Food-sharing mobile photo app Foodspotting had an API since day one. Of course, every mobile app has an API, at least if it needs to store or retrieve non-trivial data. Most of those interfaces stay hidden away, private APIs with only that single, internal audience. Foodspotting, on the other hand, signed Zagat as an early partner and now also has OpenTable, among others, using its Foodspotting API. The company is not exactly making it widely available for any developer, though the documentation is public, planting it in a vast grey area that’s becoming increasingly common.
Twilio is inviting developers out to the Bay Area for two days of networking, panels and hacking when it hosts the upcoming Twilio Conference. With a focus on cloud communications over 40 speakers will talk about building great apps, highlight their successes and share advice on how to make money with your product.
Popular weather data site Weather Underground (Wunderground) has a new version of its Weather Underground API and two things are notable: its former XML service is being phased out in favor of JSON. And it has a very clear pricing structure, though there’s a free version for non-commercial projects.
You can provide the best API in the world, but if you don’t document it, the only developers that will use it are the ones that are paid to do it, or that enjoy pain. Most likely, your goal is to attract every type of developer: the hobbyists, the newbies, the freelancers, the paid employees, the student and more. The goal of your documentation is to explain the API in a way that works for all of those types of developers, and all types of learners. The most friendly APIs provide all six of the ways described below to engage with their documentation.
This week we had 36 new APIs added to our API directory including an image marketplace service, video encoding software, social media monitoring service, video hosting platform service, shopping reviews service, maps and gps navigation. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.
This past week 31 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 17 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Interfax. The most often used APIs this week are Facebook, Twilio and Twilio SMS. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Shopping (4 APIs, 4 mashups), Social (2 APIs, 11 mashups) and Wiki (1 APIs, 1 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
E-Commerce covers a broad range of inter-connected processes which eventually leads to a transaction between two or more parties. Recent enhancements in technology, specifically social interactions on the Web, have increased the complexity in analyzing these processes and describing E-Commerce as a whole. And, to be honest, there is a lot of confusion within the terminology of “E-Commerce” itself. The exact definition of E-Commerce varies depending on your source, and you might hear words like e-business, e-retailing, and online shopping all used interchangeably. Mind you, they all have different meanings.
In this age of automation and separation it is surprising to find human components of automated services. QuickTate believes that humans are still better than computers at speech recognition and that’s why the QuickTate API is built around living breathing typists. The company has taken the old model of a transcription service and revamped it to take advantage of the internet age that we live in: typists are distributed rather than co-located and jobs can be submitted via API from any number of applications.
Last week at the Dreamforce event in San Francisco, Saleforce.com unveiled its new mobile platform called touch.salesforce.com. Built with HTML5, touch.salesforce.com will allow users to access salesforce.com apps on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. At Dreamforce, Saleforce.com acknowledged that the future of the enterprise is both social and mobile, and the Salesforce.com APIs are a driving force.
Rapleaf wants to see more personalization apps built on its Rapleaf Personalization API. To support the expansion, the company will provide grants and services to companies via its just-launched $1 million fund. The investment approach is quickly joining contests and hackathons as ways for providers to woo developers.
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