You’d hardly notice the difference unless you were looking for it. MapQuest’s latest API is a reinvention of its MapQuest API to display maps. So, what’s new? Following the company’s recent pattern, MapQuest Open API is based on OpenStreetMaps, the crowd-sourced map favored by many modern geo-hackers.
Back in February 2010 we asked Why can’t you share photos on Foursquare? We discussed that this could be seen as an oversight or an opportunity for others. However, this question has now been deprecated by Foursquare with the introduction of its add photo API method, which suggests that the previous absence of a method was simply because it wasn’t a priority, it was an oversight or the opportunity hasn’t been taken up by developers as Foursquare had hoped. In addition to the new add photo method, Foursquare have also introduced API methods which allow comments to be added and deleted from checkins. These methods have already been rolled into the official iPhone and Android apps along with a few 3rd party apps that use the Foursquare API.
You may remember the full featured, unpublished API from popular mobile photo sharing site Instagram that we covered last month. The interface was reverse engineered by a developer and today Instagram asked anyone using its private, unofficial Instagram API to stop. At the same time, it announced a beta public API would be coming soon.
The Facebook API saw huge changes in 2010 that moved the service away from being a closed network and towards being a more open community. The leading social network site must be doing something right on that front. Facebook was the third most popular service for use in new mashups last year, nearly doubling its total number in our directory.
Our API report for 2010 listed 25 URL Shorteners in our directory (there are now 28 URL shorteners). One of the better known link shrinkers in recent times, Goo.gl, has just given developers a New Years gift by providing an API. The Google URL Shortener API allows developers to integrate the Goo.gl service into their application and gives access to all operations like shortening and expanding URLs and giving access to your history and analytics.
Remember radio? It played music through the air and determined who the next big thing would be. Okay, so maybe some of us still listen to radio in our cars, so these tricks may seem familiar. Have you ever tried to be the ninth caller? Have you ever requested a song from your favorite star? Thanks to the Twilio API and the mashups below, you can now do each of those things without needing the help of any darn radio station.
Google Wave was seen as one of the spectacular failures of 2010. While the product did not find resonance with the users, the underlying technology that was used in it has been winding its way to acceptance ranging from getting incubated in Apache and a new offering from Google labs named Google Shared Spaces.
We kicked off 2011 with our report on API growth. We list more than 2600+ APIs in our directory, with social and mobile APIs seeing major growth. APIs will continue to increase and 2011 should see the a move from simply providing an API to providing great APIs. The beginning of the year typically gives rise to several articles that tell us about what to expect in the year ahead and APIs are no different, with those below from GigaOm.
This week we had 29 new APIs added to our API directory including a translation service, event management service, mobile advertising platform, two-way sms service, URL shortener, cloud-based application management service, email marketing service, band and concert search tool and domain registration service. Below is more detail on each of these new APIs.
For over a year developers have been asking for an API from Quora, the Q&A site that has recently exploded in popularity. The company had been waiting until there were “enough users and content on Quora.” A browser extension outed the interface and now there is an officially released, but still alpha Quora API.
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