One of the questions that I am most frequently asked regarding content APIs is “how can I make money with my API?” Before answering that question, however, it is important to ask for whom the API is designed. After all, the audiences for your API will determine what business opportunities exist.
On August 19th, Google introduced “two significant changes in the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery: a developer signup fee and a domain verification system.” As announced on The Chromium Blog, Google implemented these changes for security reasons, to “create better safeguards against fraudulent extensions in the gallery and limit the activity of malicious developer accounts.”
Online driving directions pioneer MapQuest had the first free directions web service a year ago. Now it followed up with the same engine based on the wiki-like Open Street Map data. The new, open service follows an open version of the MapQuest tiles.
Just how much are people talking about Justin Bieber? How ga-ga are they for Lady Gaga? Viralheat has a platform for tracking these sorts of social trends and now the data in over 4,000 searches is available for free. Today the company announced its new Social Trends endpoint for the Viralheat API.
One of the major purposes of a Web API is to expose a structured content that you can use in your own app, create some great mashup and share it with your friends. But what do you do if a popular app does not expose any API? If you’re a developer, you write code to scrapes the app’s content and transform it to a format you need. It’s admittedly murky legal territory, but ScraperWiki makes that process easier by providing a console and an API to access the data you collect.
A new mapping-related API from WeatherBug has a response type we don’t see too often: images. The new service provides radar, temperature and other weather-related data as an overlay for Bing or Google Maps.
Most of the time we write about mapping, it admittedly includes Google Maps (we list over 2000 Google Maps mashups). However, ESRI, the biggest supplier of geographic tools for the enterprise, has made huge strides this year with its tools, including its own web mapping platform, ESRI ArcGIS JavaScript API.
With millions of users currently using and checking Twitter every few minutes to every couple of hours, it’s no surprise that Twitter has become an ideal platform for brief announcements. From open dinner invites to birth announcements to product launches, Twitter is being used to announce just about everything and anything.
This week we had 12 new APIs added to our API directory including sending and receiving sms, web based email api, rich media embed utility and a multi-service url expander. Below is more details on each of these new APIs.
This past week 23 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 32 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Amazon Marketplace Web Service, Campfire, Chirpio, DocuSign Enterprise, Enthusem, Intuit Data Service, Ping.fm, Tropo and zanox. The most often used APIs this week are Box.net, Google Maps and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (5 APIs, 9 mashups), Enterprise (4 APIs, 4 mashups) and Mapping (3 APIs, 8 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
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