Naspter is one of the most recognizable names in digital music, being one of the first music distribution platforms when it was released way back in 1999. After much controversy, and changing hands several times in the last 10 years, it is now owned by the US electronics retailed Best Buy. Now the technology behind Best Buy Remix, the open API for Best Buy’s product catalog, has been released to the public with the Napster Access API (for technical details see our new Napster API profile).
In earlier eras of software development, programmers quite often had the luxury of using a stable version of a platform or API, because even when vendors updated their apps, OS’s, and middleware, the organizations relying on those platforms could implement those upgrades in their own time. But now with online web services, developers often have less control over updates to the API they are using, and unannounced changes to web service APIs are becoming a big problem.
Location-based social game FourSquare no longer has limits to where it can be used. When users click on their city name below the header of the website, they see a search box to enter a new city. Previously the service supported about 100 cities worldwide and anyone who lived elsewhere was out of luck.
Yahoo is weighing its options with its blog-based social network tool MyBlogLog and has not ruled out closing down the site–and its API (our MyBlogLog API profile). When the MyBlogLog API launched, it looked to have a promising future, though this was before Facebook and Google released similar features.
The site claims a “huge collection of hit lyrics.” Your next music application can tap into the database with the new ChartLyrics Lyric API. You can use it to search in several ways and, more importantly, obtain the text that makes up the words to popular songs.
This past week 14 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 26 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Jigsaw, Mobypicture, Stylight, and TwitterCounter. The most often used APIs this week are Google Maps, TwitPic, and Twitter. And the most frequently used types of APIs were Social (6 APIs, 11 mashups), Mapping (5 APIs, 9 mashups), and Search (3 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups.
This week we had 6 new APIs added to our API directory including a new API for finding song lyrics, an API for integrating Apple Push Notification Service messages into any service, an API for domain registration and web hosting, an API for social messaging, an API for the Sourcemap project (which we covered earlier this week), and an interesting new API for people search.
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