With last week’s Mashup of the Day winner LastLyrics, you now have your choice of over two dozen web mashups about music that also integrate song lyrics. If you look at this list of song lyrics mashups, you’ll see that most of them make use of either one of the 2 lyrics APIs we have listed, one from LyricWiki.org and the other from Lyricsfly.
This week Google announced that it will discontinue development on some of its services, and in some instances, discontinue the services all together. According to the Google Code Blog, Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Mashup Editor will be affected by this decision; in addition, Google Video will no longer support uploads and Google Notebook will cease to accept new signups. The blogosphere has been abuzz with the news, and there are mixed reactions to the decision, although it seems like the general consensus is that Google trimmed its efforts on services that had either stalled, were redundant, or had failed to capture sufficient market share to make them worthwhile web properties. ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, Search Engine Land, Mashable, and CNET all have additional information on Google’s news.
The Amazon Web Services team has announced a new “Requester Pays” pricing model for their Simple Storage Service (S3). Amazon’s S3 service, which provides scalable access to Amazon’s online data storage infrastructure, enables customers to rapidly scale their platform using a cost effective pay-as-you-go model. Now, the new S3 Requester Pays Model gives S3 customers the built-in ability to charge their users for specific data transfers. Furthermore, Amazon takes care of the billing for the requested data, eliminating excess accounting overhead for the data providers. From their announcement:
ffwd is an online community that lets members discover new videos selected based on their interests and favorite shows, and share videos with friends. The “ffwd” button lets you “fast-forward” to the next video in the sequence if you’ve seen enough of the current video — kind of like “channel” surfing, buy on the Net. ffwd have now released an API to let developers build ffwd applications on any web-enabled video device. Specifically, ffwd’s new API will enable developers to:
Not all API providers know how to make developers happy. In fact, although there are now nearly 1,100 web service APIs available, many of those API providers fail to really understand the needs and motivations of their (potential) developer community. For evidence of how developers can react to both good and bad API programs, look no further than a very insightful blog post from mashup developer Alexander Lucas on Making Your Webservice More Developer Friendly (Alex is the creator of Migratr a useful desktop mashup that uses APIs from 11 different web services in order to let you migrate photos between different online photo services).
Yahoo has been steadily expanding on its Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS), a set of complementary platforms that allow developers to rapidly access Yahoo network data and develop applications. At the core of Y!OS are two platforms: the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) and the Yahoo Social Platform (YSL), which can be accessed via the Yahoo Query Language (YQL). As regular readers will note, we have covered Y!OS in previous posts here on ProgrammableWeb.
The New York Times has just announced its new Congress API, which provides capability for developers to access to four sets of data about US Congressional representatives and their votes: “a list of members for a given Congress and chamber, details of a specific roll-call vote, biographical and role information about a specific member of Congress, and a member’s most recent positions on roll-call votes” (see Congress API profile for details).
In a clever move, Apple has leveraged the power of the Google Maps API (our Google Maps API Profile) to provide geotagging capabilities for iPhoto 2009, the latest version of its popular photo management software. Announced by Phil Schiller at MacWorld 2009, iPhoto 2009 is packed with several new features, including ‘Places’ which gives users the ability to easily assign geographic coordinates to their photos.
Although mashups started out in the consumer space, their success makes a migration into corporate IT environments inevitable. Firms exploring this new software development model may struggle at first to understand the importance of mashups from a corporate perspective. In the upcoming book, Mashup Patterns, author Michael Ogrinz provides a collection of use-case driven patterns intended to explain the value of enterprise mashups to both technical and non-technical readers. We recently interviewed Michael about the patterns and what he hoped to achieve with his book.
Although over 1.1 petabytes of data are available and shared via the peer-to-peer services of BitTorrent, there’s now a new web service that lets you get statistics on it all: it’s called Bitsmash. This relatively simple service allows you to search and sort data and usage metrics about all that p2p data. Data which is available via an API (our Bitsmash profile). And for any given torrent (any file being distributed on the network) it will give you summary data and show you graphs of activity over time. The screenshot below shows a bitsmash entry for Knight Rider
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