GIS software and services provider ESRI recently launched a new Web Mapping APIs site that serves as a comprehensive gateway for developers to learn more about the company’s web-based APIs, including its ArcGIS JavaScript API (our ArcGIS JavaScript API Profile).
This past week the new mashups added to our mashup directory used a total of 28 different APIs. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs that developers used this week include Akismet, Big Huge Thesaurus, Bing Maps, ShareThis, and the Your Mapper API. The most often used APIs this week were Flickr, Google Maps, and Twitter. And the most popular categories of APIs used were: Mapping (8 APIs, 14 mashups), Social (3 APIs, 6 mashups), and Internet (3 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Google now has over 400 cities included in its transit service. That means each of those organization provides a feed so that the search giant can give accurate routing, schedules and fares. So, why isn’t it easier for the average developer to access this data?
In addition to the 4 new APIs we outlined yesterday, we had four others just added to our API directory. These include an API for creating a virtual workforce, an API that can identify what language you are speaking, a SIP-based voice platform service for VoiceXML apps, and new URL shortening service. Here are more details on each of these new APIs:
Hey there, bit.ly. You’ve been garnering your share of praise–and jealous criticism–lately. It’s barely past your first birthday and you’ve raised a few million in venture capital and are going steady with Twitter, one of the hottest sites of the moment. Your competitors publicly proclaim you as unbeatable. What’s your secret, bit.ly?
SaaS and cloud services provider LiveOps has just announced the release of a new “cloudsourcing” API for its LiveWork service. The Open Workforce API (OWAPI) enables businesses to integrate applications with an on-demand virtual workforce provided by LiveWork (more at our Open Workforce API Profile).
Now you can use an API to find out once and for all whether you are among the living. The U.S. Social Security Administration maintains a “death index” to prevent fraud. CDYNE Corporation subscribes to the updates and has opened the index up with a fee-based API (details at our Death Index API profile).
Did you know that leraar is a Dutch word? A new API, LangID can help you with those pesky language identification problems. Feed it a string of text and the API returns the name of the language, its ISO code and even an image of the flag for a country that speaks the language (the latter could be a hot-button political issue–watch out). You can choose your output as either XML or browser-friendly JSON. (More details at our LangID API profile.)
Do you live in the now or keep a foot back in the past? Better yet, what should an API provider do?
At the end of July Last.fm (our Last.fm API profile) shut off some old API calls, to the disappointment of some mashup users and developers. The company had some good reasons, but it raises the question about what developers should expect, especially from free APIs.
This week we had 6 new APIs added to our API directory. These included new web services for getting access to passages from the Bible, storage in the cloud, an editable and programmable directory, a service for storing web pages for later access, 24×7 web site monitoring, and a text-to-speech (TTS) service. Here are details on each of these new listings:
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