As expected since Twitter photos was announced in June, the microblogging company has activated photo-tweeting from the Twitter API. With it, any application will be able to upload an image to Twitter’s servers as part of a tweet. Adding images via the API follows Twitter’s recent inclusion of the service for all users on its flagship website.
When programming a web application, security is often a prime concern. If you’ve read my previous articles, you’ve often seen me comment on how secure an API is, as many of them are pretty secure, but many of them are not. When working on a cool application, often security is something you don’t really want to spend that much time thinking about, which is why Layer 7 recently released an OAuth toolkit.
Last weekend at the AT&T Mobile Hackathon I had a pleasure of checking out the MongoLab’s MongoDB service. In short: it was a delight to work with. I fell in love with that technology. It worked exactly the way I thought–MongoDB architects got it right. After spending a good part of the day fighting my hibernate configuration in JUnit I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that Mongo keeps their documentation and design accessible with plan old object and simple REST calls to its MongoLab API.
This week we had 61 new APIs added to our API directory including a cloud storage service, a social sharing experiment, a web polling service, open source government data, a mapping search service, and a restaurant deal search service. Additionally, we covered an API with a sense of humor and an interoperable places data API. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.
This past week 14 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 23 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include AddThis Services, Amazon Flexible Payments Service, Amazon SES, BookingMarkets, Google Shopping Search, Mediaburst SMS, Open Dining Network Food Ordering, PeerIndex, Quova and Springer. The most often used APIs this week are Mediaburst SMS, Twilio and Twilio SMS. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (3 APIs, 3 mashups), Mapping (2 APIs, 2 mashups) and Reference (2 APIs, 2 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
The Pixmac team boldly proclaims that they aim to be the “fastest, most usable and reliable microstock agency…in the image marketplace” on their about us page. The straightforward Pixmac API should increase the exposure for their stock image portfolio in service of that goal. Security is clearly important to PixMac since API requests can be sent over HTTP or HTTPs. Responses can be returned in either JSON or XML format based on preference. The API has four simple steps to follow for selling their stock images on your website or application.
Although many of us currently use online services for our weather reports, some still like to watch the television for their weather news. The Weather Channel is the main go-to channel for weather, offering weather reports whenever you’re in need of them. It recently started to integrate Twitter into the televised reports, searching Twitter for locals talking about the weather. It also has a special site where you can find weather-related tweets for your own city.
A survey of API experiences raised some of the largest problems developers encounter, including which companies cause them. The Facebook API was mentioned far and away more than any other in long-form answers to questions about headaches, horror stories and other issues while integrating with APIs. Also mentioned often were Google APIs and the Twitter API. While it should be noted that all three are also among the most popular for developers, there are lessons to be learned in mining the results of this survey put out to Hacker News readers.
Hackathons are now a part of mainstream. Our coverage of the changing nature of Hackathons shows that they are being applied to different streams too. The latest hackathon is API-oriented and presents another opportunity for devs to learn about APIs, interact with other devs, build something cool and win prizes.
Wait, what does your startup do? It’s a common question among the hip digerati, given that sometimes it’s not entirely clear. “It’s like Flickr for video,” may have been the reply five years ago as YouTube and other video startups grew. But what about now? There are far more hot startups and areas of focus to use as examples. That requires It’s This For That, a new site with a sense of humor. And like any good new venture, there’s an API. The It’s This For That API simply responds with the this and the that.
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