This week we saw the ProgrammableWeb mashup directory pass the 6000 mark. Maps, specifically Google Maps, maintain the largest percentage of mashups as has been the case since we started six years ago. However in a continuing trend from the last couple of years, social mashups have steadily increased in popularity. They now comprise 9% of the directory making them the third largest type of mashup represented.
Stock trading systems community Collective2 is bringing automated trading systems to the retail brokerage customer. Joe Shmoe can now have access to a trading system developed and practiced by an experienced broker, mad technical analyst, or possibly even a computer algorithm. The Collective2 API will make it possible for quant systems all over the internet to trigger trading in unknown numbers of retail customer accounts. Dangerous? Frightening? Futuristic? Yes, Indeed.
The need to understand social media has been around for a few years now. Companies are increasingly realizing that the discussion of their products and services has gone viral. For some companies this means the conversation has moved into an environment that they just don’t understand. Viralheat seeks to bring understanding to large enterprises and small businesses alike through their shockingly affordable social media analytics services. Adoption is it’s goal with a new free sentiment analysis API released one year after their free social trends API.
Flickr has added more real-time goodness to their photo API. Using a publish / subscribe (PubSub) system, developers can now receive real-time updates across millions of photos across Flickr friends, Flickr Commons, and by tags and geo-location using the Flickr Real-Time API.
Most companies need help with their phone support. Parents want a safe way to let their kids to call relatives without sharing their increasingly-important mobile phone. And businesses have an insatiable appetite for better sales information or help hiring great developers. All of these problems are solved in the most recent contest from telephony-as-a-service provider (and ProgrammableWeb sponsor) Twilio. The company typically runs a weekly contest for its Twilio API, but gave devs twice as long for this mega-contest, which also produced five winners.
There’s always been a little annoyance on the end of affiliate APIs, those that pay developers money for referring buyers. In exchange for a potential sale, developers have to send their users to the company’s site to complete the transaction. In the future, many of those purchasers will be able to remain using the developer’s application for the length of the sale. We’re a step closer to that future with a new release from API management company Mashery (a ProgrammableWeb sponsor). Mashery customers can now process transactions through their APIs, which means the potential for applications with lower barriers between a customer and a sale. And yes, that little annoyance at the end of affiliate APIs could be going away.
Not since a battle axe grand prize have we seen a contest give away something so intriguing. Face.com, makers of a free photo recognition API, aren’t giving away an iPad or laptop to the top developer in their contest. They’re giving that developer a job.
APIs are now the cornerstone of most product offerings. Early API Providers are now at a stage where their early API offerings have been truly tested by developers. In their quest to fine tune their API, these organizations have mined through usage patterns, API bottlenecks and many more parameters to help understand what they could have done different if given a chance (read that as version 2.0). Kevin Montrose of Stack Exchange, one of the most popular collections of Q&A sites, has published a couple of blog posts on the good and bad parts about the Stack Exchange API, that provides a good lesson to all of us.
U.S. National Library of Medicine, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, maintains a database of over 8,500 records relating to other organizations and sources of reference material on the topic of health and medicine. This “Directory of Information Resources Online” is aptly named DIRLINE. The DIRLINE API allows you to search this niche data collection from your webpage or app.
This week we had 45 new APIs added to our API directory including a hosted MongoDB database, live chat platform, fact sharing service, podcast retrieval service, distributed graph database, and a flight and travel search engine. In addition, we covered the launch of the Pearson Plug & Play Platform. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.
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