Popular iPhone photo-sharing app Instagram is a prime candidate for an API, which is probably why it already has one. Though documentation refers to it as an “unofficial” Instagram API, the fact that it uses the company’s own servers makes it seem pretty official. Instagram has not launched the API, nor is an API linked from its home page. Yet, it has a mobile app and right column Twitter integration, both of which likely consume the API.
It’s no doubt that social mashups are one of the more popular categories. In fact, these varied apps, most distinguished by using friend connections, make up 7% of all mashups ever added to our directory. The recent social mashups below caught our eye for the interesting new ways they use the social connections.
USA Today is keeping its promise to release more data from its network. The latest dataset that the newspaper has exposed is Articles, where you can use the USA Today API to access feeds and present it to your users in ways that you want. The dataset contains all web stories going back to 2004, as well as blog posts, newspaper stories, and even wire feeds.
Campaign Monitor, the email marketing software aimed at designers, recently announced a massive API update that is sure to please developers. The changes are less of an update and more of a complete redesign from the ground up. The folks down in Sydney have gone RESTful, the new version no longer supporting SOAP. The API also added realtime tracking and integrated powerful segmentation tools.
This week we had 50 new APIs added to our API directory, including the 17 we covered earlier. The 33 remaining include an online coupons and discounts service, shipping rate calculator, online payment service, cloud-based telephony application platform, website reputation service and a photo sharing platform. Below is more detail on each of these new APIs.
This past week 16 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 20 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include AvantLink and Big Huge Thesaurus. The most often used APIs this week are Facebook, Google Maps and Tropo. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (4 APIs, 9 mashups), Mapping (3 APIs, 6 mashups) and Shopping (2 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Ready for a side project this weekend? Ixaris, a Payment platform provider has thrown up a Developer Challenge codenamed “The Secret Path” and is inviting developers to build payment applications on its platform. The Ixaris platform makes it easier for developers to integrate payments into their applications, by doing all the plumbing to Visa, Mastercard and other global money transfer networks. It is an Open platform that can be used on social media networks, mobile devices and e-commerce sites.
Popular location-based social network Foursquare quietly made the long-teased new version of its API publicly available Tuesday. The changes, embraced by its developer community, include JSON-formatted responses and OAuth-only authentication. Even though the new API is characterized as in beta, the company has also deprecated the previous version, announcing it will no longer be available by the middle of next year.
The Woodstock for Developers took place on Monday, with many convening for the free event that brought some of the big names in APIs together. ProgrammableWeb founder John Musser spoke about the open API ecosystem. One of the important questions to ask for providers considering an API is “Why?” Below are five reasons from Musser’s talk.
Nearly 100 developers gathered on the 15th floor of the New York Times building last Saturday for a multi-API marathon of hacking, sharing, pizza and beer (plus URL-enhanced M&Ms). Representatives from industry heavyweights including Google, Facebook, Flickr and Tumblr were joined by indie hackers, makers, and tech talent from NYC’s growing startup club.
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