Sunlight Labs announced a new API for streaming U.S. congressional activity. The Sunlight Labs Real Time Congress API (RTC) covers a broad range of U.S. House and Senate actions and data as soon as it’s available on the web. The API can be queried and combined with other APIs including the Sunlight Labs Congress API that contains data on legislators.
“Every day, movies expire from Netflix Watch Instantly,” Twitter’s Robin Sloan tweeted. So, the one-time Current TV online strategist decided to do something about it. Using the Netflix API, he wrote a program to find the movies that are about to expire. Then, he tweets them out from @queuenoodle, an account that has already hit nearly 4,000 followers in a day.
In a move that we are likely to see more of this year and moving forward, companies are inviting developers to closed beta programs of their APIs to ensure that they get their next releases right. Royal Pingdom, a provider of website monitoring and reporting services, as part of its plans for the next release of its Pingdom API, has done just that.
Developer contests are the norm these days and most developers have a tough time deciding which one to take part in. How about a developer contest that is modeled almost like a duel, with the winner winning a championship belt, getting christened “King of the Apps” and giving you a chance to defend your title next year? If this sounds interesting, the Rackspace “King of the Apps” contest is for you.
Customer service-driven company Zappos, which first launched its developer program in June, is showing it’s still focused on its Zappos API. The platform for platform shoes has been hard at work on a new version, according to Zappos’ Will Young, though developers won’t notice much difference quite yet.
Filtering, curation, aggregation and relevance have long been touted as the next important steps for social media. In actual fact we’ve had curation services in the form of Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious and many more for a long time. However, the questions “How do I find the blog post, tweet, facebook update, photo or check-in that is most relevant to me?” and “How do I know I’ve not missed a really important piece of news?” are still asked daily. So, there still isn’t a definite answer – or a definitive service. Cadmus started off as a “real-time filtering service” for a product called ViewPoint, but has grown into a self-standing application and the Cadmus API can help users and developers answer these questions.
It’s Valentines Day today. It is estimated that around 110 million roses (majority of them red) are sold during the 3-day period around Valentine’s day. What has this got to do with APIs that we normally write about? Well guess what, if you dig APIs, Florist One and its Florist One API can help you start selling flowers online.
Like Me Date Me is a new dating site built on top of the Facebook Graph API, which provides search-able access to user profile information. The service displays a photo and limited profile information of whichever gender you want to see. As the name of the site implies, users can “like” others, which can then lead to more interaction. The ratings approach, encouraging snap judgments, is similar to HotOrNot, which also added an option to meet the people you rate.
This week we had 52 new APIs added to our API directory including some from big companies. For example, we wrote about MasterCard’s ambitious platform. Other new APIs included cloud computing software, a text to speech service, media conversion tools, ATM location service, content access billing service and quite a bit more. Below is more detail on each of these 52 new APIs.
This past week 27 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 Avvo, Collecta, Forvo, Google Geocoding, Google Gmail OAuth, Map24 AJAX API, Playme, Quora, SemanticHacker, SendGrid and Yahoo PlaceFinder. The most often used APIs this week are Google Maps, Twilio and Twilio SMS. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Mapping (5 APIs, 7 mashups), Social (4 APIs, 6 mashups) and Music (3 APIs, 4 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
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