This week we had 68 new APIs added to our API directory including a microvolunteering platform, a mobile application positioning service, a phone call demographic data service, a service for accessing small business content, a restaurant menu sharing service and a calling, VoIP, and messaging service. In addition we covered a recent transit hackathon in Philadelphia.
This past week 18 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 Bump, Evature Travel Search, Orange Location, Orange SMS, Union County NC GIS and WordPress.com. The most often used APIs this week are Foursquare, Google Maps and Twilio. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Telephony (3 APIs, 8 mashups), Blogging (2 APIs, 2 mashups) and Messaging (2 APIs, 4 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
When looking at the tags associated with the mashups that are submitted to our directory; the most popular ones have always been mapping, social and search. In recent months that trend has continued and today we look at a mashup type that is nearly as popular but doesn’t seem to get as much coverage; the video mashup. These recent Mashup of the Day selections all incorporate video, specifically the YouTube API.
Greetings Programs! Well-designed REST APIs can be leveraged to create balanced client-server web applications; where the client’s responsibilities extend far beyond simply rendering a server-generated HTML document. Web sites and applications have been slowly shifting to this architecture since Internet Explorer 5’s inclusion of the core AJAX mechanics, DOM scripting and XHR. More recently, the architectural shift has been accelerated by significant advances in standards (e.g. HTML5) and performance (e.g. device CPUs and JavaScript).
On a cool morning a group of hackers slowly filter into a downtown Philadelphia storefront. The whiteboard wall quickly fills up, as a few work on finding an accurate way to track the progress of a single chosen bus line. With phone in hand, others build systems providing schedules and stops via SMS and voice. A few keystrokes and another starts tracking the positions of trains, while across the the room, transportation information flickers across a screen, controlled simply by a pair of hands moving through the air.
Online file storage services have not just seen huge adoption, but providers of such services have been innovating constantly to attract more developers. Combine this with the fact that traditional enterprise software vendors are not fast enough to respond to the changing dynamics in enterprise software. All this makes for a good opportunity for one of the vendors to step in and pave the path to drive innovation. Box.Net is on mission to provide exactly that with its Box.net API. It hopes that its new developer community and $2 million integration fund will help.
It’s funny that when I talk to people in the travel industry about mashups and APIs, most of them get glazed looks in their eyes. Throw in terms like location based services or geospatial awareness and I’ve lost them. What most of them don’t realize is that the majority of the travel apps that are starting to come out, both online and for mobile are mashups that are relying on location awareness and geospatial data. Many of them, like Pocketvillage are a consumer interface on top of a variety of APIs all normalized for a single homogenous user experience. That’s right, it’s essentially a metasearch tool that pulls in content from a variety of sources including Viator, GetYourGuide, TourCMS, Rezgo, AirBnB, and many others. What differentiates a metasearch like Pocketvillage from other metasearch applications however, is the fact that with location based services enabled, Pocketvillage can return content based on your current location. The issue right now however is that not all geo data is equal. Not all APIs provide geolocation information and some return it based on different criteria.
Librato hits the sweet spot for late adopters. Developers that are not willing to host their systems in the cloud, but need to implement reliable, automatic scaling should find Librato to be a realistic way forward. It allows for existing applications to be wrapped in “containers” and “templates” which transform them into monitored processes that produce performance metrics. Now with the Librato APIs, developers can now fully manage their process configuration set programatically. This company makes a serious offering to the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space with technology driven on an excellent strategy and backed by 12 million in funding.
Have you ever wondered why some popular sites do not provide an API but ship a great mobile application that works with their data? It is easy enough to conclude that beneath the layers of the mobile application, there are indeed API calls but just that the API is private and not yet made available. If you are itching to discover the APIs but did not know how to, help could be on the way.
The winners of the Thrutu enhanced phone call contest all focused on collaboration. The Thrutu API allows developers to create “buttons,” applications that can run during a phone call and pass information between the callers. The winner also utilized the Dropbox API to create a file sharing button.
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