Path.com has a mobile app, so of course it has an API. Someone sniffed the traffic and discovered something naughty. And you know the answer-anything Wolframe Alpha? Find out why it really, really likes Apple’s Siri. Plus: Facebook gaming, Google Plus developers and 18 new APIs.
HootSuite, a social media management tool for web and mobile, uses a lot of APIs. Now, it also provides one, the HootSuite Engagement API, which the company unveiled today. The new platform allows developers to create, schedule and organize social messages and accounts.
Every day Foursquare users create millions of check-ins using the location-sharing platform. Those may be only a small fraction of the traffic seen by its API, which we’ve estimated receives at least 5 billion requests per month. The company continues to expand the local data made available via its API, so developers of all sorts are finding it a rich resource for building their apps.
After four months, Facebook is set to open its timeline actions to developers this week, according to AllThingsD. The feature is an addition to the Facebook Graph API that allows developers to assign verbs for actions users perform within applications. For example, how users now “like” things, they’ll also be able to “read” articles, “play” games and “listen” to music. I would expect many, many actions to be submitted to Facebook for approval, especially related to game-specific acts. It’s too early to tell how closely the social network will watch its pending list of actions, though there’s a clear approval process.
After our recent look at the growth of social APIs, we thought we’d look back at the history of the category. We added the Plazes API in September, 2005. In terms of the web, this is recent history. In terms of APIs, we might as well be looking at scrolls. In fact, less than half of the first 10 social APIs are still alive today. Below you’ll find a list of those trailblazing 10, along with a status for each of them.
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.
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.
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.
The most popular Twitter ranking service, Klout, has used its API platform to boost its growth. The company, which is also expanding outside of Twitter, saw calls to its Klout API more than triple in just a few months. The company is now clearly in the API billionaires club.
The amount of messages that are being shared by users on the social networks has reached massive proportions. What if we were able to add Voice to all the social snippets that we are sharing today on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks? That’s the target of a new “Social Voice Platform” QWiPS.
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2012. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
