A community-minded API has a politcal message for the UK’s Royal Mail: open up the postal code database. ErnestMarples.com is named after the former postmaster general who apparently first oversaw the introduction of the postal code in the UK.
Late last week we reported on Yahoo’s decision to shut down two of its APIs: the Term Extraction and the Contextual Web Search (our profiles of the Yahoo Term Extraction API and the Yahoo Search API). But in response to outcry from the developer community since that announcement, it looks like Yahoo will be keeping the Term Extraction alive.
You can now use the YouTube API to access and create captions for your videos. That means you could let your site visitors refine the transcript to videos you own, or create their own versions of the caption.
National Public Radio (NPR) has just opened another means for developers to access content from NPR.org: a new API for transcripts. This API provides access to tens of thousands of transcripts from some of the most popular programs on NPR. As we covered last year and in our NPR API Profile, their APIs open-up a range of interesting possibilities.
Want to build apps that use government data, filter spam, or use Twitter for sports? You can find those and a couple more things in the 7 new APIs added to our API directory this past week. This set includes an API for the NY Senate and one for tracking expenses of UK parliament members, an API for managing documents in the cloud, an API for filtering email spam, and an API that lets you track your running by using Twitter. Below are more details on each of these (and for those keeping score, there are now 1,421 APIs on ProgrammableWeb):
This past week 19 new mashups were add to our mashup directory and 32 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include BibSonomy, Connotea, and ooVoo. The most often used APIs this week are Flickr, Google Maps, and YouTube. The categories of APIs with most usage last week include: Mapping (4 APIs, 11 mashups), Bookmarks (3 APIs, 3 mashups), and News (3 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
One of the most active categories of APIs added to our web service directory was the games category. 3 of the 10 latest APIs were game or toy-related. There’s a new API for accessing 3D data for World of Warcraft, an API for LEGO information, and an API that gets you information on 11,000 game titles from 20 different game platforms. This means there are now 30 game-related APIs in our directory. Here are more details on each of the latest (have fun):
Popular micro-blogging platform Twitter has announced new “retweet” feature that will be added soon, complete with a new retweet API that will allow developers to access retweets in a variety of ways. As many of you know, the Twitter API (our Twitter API Profile) has quickly become one of the most popular APIs in our API Directory.
It hasn’t been long since developers responded with fear that Yahoo’s innovative search tools could go away. Now two of the smaller, but still well-loved, APIs have been given less than a month to live.
Ruby programmers creating Twitter apps, feast your eyes on this gem from squeejee, called Twitterland, which combines five Twitter services into one package.
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