Amazon Web Services has launched an updated version of the AWS web site that features ease-of-use improvements and new content for AWS developers.
Google has announced its latest API with a haiku of all things:
New admin tool dawns
Settings change like the seasons
For hosted email
That’s from Andrew Olsen of the Google Apps team, announcing the Google Email Settings API, which allows IT administrators at organizations that use the Gmail-based Google Apps hosted webmail solution to “programmatically update Gmail settings for their users in bulk by making requests to a GData feed.” Previously, settings could only be changed manually, on an account-by-account basis.
Wikia Search has announced a new feature called Wikia Intelligent Search Extensions, or WISE, which founder Jimmy Wales likens to “Facebook Apps for search results.” The new platform allows third parties to build applications, called WISEApps, that Wikia Search users can enable in their accounts and which add additional functionality to relevant search results (more at our Wikia API profile). For example, the results for an ordinary search for “Chicago weather” will include a link to AccuWeather.com, but if the user enables the AccuWeather.com WISEApp, the search result will include a full graphical five-day weather forecast.
After much anticipation, The New York Times has released its first API: a Campaign Finance API that allows developers to retrieve contribution and expenditure data based on United States Federal Election Commission filings (our New York Times Campaign Finance API profile). The API is part of the new Times Developer Network, which will eventually give developers access to several APIs.
Last month developers at Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day got a sneak preview of the new Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). YAP is in preview mode and not yet available for public use, although documentation for the new service is available.
Mashup contests can be a good way to reveal the variety of applications that are possible when the developer community is provided with a quality API. At the recent BarCamp London 5, Stefan Magdalinski, CTO of MOO.com, ran a weekend-long MOO API hack competition. The MOO service and API let users submit custom designs that can be printed onto products like business cards, sticker books, postcards, etc. These products can then be sold through an online store.
As we reported earlier this year, ESRI, a leading GIS software provider, released a public version of its ArcGIS JavaScript API that allows developers to integrate GIS functionality with web applications. Now ESRI has added a new ArcGIS Server Live User Sites section to its web site that showcases various geospatial solutions, several of which use the ArcGIS JavaScript API (see our ESRI API profile).
The rate at which new open web service APIs are released continues to increase. Take this past week as an example, a week in which 15 new APIs were added to our directory. That’s just over 2 new APIs per per day. As we covered earlier this year, it’s a rate that is more than double that of a year ago. And given the number of new APIs we see in our queue, this will only accelerate.
Defensio, the anti-spam service, offers an API that can be integrated into blogs and web sites to fight spam comments and other unwanted spam (details at our Defension API profile). The service appears to be run by a small team, and is similar in purpose to Akismet, the much larger spam filtering service from Automattic (which powers WordPress.com), who also offer an anti-spam API.
Three months after its initial launch, much-talked-about data portability service Gnip has released version 2.0 of its API, as well as the first glimpse of a business model. As we covered back in March, Gnip’s goal is to “connect Data Consumers to Data Publishers in a low-latency, highly-scalable standards-based way.” Gnip is a sort of proxy that makes data from diverse Publishers–services like Delicious or Twitter, which create activity content–available in a unified format, and notifies Consumers–like FriendFeed or Plaxo–via a push interface when new data is available. The new version of the API adds full data delivery, XMPP support, and advanced data filtering.
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