New York City is probably best known for its skyscrapers and millions of people, not the trees that line its avenues. A new iPhone app goes out on a limb to give a little credit to the oaks and maples. And it’s doing it thanks to open government data.
The upcoming Chirp conference organized by Twitter is bound to interest a new group of developers. Getting up to speed with a new API can take some research, but Twitter makes it easy with a handy list.
Geomena is an open geo database of WiFi access points meant to be used for geolocation. The concept is similar to Skyhook (see our Skyhook API profile) and Google’s Gears (our Google Gears Geolocation API profile). The difference is that the database is as open as Wikipedia, editable and downloadable by anyone to use however they want. Geomena officially launched an API for developers at this month’s Where 2.0 conference in San Jose (video embedded below).
Developers are familiar with bugs in their code, but how about in their city? SeeClickFix helps citizens share non-emergency problems in their neighborhood. And its new API will allow developers to bring that ability to more users.
What’s new in APIs this week? This year continues its rapid pace of new APIs and our directory now has 1876 APIs. Some of the latest include an API for cloud server monitoring, a group shopping service API (from one of the hottest startups around), a travel research and planning service API, and an API for a Twitter sketching tool.
This past week 16 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 22 different APIs were used to build them. And the mashups we’re seeing continue to follow the larger trends, with location and mobile being hot (thus use of APIs like the Foursquare API and the Gowalla API). Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Google Gears, Meetup and Spotify Metadata. The most often used APIs this week are Box.net, Google App Engine and Google Maps. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (5 APIs, 5 mashups) and Mapping (5 APIs, 11 mashups).
Five years ago Paul Rademacher reverse engineered Google Maps to put Craigslist homes and rentals on a map on his site. The site essentially pre-launched the map mashup category, because there was no Google Maps API at the time. Now it is the prototypical example and still used by many to find their new homes. And, of course, Google Maps is now by far the most popular API to use.
Crawling webpages isn’t something most of us are set up to do. That’s why 80legs turned it into a service, spidering two billion web pages per day. It launched with only Java support. Now the company has added an API Kit for Python programmer, responding to its users most popular request.
One of the most powerful aspects of mashups is taking similar data from competing websites and providing a single place to examine the content. In this round-up of the best new mashups we’ll look at three apps that aggregate data from multiple services. One looks at location check-ins, another at shared photos and another mashes photos with information about where they were taken.
While Twitter mashups continue their tremendous growth, there’s another area we’re also noticing blossom: Twitter APIs. These developer-created apps process data from Twitter, adding value and sharing that back out for developers.
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