GetSatisfaction describes itself as “a place where customers and companies can come together to answer each others’ questions: questions about shipping, pricing, fulfillment, the product itself.” It’s a kind of social customer support site that lets people express their problems, questions, and wishes for the products they use, and the companies that make those products — as well as other users — to respond, in a more or less neutral environment.
One of the big shifts we see taking place here on ProgrammableWeb is how open APIs and mashups are moving from primarily a consumer Internet phenomenon to becoming a force in the enterprise as well. The whole rise of “enterprise mashups” exists at the confluence of a set of trends including software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing, and the model of web oriented architecture (WOA) in which the RESTful design principles that underly the Web itself are influencing enterprise architecture and design. To help provide a forum for learning about and discussing these topics, ProgrammableWeb and InfoQ have teamed up to offer a one-day event covering these emerging trends and practices: the Enterprise Web Conference. The event will be held in New York on October 28th and London on October 30th.
Want to make money from Flash map mashups? One new alternative comes from Lat49, the online ad network for interactive maps, who have just added support for integrating ads into Flash maps. As we covered last year, Lat49 enables map mashup developers to layer geographically relevant ads onto third party mapping platforms like Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. The contextual ads can be placed on top of and alongside the maps themselves. They also offer developers an API for finer control over the ads (details at our Lat49 API profile).
A wide array of content and functionality has been incorporated into the ever-growing number of mashups out on the web today. From enterprise mashups to proof-of-concept hacks, developers and would be developers are leveraging the power of mashups to provide information in new and compelling ways. Mashups are still a relatively new phenomena, and as this new type of online application evolves it will become increasingly more important to ensure that your mashup adheres to a variety of best practices. Summarized below are five key best practices that you should strive to use in the development of your mashup.
The International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC), which takes place in Sydney this December, is hosting its second annual Workshop On Web APIs Services Mashups, or “Mashups ‘08″ for short, and is soliciting papers for publication. The theme of the workshop is challenges mashup developers face, including diverse protocols and platforms, quality of service, and social and economic factors.
Skydeck announced their new APIs, with the objective of enabling developers to create applications that integrate personal cell phone data into their daily online experience, including email and calendars, Facebook, MySpace, and Salesforce. “Very few developers have ever had the chance to work with cell phone data, so we’re excited to see what people come up with.”
The World Bank, whose mission is to end world poverty by providing financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world, is now offering developers a new API (our World Bank API profile).The bank considers the development of its API a component of this mission.
Music video content provider MTV recently announced that its Content API is out of private beta and available to the general public. Available as part of a new MTV Networks Developers Tools web site, the RESTful API gives access to content from MTV, VH1, CMT and Logo. The API supports a variety of open standards including OpenSearch and MediaRSS for data results (see our new MTV API profile for more details).
Google has announced the release of additional documentation for its relatively new Health Data API. We covered the release of this API earlier this year, noting that it was one of the first few APIs added to our Medical Category.
The Big Huge Thesaurus API provides a convenient interface for initiating a search based on an English word and retrieving related words and phrases.
The Big Huge Thesaurus includes more than 145,000 english language words.
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2012. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
