for World Wide Web is sh95000541.

If you drop this URL into your browser, you’ll get the default format or representation of the information lcsh.info has about the World Wide Web subject header, including:

broader terms (e.g., Hypertext systems)
narrower terms (e.g., Semantic Web)
related terms (e.g., Internet)
alternative label — (e.g, W3 (World Wide Web))

The diagram below illustrates some of these relationships

To facilitate reuse of the data, lcsh.info offers its data a variety of formats that can be accessed via content negotiation. That is, you use the Accept HTTP header to specify which of the following content type you want:

XHTML (with embedded RDFa), which is the default value (application/xhtml+xml)
JSON (application/json)
RDF/XML (application/rdf+xml)
N3 (text/n3)

For example, you can use curl to get JSON representation of the World Wide Web subject header:

curl -v -L -H “Accept: application/json” http://lcsh.info/sh85062913

By looking at the RDF/XML and N3 representations, you can see a concrete example of semantic web approaches to express notions of broader, narrower, and related terms as well as alternative labels using

Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), which is “a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, folksonomies, and other types of controlled vocabulary”
designs rules for linked data to represent the network of interconnected subject headings

This experimental but promising service may soon pave the way for full production level web services from the Library of Congress.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Gov, SemanticWeb at 1:29 AM | 1 Comment »

April 28th, 2008

OAuth Coming to All Google Data APIs

Standardization, or lack thereof, around identity, authentication and authorization for open web APIs is one of the greatest challenges to mashup application developers today. So it’s quite notable that Google not only just quietly added OAuth support to their Google Contacts API but also stated that “This is our first step towards OAuth enabling all Google Data APIs.” With over a dozen GData APIs to date and more on the way, this is a significant endorsement of this relatively new standard.

OAuth, which we covered last fall, is an API access delegation protocol that has been described as your valet key for the web:

Like the feature on many cars today where you give the parking attendant a special key to your car that gives him some, but not all, access to your vehicle. On the Web you now have your own keys to dozens of sites but how to best handle the mashup-style case of site A wants you to grant them access to get some data from site B? Ideally you don’t want to give site A your password to site B. OAuth aims to simplify this problem: “It allows you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User).”

This marks at least the second API from one of the major providers to now support OAuth: earlier this year, the innovative Yahoo Fire Eagle API integrated OAuth support.

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Security, Standards, Yahoo at 1:30 AM | 2 Comments »

April 25th, 2008

The Yahoo Operating System

At yesterday’s Web 2.0 Expo keynote, Yahoo’s CTO Ari Balogh announced YOS, Yahoo Open Strategy, a major transformation that will ultimately give developers access to a vast array of Yahoo services including mail, sports, search, the Yahoo home page, mobile, My Yahoo and others. It’s an ambitious “rewiring” of Yahoo that includes development tools, an application platform, and unified social profiles.

The first public piece of this effort is the project code-named Search Monkey, initially announced back in February: an extensible, open approach to search. Later this year Yahoo will unveil Y!Open which among other things will expose social network services and tools for developers including news feed-style streams, which they refer to as “vitality”.

Although this announcement comes only days after Google announced iGoogle is becoming a social network, Ari stated that “We are not creating another social network. We will rewire the entire experience to make it social. We don’t think of social as a destination but as a dimension.”

Yahoo’s Neal Sample provides more background on Yahoo’s blog and you can view the Ari’s Web 2.0 Keynote here:

Yahoo used the occasion to remind folks just how vast their reach is: 500 million unique users and 120 pageviews per month. And with 10 billion relationships on Yahoo buddy lists and address books, “there’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo!, and we’re going to bring it to the surface”.

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Posted by John Musser as Yahoo at 4:11 AM | 2 Comments »

April 24th, 2008

25 Finance APIs

Among the 25 finance-related APIs now listed on ProgrammableWeb, there are services from old and new companies, and large and small companies. For example, the venerable Dun and Bradstreet offers the Dun and Bradstreet Credit Check API, personal finance startup Wesabe offers an API and there’s an API from Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending service. Overall, most current business and finance APIs fall into one of two categories: APIs from SaaS-based business administration and management services, and APIs that provide financial markets data.

SaaS Business Administration APIs

A variety of new on-demand service providers offer APIs as a means to reach and integrate with their services. For example, the Blinksale API accesses their online invoicing service. The REST API provides access to your Blinksale data, letting you create invoices using a Blinksale invoice template or one of your own creation.

The FreshBooks API provides online invoicing and time tracking using your Freshbooks account. The KashFlow and NetAccounts APIs offer broader accounting capabilities, geared toward businesses in the UK and Australia, respectively.

Financial Data APIs

Looking for real-time financial market quotes or historical data? Fifteen APIs are ready to get you the data you need, when you need it. Xignite provides financial data APIs ranging from XigniteRealtime and XigniteFunds (real-time U.S. stock market quotes, and U.S. mutual fund data) to XigniteCurrencies and XigniteRates (currency and international interest rate data) to XigniteEdgar and XigniteCalendar (U.S. SEC Edgar filings and global economic calendars). The Xignite APIs feature SOAP and REST protocols, with all data returned in XML format. Once you’ve used one Xignite API, it’s relatively easy to get started with others, since all the APIs incorporate a common design structure.

StrikeIron offers a number of APIs that serve users with U.S. financial data including StrikeIron Stock Quotes Basic, StrikeIron Mutual Funds, and StrikeIron Historical Stock Quotes. The StrikeIron APIs utilize SOAP protocol and return results in XML format.

Timepost Mashup

Business and Financial APIs provide excellent opportunities for developing mashups. One example is the Timepost mashup, which applies the Blinksale and FreshBooks business APIs, along with the popular Basecamp API (from 37signals) and the Harvest time-tracking API. Integration of these APIs results in a rich time tracking and project collaboration solution for small businesses.

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Posted by KevinFarnham as Money at 4:07 AM | 4 Comments »

April 23rd, 2008

Flickr: 704 API Calls per Second

code.flickr.com As announced on the Flickr Blog, Flickr has launched a new website for developers: Flickr Code. And besides announcing the new site they’ve both a) given interesting details on just how much API traffic they do each day (see below), and b) they announced they’re open sourcing Flickr Uploadr, the cross-platform (Windows and OS X) desktop tool for uploading photos to Flickr.

New at Flickr Code, you can find:

Uploadr is built on on Mozilla’s XUL Runner. Now that Uploadr is open source, developers can customize and extend its functionality. Maybe you will want to apply specific effects (such as watermarking) to your photos before uploading them. More radically, perhaps Uploadr can be transformed to be a full-function desktop UI to Flickr, to become a Viewr and Downloadr all in one. Maybe developers will extend the Flickr Uploadr to talk to sites other than Flickr. The potential is there for all this development.

How to get started with hacking Uploadr? A good starting point is Flickr Uploadr, start to finish now to learn about the challenges of developing cross-platform apps using XULRunner. Check out the video interview with developer Rob Crowley to get an in-depth story. You can also join the discussion at the Flickr Group Hacking Uploadr.

Even though the open source Uploadr is the big announcement coming from code.flickr.com, don’t miss the fascinating glimpse that the announcement provides into the tremendous buzz continuing around the venerable Flickr API (which you may know as the 2nd most mashed up API listed in ProgrammableWeb with 329 Flickr mashups listed):

In the last week we deployed new code to Flickr 50 times, including 546 changes by 16 people. We issued over 2,000 new API keys, and third party developers made an average of 704 API calls per second, across 109 public API methods. We added 1 new API method, and updated 7 others. There are approximately 10,000 lines of open source code in our public subversion repository.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Code, Metrics, Yahoo, photo at 1:10 AM | 2 Comments »

April 22nd, 2008

iGoogle + OpenSocial = Social Network?

iGoogle, Google’s personalized homepage is on its way to becoming a of social network thanks to their just announced adoption of the OpenSocial API. In particular, the just launched developer sandbox will allow gadgets on iGoogle will be able to access friends’ data and to create “activity streams” (akin to the Facebook news feed). Shown below is the Updates Gadget where using the OpenSocial API “you can post updates to the updates gadget. Users will be able to see updates generated from their friends’ gadgets, encouraging content sharing.”

As this is in ’sandbox’ mode, this feature set is available only to developers and is not yet rolled-out to the general iGoogle population.

The Google team have updated their iGoogle developer docs and FAQ with more details. There’s also a new video from Google demonstrating the new features.

Many are interpreting this as a hint of things to come. And as VentureBeat’s MG Siegler asks “Who needs to login to Facebook when all your friend’s updates are right there on your homepage?”.

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Posted by John Musser as Google, OpenSocial, Social at 1:50 AM | 2 Comments »

April 21st, 2008

Google’s REST API for Search

In the beginning, there was the Google (SOAP) Search API. In December 2006, Google no longer issued any new keys for this API. Those with keys already could still use the API, but it was effectively deprecated.

Then came the Google Ajax Search API. This API was more fully fleshed out but was meant to be used only in browser-based JavaScript to display search results. In contrast, the old Google SOAP Search API had not been tied to browser-based JavaScript applications.

Now, earlier this month, via Google Blogoscoped and BadMagicNumber, comes word that Google added a RESTful supplement to the Ajax Search API to support “Flash and other Non-Javascript Environments:

For Flash developers, and those developers that have a need to access the AJAX Search API from other Non-Javascript environments, the API exposes a simple RESTful interface. In all cases, the method supported is GET and the response format is a JSON encoded result set with embedded status codes. Applications that use this interface must abide by all existing terms of use. An area to pay special attention to relates to correctly identifying yourself in your requests. Applications MUST always include a valid and accurate http referer header in their requests. In addition, we ask, but do not require, that each request contains a valid API Key. By providing a key, your application provides us with a secondary identification mechanism that is useful should we need to contact you in order to correct any problems.

The example search given in the documentation should give you a quick sense of how to use this part of the API. The following command

curl -e http://www.my-ajax-site.com “http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=Paris%20Hilton”

returns a JSON object, which you can parse for titles, URLs, and short blurbs.

We can infer from the careful wording in the documentation that the RESTful interface to the the Google Ajax search API is still supposed to be used only for displaying Google search results on a website. Note the insistence on a proper HTTP referer header (implying that the call is from a web application) and the reference to the API’s terms of use.

In order words, we’ve come from a SOAP based search API that was limited to personal, non-commercial use that nonetheless wasn’t tied to web applications to the current manifestation of an Ajax and RESTful API that is open for restricted commercial use tied to displaying search results on the Web. What’s next?

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Google, Search at 2:54 AM | 4 Comments »

April 18th, 2008

Follow the Oil Money

Did you know that George W. Bush received $2,649,725 in oil contributions is his 2004 election campaign? Or that in 2008 Rudy Giuliani received $659,158, John McCain received $291,685 and that Barack Obama received $163,840? These and other bits of political trivia and insight come from a useful site that was recently Mashup of the Day: Follow Oil Money. The very well done and enlightening service is subtitled “tracking petroleum industry campaign contributions.” It draws from over 8,000 contributions from 6000 companies to deliver a rich set of tools for searching and visualizing where the money comes from and who it goes to.

As co-creators Greg Michalec and Skye Bender-deMoll describe:

We’ve created a map of the political campaign contributions from companies in the oil & gas industries to politicians who are candidates for federal office. This is a relationship map of the contribution network. That means that unlike a physical map, where points are positioned at a geographic location, the icons for the companies and candidates are placed so that they are that they are as close as possible to whomever they contribute to or receive contributions from.

Another way to imagine it is like a molecule: the companies and candidates are like atoms, and the contributions are like atomic bonds. Or, one can think of it like the popular websites Facebook or MySpace, in which companies and politicians have become ‘friends’ by giving money.

Data comes from a variety of sources including the Sunlight Labs API, the Democracy In Action API, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Center for Responsive Politics, and GovTrack.us. Skye provides more background on his blog.

The developers even let you know what tools they used to build it: MySQL, PHP, Graphviz, and the script.aculo.us and TableKit ajax libraries.

For more on government-related APIs, mashups, and news (like Tracking Money and Politics), check the Government API and Mashup Dashboard.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Gov at 2:45 AM | 1 Comment »

April 17th, 2008

Google I/O Coming Soon, Free Passes Now

Hardly a week goes by these days without an API or other developer-related announcement from Google. And given that they now have over 35 different APIs as well as whole platforms like Android, Google will be hosting their first multi-day developer event next month in San Francisco: Google I/O, May 28-29. Last year they had a successful, one day global Developer Day, and this year’s event looks to be a whole lot bigger and broader with 70 sessions covering:

AJAX & JavaScript: AJAX and JavaScript continue to capture the imagination of web developers. These sessions focus on tools and techniques of client-side code, and how to use them to make serious applications quickly and easily.
APIs & Tools: Development tools for the web are evolving. Product APIs allow integration and extension of web applications. Tools like the Google Web Toolkit™ provide a whole new way to improve performance and compatibility.
Social: The web is an inherently social place. A new wave of APIs and frameworks, including OpenSocial, are opening up interesting ways to interact with people through applications.
Mobile: Mobile devices are blurring the lines between handset developers and web developers, opening up interesting opportunities for applications that span multiple platforms. We’ll take a look at how developers can use technologies such as Android™ and Mobile Gears to build applications on the mobile web.
Maps & Geo: Since the introduction of the Google Maps™ API in 2005, geo and map applications have been one of the most interesting phenomena on the web. These sessions focus on the many aspects of geo applications, from KML to the Google Maps API and more.

Should be a great event and ProgrammableWeb has 10 free passes to give away: be among the first ten to reply in the comments here and receive a free pass to the two-day Google I/O conference in San Francisco (a $400 value). And of course you’re welcome to suggest what sorts of Google based mashups you’d like to see built next: perhaps using Google Calendar, or YouTube, or Google Book Search, or the new Google Visualization tools.

Update: The free passes have all been given away. Thanks for all the fast replies, ideas and comments.

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