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Web API Sites

May 12th, 2008

Google Friend Connect: Make Any Site Social

Google announced Friend Connect today, a new service that will allow any web site to enable social networking features for their visitors. And the key piece of the strategy is that to do so only takes a few lines code, similar to the ease with which AdSense ads can be to any web page. By walking through a few steps in a web-based wizard, a site owner can get a snippet of code that can add functionality like “user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.” More information on the project will be available at http://www.google.com/friendconnect after the Campfire One event at Google’s Mountainview headquarters later tonight.

Leveraging emerging standards like OAuth, OpenID and OpenSocial, Friend Connect stitches together much of the social network plumbing found in most of today’s social networks. And by virtue of building on OpenSocial, it effectively makes any site that uses Friend Connect into a simple OpenSocial container, allowing them to include almost any OpenSocial application into their site (note that sites can still use projects like Shindig and their own code to build more elaborate social features, Friend Connect just looks to lower the bar to entry). As Google’s directory of engineering David Glazer describes:

“Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social,” said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. “Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

More technical details will be available shortly, and in the meantime Google has release a few screenshots, one that shows an otherwise un-social page about Guacamole can gain social features and another showing the start page for their wizard-like setup process.

For good coverage of today’s announcement, which TechCrunch initially broke, see Dan Farber at ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb, O’Reilly Radar, VentureBeat, and the thread at Techmeme.

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Posted by John Musser as Google, OpenSocial, Social at 1:13 PM | No Comments »

Upcoming Events of Note

The spring conference season is in full swing at the moment and we’re seeing a lot of conference sessions and tracks focused on web APIs, platforms and mashups. Here’s a rundown of these events happening this month and next.

O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference is this week in Burlingame, CA (tutorials are today, general sessions begin tomorrow). As you can see on the agenda, lots of API and mashup-related sessions. ProgrammableWeb readers can save 15% off registration via discount code whr08pgw.
Later this week, on Thursday the 15th, over at Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale is the SearchMonkey Launch Party. As one of the first components of the Yahoo Operating System, SearchMonkey looks very promising. Party starts at 5:30pm. Be among the first ten readers here who RSVP to searchmonkeyevent@yahoo-inc.com and mention ProgrammableWeb can get a $50 iTunes gift certificate.
On May 27-28th at the NetSquared Conference in San Jose, CA, you can see how mashups can provide insight into important social issues as part of the NetSquared Mashup Challenge which culminates at the event (our earlier coverage here). A limited number of seats are still available to the public through May 16th.
In just over two weeks, on May 28-29th in San Francisco is Google I/O. As we covered last month there are 70+ sessions on dozens of Google API and mashup-related topics.
For lots more on social APIs from OpenSocial to Facebook, there’s next month’s Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) East, June 9-11th in Washington, DC. Speakers come from all the major players and sessions range from tutorials to advanced programming and monetization strategies. Our sponsor O’Reilly Media is offering 15% off registration by using code gspe08pgw.
Coming-up on 16-17th of June in New York City will be WidgetWebExpo. Two tracks will cover both the commercial and technical perspectives on widgets. Early bird pricing is in effect until the end of this week.
Also that same week is eBay’s Developer Conference, June 16-18th in Chicago. Tracks include sessions on programming and best practices using the eBay, PayPal and Shopping.com APIs.

And for more 2008 tech events, see good round-ups from Mashable and Frank Gruber.

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Posted by John Musser as Events at 2:13 AM | 1 Comment »

May 11th, 2008

Thanks to ProgrammableWeb 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.

Serena Software: If you’re looking to beat the backlog of your simple application needs and want to bring greater efficiency to your organization, then build business mashups in minutes with Serena Mashup Composer.
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.
BEA: Web 2.0 for Business. BEA’s AquaLogic product suite is built from the ground up for SOA, giving IT a unified set of products that handle user interaction, messaging, service management, data unification, and security needs.
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. StrikeIron’s new Lite Web Services gives developers more free access to valuable data and services.
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.
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: Some great O’Reilly conferences are coming-up including Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) East, June 9-11th in Washington, DC, and Velocity June 23-24 in Burlingame, CA. Both have lots of API and platform-related sessions. ProgrammableWeb readers can save 15% at GSP using registration code gspe08pgw and 15% at Velocity with code vel08pgw.
eBay: The future of ecommerce is coming to Chicago on June 16-18th when eBay hosts their annual eBay Developer’s Conference. A great lineup that covers not only eBay’s APIs but also platforms from PayPal, Shopping.com and Half.com. Register before May 31st and save $120.
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.
Where: From location-based service (LBS) provider uLocate, WHERE enables content owners and publishers to create compelling mobile GPS applications.
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.

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

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Posted by John Musser as Site News at 4:42 PM | No Comments »

May 9th, 2008

4 Spy Mashups - Watch in Realtime

If you want to see in realtime what’s going on Digg you can use their digg spy page. This popular Digg feature uses a dynamic Ajax UI to let you see diggs as they happen. And now it serves as a model for a growing number of mashups that use web APIs to give you a realtime window into activity on a variety of services. Here are four from our mashup listings:

Two good ones from the team at Ajaxonomy are TubeSpy (mashup profile) and del.icio.us Spy (mashup profile). TubeSpy shows the videos being watched on YouTube as they are being watched and del.icio.us Spy shows you the newest bookmarks added to del.icio.us and also letes you filter links and share the bookmarks.

FlickrSpy - the Flickr Peepshow shows you what’s uploaded right now (more details at our mashup profile).

Digg Comment Spy (mashup profile): Track live comments posted to Digg. Blue posts are replies to the top thread, yellow are replies to another comment.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Video, Visualization, photo at 2:28 AM | No Comments »

May 8th, 2008

Google Streetview in the Wild

In late March, Google announced enhancements to their mapping API that gave developers programmatic access to their popular streetview feature. Streetview allows users to “virtually explore city neighborhoods by viewing and navigating within 360-degree scenes of street-level imagery.” The API enhancements provide the ability to embed panoramas in an app and to even pan them dynamically using JavaScript.

Since that release, developers have had a chance to create some very interesting mashups using streetview, and in a recent Maps API blog post, Google’s Pamela Fox highlighted some of these (3 of which are now cataloged in our directory: StreetView Adventure Game, Povo Boston, and Dual Maps):

StreetView Adventure Game: In the spirit of the classic interactive fiction games like Zork, this demo lets you play a short game that begins with chasing a guy trying to climb out a window in San Francisco.

DualMaps: For a given location, displays the Street View, Birds Eye View, and Google aerial map view simultaneously and lets you embed or share the result.
Povo: A local reviews site specially for Boston. Displays street view in a lightbox for each location, and has made a Street View tour especially for the recent Boston Marathon.

And if you want more streetview mashup examples:

Also check out VegasVision, Ong Map V2 (Alpha), VPike, FlyRig, Street View Gadget, LotView, Street View SF Tour, RealBird, Glotter and a Street View Tour Gadget. And if you loved Trulia’s implementation (announced on Google LatLong last week), check out this demo that shows how to angle a street view panorama towards the side of the street that a building is on. (It involves math, but don’t worry, we’ve done it for you.)

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Mapping at 1:31 AM | 1 Comment »

May 7th, 2008

Love Color? Use This API

COLOURlovers, the terrific site for the color and design community now has its own API. For those not familiar with COLOURlovers, it’s “a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or even in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color apalettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.”

The new API (more details at our profile), gives you access to their growing database of user-generated named colors and palettes:

With the release of the COLOURlovers API, you can now access almost 1 million named colors and more than 325,000 color palettes for your creative projects and applications. Creating a theme editor and want to give your users some color theme options? Creating a visual project that ties keywords to colors? Who knows what amazingly creative stuff people will come up with.

Two of today’s new mashups, including the Mashup of the Day winner, were built using it: Dekaf Lovers and Renkler.

And for more on the “proper” spelling of the first word in their name see the enlightening post Color Vs. Colour, the Great Spelling Battle.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:48 AM | No Comments »

May 6th, 2008

How the Flickr API Now Handles Video

The most significant recent development for Flickr has been the introduction of video into what used to be a photo-only service. The Webware article What’s next for Flickr video? describes what the Flickr community has actually done with videos this last month. Of particular note for ProgrammableWeb readers is the state of the Flickr API:

One notable feature to come with the addition of video was the company’s decision to make it immediately available for use in Flickr’s standard data API. So far, there have been few services to take advantage of this, including Yahoo’s own video-editing tool Jumpcut. Kakul Srivastava, Flickr’s general manager says that there’s still work to be done with the Jumpcut team before Flickr video gets tie-ins, but that they’re on track to deliver something that’s seamless for users of both services.

In the meantime, one of the cooler creations to take advantage of Flickr’s video API is a video browser put together by Matt Crampton. It takes a smattering of some of the latest videos and puts them together on a giant array that people can watch without having to venture on Flickr.

Matt’s video browser mashup is now listed in our mashup directory:

Flickr developers seeking a detailed description of how to use the API to handle videos should turn to Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s Videos in the Flickr API. The essential ideas of his post on the Flickr Developer Blog is simple:

First thing to understand is as far as Flickr is concerned videos are just a funny type of photo. Your API application can ignore that video exists and everything should go on working. This means:

you can display a preview of a video by treating it exactly like any other photo on Flickr.

photos AND videos are returned by any method which used to return just photos

you can get info about a video like you would a photo.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Yahoo, photo at 2:41 AM | 1 Comment »

May 5th, 2008

3000 Mashups

3000 mashups. That’s how many mashups are now listed in our ProgrammableWeb directory as of last week. What’s most popular? As you can see in the chart below, the top ten categories of mashups do of course include mapping, but there’s a fairly even distribution across many of the other top categories like shopping, photos, video and music:

New mashups have been added to the directory every day since we launched in August 2005 and the average number of new mashups added here per day is 3.45 (a sample of all the mashups in existence)
While map mashups are common, the reality is that over 340 different APIs have been used in the apps listed here, with an average of 23 different APIs used per week
Since we started awarding a Mashup of the Day (MOTD) in early 2006, there have been 687 MOTD winners
The mashup tag cloud gives a sense of the variety of mashup types
Just outside of the top 10 categories are subjects like social (160 mashups), music (153), mobile (150), widgets (110), bookmarks (103), reference (96), events (94), and visualization (80)
If you look at mashups sorted by popularity you see what people view most often
There have been a lot of contest winners
You can now view the mashup listings as text only, images only, or text + images
Past “round number milestones” covered here in the blog have included 500, 1001, and 2000 mashups

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Posted by John Musser as Site News at 2:00 AM | 1 Comment »

May 2nd, 2008

Twitter API Goes Geo

Thanks to some new API updates, one can now update the Location field in a Twitter user’s profile using the Twitter API. As Ryan Sarver writes on his blog:

Location updates currently aren’t normalized or geocoded, but the ability to update it on the fly allows for some very cool possibilities when it comes to geo-based tweeting — especially in apps like Twinkle [an iPhone app] and Twittervision.

This update has now been reflected in the official API Documentation. For example, the following curl command will update your location (where USER and PASSWORD are your Twitter username and password):

curl -u USER:PASSWORD -d location="Berkeley, CA"
http://twitter.com/account/update_location.json

Note that the location field is limited to 30 bytes when encoded in UTF-8. Hence, a long address such as “2855 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, CA.” will be truncated as “2855 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley,”.

It will be interesting to see how this ability to programmatically change a user location will be used in practice. In addition to using this location field to display tweets on a Google map, Twittervision (profile) has been promoting a way to update one’s location right within a tweet, by embedding a location such as L: Berkeley, CA. What will Twitter programmers and users use to update their location: the profile location, individual tweets, both, or neither?

Meanwhile the Twitter API continues to provide us with a steady stream of very useful and interesting mashups, with 46 Twitter apps listed here so far, including recent entries like the straightforward Twitterwatch that lets you see all the latest twitters as they are sent (full profile here).

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Mapping, Social at 1:29 AM | 5 Comments »

May 1st, 2008

Photobucket Releases Public API

The popular photo and video hosting site Photobucket have announced a new public API to allow programmatic access to photos and videos hosted on their site. The company blog notes that the API will allow developers to:

Securely log into Photobucket accounts
Create, edit and access albums
Upload new content to their albums (photos, images and videos)
Share content from albums via email
Search through publicly available content on Photobucket
Access and update metadata (titles, descriptions, tags, etc.)

The Photobucket web service is a RESTful API that also happens to be the second API covered this week that supports OAuth (the earlier one being Google’s implementation in the Google Contacts API).

In addition to a “non-commercial API option with open registration,” there is a commercial option “for developers with an approved business plan for their application.” Initial users of the API include Adobe, AOL, FotoFlexer, Intercasting, RockYou, Slide and Snapvine. An Application Gallery includes offerings from Blurb, Eye-Fi, Flektor and TiVo. The TiVo mashup allows users to view Photobucket content directly from their DVRs (more at our mashup profile).