At the bottom of many blog posts (including this one) and website entries you’re likely to find a widget that allows sharing to social sites or emailing to a friend. ShareThis competes with other systems like AddThis and SocialTwist to give publishers an easy-to-install sharing method.
Social Actions takes actions posted on the web from more than forty different socially progressive organizations, and aggregates them into a common format for easy discovery. The actions are concrete activities like volunteering, donating, signing a petition, making a loan, or attending a meetup, all in the service of “making a difference” for issues like Darfur, cancer, LGBT, prison reform, and other activist concerns. On the Social Actions site interested citizens can search the opportunities, and an API (our Social Actions API profile) allows developers to build on top of the stream of postings.
Building on Barack Obama’s push for a transformational process for the Federal Government, momentum is building in terms of how citizens view the government’s role as a data steward and data provider. The numerous Federal agencies concentrated in Washington, D.C. and around the country maintain a massive amount of data that, as of today, is largely inaccessible either through lack of entry points or through lack of gateways for distribution. Consequently, how to provide the public with access to “the people’s data” has emerged as an important topic amongst technologists and freedom of information advocates, especially now that the U.S. has a president who included transparency as a core element of his campaign platform.
It’s been a busy week on ProgrammableWeb, with 18 new web service APIs added to our listings. They cover a wide range from APIs for financial market data, to video chat APIs to major telephony APIs. Since we won’t have time to cover all of these individually (as with our Do the Green Thing coverage), here’s the full set:
If you like online games and you like programming, the growing number of games with open APIs is a boon. We now over 20 games-related APIs in our directory. The latest entry is for the new API for Spore, the Electronic Arts Maxis game where players can create their own creatures. The API provides developers with the capability to create mashups and applications that access the Spore database of user creations and information about the creators themselves (see our new Spore API profile for details).
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