When we wrote about APIs fueling an “instant” frenzy, there were only four mashups in our directory tagged instant. We’ve added more than that just this week, taking our total to 16 instant mashups. But the most common type of instant mashup may surprise you.
Getting on a plane and actually traveling somewhere is so old fashioned. Teleporting is the future. But since we haven’t worked out all the kinks of physically moving our atoms from place to place, for now we have the Google Maps API and it’s Street View feature.
We’ve previously covered 3 free to geolocate any user. Today there’s another option, with Quova offering its service for free for the first time. The simple API provides extensive geographic information with only a user’s IP address (like 208.75.242.38) as input. The service was announced, along with a developer portal, at the Business of APIs conference in San Francisco.
A new service for city planners and others requiring detailed demographic and regional data has a great way of accepting geographic input. Cubit uses the Google Maps API to determine the area in which its user is interested. Then, it queries its own data sources based on the path or shape the user selects.
Transloadit offers media upload, modification, and storage as a service for developers who need that functionality (or, as Transloadit’s homepage puts it, “geeks who run web or mobile applications”) but don’t want to worry about it themselves. There aren’t too many moving parts to it, but they’re ones a lot of applications make use of. The Transloadit API’s main functions include: file upload, image resizing, video file encoding, image thumbnail creations, and file storage on Amazon S3.
Before there was a Google Maps API, Adrian Holovaty created Chicago Crime to show updated crime data by location. Holovaty’s lessons were later put into play in the Knight Foundation-funded EveryBlock, now owned by MSNBC. And now, EveryBlock has an API.
Facebook is taking another big reach toward location sharing with its latest update to its Places API. When the platform launched in August, we wrote that it was “read only for now.” Now all developers can, with users’ permission, share their locations on Facebook. And, perhaps more exciting, Facebook has opened up its venue database to help out.
It’s easy to get caught up in platforms offering developers riches, or big mashup acquisitions. Now, we like all sorts of applications, but we often don’t take time out to recognize those looking to create change through APIs. In the case of the three recent mashups we list below, each uses the DonorsChoose API and is attempting to help classrooms raise money and supplies.
File sharing service drop.io last week struck a deal with Facebook in which the larger company will acquire “most of drop.io’s technology and assets.” Founder Sam Lessin, a friend and former schoolmate of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will go work for Facebook in product management. As of the announcement, users ceased being able to create new “drops” (the service’s term for file uploads) for free. Existing premium users will have access to their accounts through December 15th, after which time all accounts will be terminated and all stored content will be deleted. Not all of drop.io’s products are being wound-down quite as quickly, and at least some of the developer APIs will be remaining up for longer than the main service.
Intuit recently launched an API for its QuickBooks Online service. Currently the API is in beta, but for an early beta, it appears to be thorough and solid.
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