When launching and managing your API, many companies choose to do all the work themselves, unaware that are service providers available to help you plan, deploy, launch and manage your API infrastructure and ecosystem. To help bring awareness, I wanted to take a few moments and do a roundup of API service providers.
The last few years have seen the emergence of friend and business networks and users have raced to setup business connections and lookup old friends. How about taking a break and concentrate on building up a dream application for your family? MyHeritage.com, which provides sites to build your family tree and a family graph genealogy API, has extended its developer contest, that invites developers to build interesting applications within family networks.
New York City is hosting its third annual BigApps conference this year: BigApps 3.0. Build an application from any combination of 750 New York City data sets that describe everything from political campaign contributions to bicycle rack locations. There are more than a dozen different prize categories and $50,000 of cash prizes to be distributed. For the first time in a BigApps contest, New York City has its own API and the contest also encourages using APIs of NYC companies, including the Foursquare API and Etsy API.
This week we had 48 new APIs added to our API directory including an SMS integration service, environmental database, web hosting management services, social games mechanics platform, realtime public transit information and a book trading community service. In addition we covered Datafiniti’s efforts to provide the web’s datasets via SQL queries. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.
This past week 19 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 37 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Aviary Feather, Aviary Suite, Education.com, Exchange Rate, Trulia, Yandex and ZoomInfo. The most often used APIs this week are Facebook, Google Maps and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (7 APIs, 13 mashups), Shopping (3 APIs, 4 mashups) and Search (3 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Roomorama is not the only one in the person to person travel accomodations game. The company is in a space that’s been well established by other players: CouchSurfing, Vacation Rentals By Owner and, of course, AirBnB. While there’s an AirBNB API planned, the only room rental site that is currently public with its platform is the the Roomorama API.
ThinkUp — the free, open source web application that captures your posts, tweets and other data on social networks like Twitter and Facebook — has added support for Google Plus. Thanks to the the newly-released Google Plus API, ThinkUp now lets you download all of your social data from the major social networks.
Popular room rental service AirBNB does not yet have an official AirBNB API. But signs point to one’s existence, as well as an affiliate plan in place to pay developers for reservations booked through the API. If the company sticks with the plan as written now, developers will be able to make up to 10 million API calls per day before contacting AirBNB.
Online mapping pioneer MapQuest just launched a new local site to explore 50,000 U.S. neighborhoods. MQVibe uses the MapQuest API to display neighborhood shapes and highlighted places. The MQVibe API, while not officially launched, is used by the site itself and appears available externally.
According to a post from a Google engineer, intended to be private to the search giant’s employees, the Google+ API was not ready at launch. Google’s Steve Yegge also badmouthed the read-only, public API. When the company’s new service was only two weeks old, I wondered whether the Google+ API was intentionally late. Maybe it was just truly late.
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