Two of the biggest brands in local search are partnering and they’re using open APIs to do it. Citysearch is including sponsored ads from YP.com (Yellow Pages) in its CityGrid ad network (our CityGrid API profile). Additionally, Citysearch reviews show up across the YP.com website.
Google Moderator is the sort of tool that deserves an API. The platform to collect audience ideas and gauge interest is used widely internally at Google, as well as being available to anyone. It is no longer limited to web browser use, as it now has an API (our Google Moderator profile).
Developers working with Google’s next generation of its popular mapping API (our Google Maps API Profile) will be pleased to learn that some new features have been added to the API. Since its initial release a little less than a year ago, v3 of the Google Maps API has steadily been growing in terms of features and functionality. The latest addition of features are three new “layer classes” that make it dead simple to add KML (or GeoRSS), traffic, or bike routes as overlays on a Google Map.
2010 is not yet half over and already Music Hack Day is hitting its third city of the year: San Francisco. On May 15th and 16th, scores of hackers will convene at the Automatic Lounge for a 48 hour hack fest themed around all things music.
Did you know most political polls in the U.S. are still done by phone? Most of it is automated, with voters using the buttons on the phone to reply to questions. Now some of these polls–including those by the Democratic National Committee–can be performed by a mashup, Precision Polling.
“In any organization you can be a Dilbert or a Wally,” according to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. “Dilbert hasn’t given up yet, but Wally has.” The analogy was appropriate for the developer-heavy crowd at the Open APIs for Government event. The setting–San Francisco City Hall–was also appropriate, because Newmark may have been speaking more to those in charge of continuing to open up government data.
Internet Archive have released a REST API that gives developers access to their historical snapshots of the web. It is based on the Amazon S3 API, and is currently the best way to access the Internet Archive data.
This week we had 26 new APIs added to our API directory. Some of the notable new entries include a billing and time tracking API, an API to access patent document data, a networking community and job resource API, a telephone number look up API (which we covered here), an API for url shortening and lengthening, and a photo storage and sharing API.
This past week 15 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 18 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include billomat, Infosniper.net and mite. The most often used APIs this week are Amazon EC2, Google Maps and GovTrack.us. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (3 APIs, 4 mashups), Mapping (3 APIs, 8 mashups) and Search (2 APIs, 2 mashups).
The limitation so far has been that users and developers usually have to wait for the big players like Google, Yahoo and Bing to add the relevant information to their maps.
CloudMade has conveniently side stepped this issue by allowing its maps to be collaboratively edited, making it a kind of “Wikipedia for maps”. The results have been quite impressive, as TechCrunch reports.
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