Seller of shoes and more, Zappos has added an external, virtual hackathon to its internal company event this week. While Zappos engineers work on their quirky or useful projects outside their normal job, the company has invited developers to use the Zappos API to make something great, fun, weird or mashed-up.
At the recent Small Business Web Summit, several member-company representatives hashed out a list of guidelines that may one day become a “Good Housekeeping”-esque seal for The Small Business Web, a consortium of API providers that are working together to create better small business tools. Among the list is an entire section devoted to APIs, where the seal would signify a series of promises to partners.
This week we had 71 new APIs added to our API directory including a content delivery network, grid computing facilitation service, online health network service, cloud hosted search service, apple product search and a web content aggregation and ranking service. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.
This past week 12 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 16 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include AMEE, awe.sm, uShip and Zomato. The most often used APIs this week are AMEE, Facebook and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (5 APIs, 10 mashups), Mapping (2 APIs, 3 mashups) and Shopping (2 APIs, 2 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
This weekend DocuSign, the company I work for, was at the first AngelHack hackathon in San Francisco. With nearly 200 people attending (over 150 developers), we were excited to see what applications can be enhanced with the DocuSign API, as well as all the different types of apps developers built.
Think the social web is big? When it comes to connecting Twitter, Facebook and others to the rest of the web, APIs are there to do the heavy lifting. The category continues to explode, already surpassing the number of social APIs added last year. Our directory currently lists 558 social APIs, with nearly 200 added this year.
The DataSift platform allows users to define a “stream” using filtering parameters such as keywords or locations. Users can immediately begin to receive data in real time as comments are posted on social media sites. With a license to access Twitter’s full “Firehose”, we offer users the ability to search for posts using all the metadata contained in a Tweet, making it a far more powerful search. Though we make the search available via the simple Datasift API, there’s actually quite a bit that goes into it.
Yahoo! BOSS, the Build Your Own Search Service, has seen a series of upheavals in the last two years. When Yahoo! announced its Search partnership with Microsoft, it looked that Yahoo! BOSS might not survive for long. However, that was not the case. Yahoo! BOSS has come back strongly this year with paid version V2 and major updates to the BOSS API. In a sign that it is alive and kicking, it has announced a new home for Search BOSS and three new product offerings under the BOSS umbrella along with API updates.
The Mendeley Binary Battle is over and the winners have been announced. To recap, the Binary Battle is an innovation challenge similar to the X-Prize, for using the Mendeley API. The platform gives anyone access to a layer of social and demographic information about research, enabling scientific research to be used alongside any application like FourSquare uses location on Twitter.
Urban Airship, the API company providing push notifications to smart phones, is now powering notifications on the new Amazon Kindle Fire. The company’s Urban Airship API simplifies push notifications for developers using iOS, Blackberry and Android. Because Kindle Fire is built on Android, the company’s work to integrate push to the Fire was already done.
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2012. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
