Shoutcast maintains a radio directory of 50,000+ radio stations from all around the world. The company, owned by AOL, released its first Shoutcast API a few years ago, but has since released version 2.0. The updated API provides developers with more advanced options for integrating music streaming services into web services and mobile applications using RESTful calls formatted in XML, JSON and RSS.
Online mapping pioneer MapQuest just launched a new local site to explore 50,000 U.S. neighborhoods. MQVibe uses the MapQuest API to display neighborhood shapes and highlighted places. The MQVibe API, while not officially launched, is used by the site itself and appears available externally.
MapQuest’s recent entree into mobile developer tools is an interesting one. Choosing Android over iPhone means going toe to toe with Google, a familiar competitor to MapQuest on the mapping front. Mapping is logically MapQuest’s turf. The company was helping people find directions online before Larry and Sergey were even in graduate school, let alone leaving to found Google. Of course, another way of looking at it is that Android is in line with MapQuest’s latest push to open up mapping data.
Online mapping pioneer MapQuest is using open data to provide transit directions via its MapQuest Directions API and the OpenStreetMap-based MapQuest Open Directions API. In both cases, transit directions are based on the Google-created GTFS data standard that helps transit agencies share their routes, schedules and fares in a consistent format. Currently MapQuest’s support is limited to six U.S. metro areas.
You’d hardly notice the difference unless you were looking for it. MapQuest’s latest API is a reinvention of its MapQuest API to display maps. So, what’s new? Following the company’s recent pattern, MapQuest Open API is based on OpenStreetMaps, the crowd-sourced map favored by many modern geo-hackers.
As anyone with multiple social networking accounts can attest to, keeping track of them all can be time consuming. AIM Lifestream is a service from AOL that aggregates a number of social networking sites, and now Lifestream has been integrated into AOL Instant Messenger.
If you’re looking for a traffic data web service, you probably have not been able to find one for free. Now mapping pioneer MapQuest is beta testing a service it says provides “real time traffic information related to incidents, markets and flow.”
Wordpress have recently enabled a web service that allows blogs to be read and posted via a Twitter compatible API.
It may be a long way from first place in API mindshare, but web mapping pioneer MapQuest has been making major upgrades to its Flash and JavaScript APIs (our MapQuest API profile).
AOL has announced that its MapQuest service now supports OpenID logins as part of the new My MapQuest capability. AOL has long been an OpenID innovator. As AOL’s George Fletcher reminds us, AOL was one of the earliest OpenID providers.
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