The web’s largest video site has added a new personalization feature to its YouTube API. Sure to be misunderstood as a privacy concern, the service now lets applications access viewing history for authenticated users. Amazon also made two announcements related to its storage and database services. That and 19 new APIs round out today in APIs.
Back in May I wrote about the race for either unified APIs or API standards to bridge the growing number of APIs in specific industries or areas. Unified APIs are created by a third party provider to bridge multiple APIs, while API standards would potentially create an industry-wide standard of how APIs should operate.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the O’Reilly Strata Conference in New York City, and sat in on a very important keynote from Drew Conway and Jake Porway about their project, Data Without Borders.
Data Without Borders is looking to match non-profits in need of data analysis with freelance and pro bono data scientists who can work to help them with data collection, analysis, visualization, or provide decision support.
The Federal Register is touted as “The Daily Journal Of The United States Government”. Its website, federalregister.gov, allows access to the documents published there, which include proposed rules, final rules, public notices, and Presidential actions. It’s a pretty interesting and useful look into what the US Government is doing, and how it might affect your life. Amazingly enough, it has a full-featured API, which is a truly open source project, to allow access to the Federal Register within applications.
Salesforce.com is holding its flagship event Dreamforce at Moscone Center in San Franscisco this week, and before we spend time covering some of its new initiatives in what the company calls the Social Enterprise, I thought it would be a good time to review the APIs that developers can use as part of the DeveloperForce program.
NoSQL databases are all the rage these days. We recently discussed moving from MySQL to MongoDB within hours. The rise of NoSQL is often associated with the need to not just store large amounts of data but also to visualize relationships between the various objects in the database. InfiniteGraph has released its InfiniteGraph API to Java developers to use its NoSQL graph database. The company also launched a developer contest.
Last weekend at the AT&T Mobile Hackathon I had a pleasure of checking out the MongoLab’s MongoDB service. In short: it was a delight to work with. I fell in love with that technology. It worked exactly the way I thought–MongoDB architects got it right. After spending a good part of the day fighting my hibernate configuration in JUnit I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that Mongo keeps their documentation and design accessible with plan old object and simple REST calls to its MongoLab API.
After launching its public beta a year ago, SimpleGeo is making public its storage product the company is based upon. Though the company has offered a few other geo APIs in the interim, the SimpleGeo Storage API geo database solution is the only product for which it charges and it appears to have lowered the price.
A little over a year ago, Google released a new product called Google Fusion Tables. Fusion Tables allows you to upload, merge, share, and visualize large tables of tabular data. Basically, we wanted to answer the question “I have a spreadsheet. I want to share it with people and create a map/bar chart/storyline/other visualization.” Google Spreadsheets, while powerful, couldn’t handle the 100 meg upload we allow for Fusion Tables. And, being Google, we also provided something for developers.
With 25 million business listings over nine countries, open data company Factual has taken a first step toward creating a place database to which anyone can contribute. With location-based applications now more popular than ever, the data is extremely valuable to developers. Factual is providing it via its API, currently for free.
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