When it comes to video (and audio), it seems every device uses its own special format. There is a good chance the format used by your camera can’t just be copied to a web site and viewed as is. The process of converting between formats is known as transcoding. It is a CPU intensive job, and with hundreds of formats to choose from presents developers with a significant challenge. Zencoder is a new web service that is looking to provide a solution.
Better hurry–you have passengers to pick up and only a handful of seconds to get them to their destination. TaxiCity takes place on the actual streets of Vancouver. The game was created by students using open data and the Bing Maps API.
Often the mashups we see speak to the analytical brain with lots of data, like our collection of tracking mashups. That’s where this group differs. Each of the mashups listed below speaks to the sense through color exploration, local travel guides and language through song.
Twitter’s platform is maturing and with it comes recognizing that some tweets just have more staying power. A recent addition to the search API means that popular tweets can be mixed in with realtime results. And in a future release that setting will be the default.
We all know we can search web pages for text, but many services are looking to go above and beyond with features like location and face tagging. The big downside to these features is that they rely on end users have to manually enter in the appropriate data. Really, when was the last time you tagged all the people in the 200 photos you just uploaded to Facebook? To help automate the process of face recognition, face.com have just opened their API.
Speculation was rife just a few months ago about the adoption of the Twitter API as a de-facto standard for micro-blogging services. WordPress.com, Tumblr, Typepad, SocialCast, and Status.net all added support for the API, and the only change needed for Twitter clients to interact with these services was the ability to use a specified end point. Accommodating different API endpoints should have involved only a few extra lines of code, but despite this, still very few major Twitter clients offer this functionality. The situation has lead Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic and the lead dev on WordPress, to conclude that “the opportunity has passed for the Twitter API to become a lingua franca for the real-time web”.
The promise of sharing our data from one site with another raises plenty of privacy concerns. While not all of these worries can be solved by technology, one definitely can. You should not have to share your password in order for services to access your content on other sites. That’s where OAuth comes in. It’s “an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.”
It’s been quite the year for government data. The U.S. released Data.gov and several city governments have followed with their own collections of datasets and APIs. Among them was San Francisco, which also held a contest. Now, big names in open government data are getting together in San Francisco for a one night discussion.
This week we had 13 new APIs added to our API directory and will soon have 2,000 listed. Some of the more interesting new entries include an API for real estate buyers, a Flash games directory API, and an API for runners. More on each of these after the jump.
This past week 19 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 28 different APIs were used to build them. A couple of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Microsoft adCenter and COLOURlovers. The most often used APIs this week are Box.net, Google Maps and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Mapping (4 APIs, 11 mashups), Social (4 APIs, 10 mashups) and Advertising (3 APIs, 3 mashups).
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