Popular location-based social network Foursquare quietly made the long-teased new version of its API publicly available Tuesday. The changes, embraced by its developer community, include JSON-formatted responses and OAuth-only authentication. Even though the new API is characterized as in beta, the company has also deprecated the previous version, announcing it will no longer be available by the middle of next year.
Last month saw the first-ever “Small Business Saturday” (at least according to American Express, the initiative’s sponsor). Small business get plenty of attention in terms of their finances, but what about their web application needs? The Small Business Web is “a directory of web apps to help small business bloom and grow.” The site was founded about two years ago by FreshBooks (invoicing), MailChimp (email marketing), BatchBlue (customer relationship management), Outright (accounting), and Shoeboxed (receipt management). It now lists dozens of applications across several more categories.
Email marketing service provider MailChimp announced last week a new $1 million dollar fund for startups building products that integrate with the service’s MailChimp API. MailChimp’s program is somewhat unique in that they won’t be asking for equity from the companies they fund. It’s a pretty attractive deal for prospective partners and a trail-blazing move for a platform in an increasingly competitive industry.
Online mapping and directions innovator MapQuest has been building new web services on top of data from the publicly-editable OpenStreetMap project since the company announced a new open platform initiative in August. Now MapQuest has a new addition to its family of open data–based services, bike routes:
Auction giant eBay is giving its developers another way to access listings. In addition to its current eBay API, it has added support for Microsoft’s “OData,” an Open Data protocol for accessing and querying data provided by an API. Using familiar technologies, OData provides a consistent structure, with the promise of APIs that are more flexible and easier to use.
Transloadit offers media upload, modification, and storage as a service for developers who need that functionality (or, as Transloadit’s homepage puts it, “geeks who run web or mobile applications”) but don’t want to worry about it themselves. There aren’t too many moving parts to it, but they’re ones a lot of applications make use of. The Transloadit API’s main functions include: file upload, image resizing, video file encoding, image thumbnail creations, and file storage on Amazon S3.
File sharing service drop.io last week struck a deal with Facebook in which the larger company will acquire “most of drop.io’s technology and assets.” Founder Sam Lessin, a friend and former schoolmate of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will go work for Facebook in product management. As of the announcement, users ceased being able to create new “drops” (the service’s term for file uploads) for free. Existing premium users will have access to their accounts through December 15th, after which time all accounts will be terminated and all stored content will be deleted. Not all of drop.io’s products are being wound-down quite as quickly, and at least some of the developer APIs will be remaining up for longer than the main service.
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2012. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
