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Monthly Archives
May 7th, 2008
Love Color? Use This API
COLOURlovers, the terrific site for the color and design community now has its own API. For those not familiar with COLOURlovers, it’s “a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or even in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color apalettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.”
The new API (more details at our profile), gives you access to their growing database of user-generated named colors and palettes:
With the release of the COLOURlovers API, you can now access almost 1 million named colors and more than 325,000 color palettes for your creative projects and applications. Creating a theme editor and want to give your users some color theme options? Creating a visual project that ties keywords to colors? Who knows what amazingly creative stuff people will come up with.
Two of today’s new mashups, including the Mashup of the Day winner, were built using it: Dekaf Lovers and Renkler.
And for more on the “proper” spelling of the first word in their name see the enlightening post Color Vs. Colour, the Great Spelling Battle.
Posted by John Musser as APIs at 12:48 AM | No Comments »
April 16th, 2008
7 Real Estate APIs: What Housing Crisis?
Despite the headlines about the ongoing housing crisis, there’s no shortage of new real estate-related APIs coming to market. We now have 7 real estate APIs in our directory, covering a range of services from real estate search, pricing, mortgage quotation services, and agent ratings. Here’s an overview of the APIs in this space:
- Zillow: Perhaps the most well known real estate API, it exposes their popular services like “zestimates”, a form of algorithmic home estimates. It’s been used in a variety of mashups, 15 at last count. One of the early challenges Zillow had was an claim filed with the FTC about potentially misleading consumers with their valuations (a claim that ultimately wasn’t substantiated).
- Rentometer: A real estate pricing service for rentals where “you can request information such as low, median, and high rental rates and comparable market data for a specific property or area.”
- Trulia: This useful real estate search engine offers an API that’s been used to create at least 7 interesting mashups. The Trulia service itself offers lots of interesting real estate-related data and metrics.
- Mortgage Marvel: A mortgage rates quote service that “enables your users to get the same mortgage rate comparisons available on Mortgage Marvel right on your site. Our API allows you to collect rate search parameters and present real-time, mortgage rate and fee quotes from multiple lenders.”
- Nestoria: Nestoria is a vertical search engine for property in the UK and Spain. The site offers an API to their database of geocoded properties. Earlier we did a mashup case study with Nestoria founder Ed Freyfogle.
- AgentRank API: Access to real estate agent sales, forecasts, and reviews from AgentRank.com system for ranking Realtors based on professional experience, recent home sales, endorsements from past clients, and other variables.” The API supports both SOAP and REST, although data in the database seems a little sparse at the moment.
- Planning Alerts: A local UK service that “searches as many local authority planning websites as it can find and emails you details of applications near you. The aim of this to enable shared scrutiny of what is being built (and knocked down) in peoples communities.”
Certainly real estate mashups have been popular, there are 167 now, and last year we profiled the best of 78.
One of our most visited mashup profiles in this market is for PlotOrNot that uses the Trulia API to give you graphical answers to lots of interesting questions based on real estate pricing data.
Posted by John Musser as APIs at 2:16 AM | 6 Comments »
April 15th, 2008
Connecting Money and Politics: MAPLight.org
Just in time for the next election season, the team at MAPLight.org offer the MAPLight.org API which enables developers to “illuminate the connection” between money and politics by providing detailed funding information for candidates for political office. It’s a growing data set and currently MAPLight covers candidates for the U.S. Congress, presidential elections, and the California Legislature.
The API is constructed using standard REST protocol with data results returned in XML format. In order to use the API, you need to know a candidate’s Federal Elections Commission (FEC) ID. MAPLight provides a link to a tool for looking up FEC IDs on its API home page.
For example, the FEC IDs for presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama are P00003392, P80002801, and P80003338, respectively. Given the FEC ID’s, you can easily obtain today’s campaign contribution information for each candidate, using this request:
http://data.maplight.org/map_fec/financial-summaries.xml
?ids=P00003392,P80002801,P80003338
Here’s an example from our mashup listing of their lookup widget:
The MAPLight API is part of an emerging trend where mashups and APIs are developed to aid citizens in monitoring government and its workings. You can find more examples in the Government APIs and Mashups Dashboard.
Posted by KevinFarnham as APIs, Gov, Money at 1:16 AM | 1 Comment »
April 3rd, 2008
Tumblr API: Manage Your Online Scrapbook
Tumblr calls itself “the easiest way to share yourself” online. With Tumblr, you create “Tumblelogs,” which are, essentially, online scrapbooks. Tumblelogs can include photos, videos, audio, messages, quotes, links, and chat dialogs. Tumblr also now provides the Tumblr API, which lets you programmatically read and write Tumblr data. The API is REST-based, with XML and JSON data format options, and supports both read and write functionality.
To retrieve Tumblr data in XML format, you append the user’s Tumblr URL (for example http://KalaFarnham.tumblr.com) with “/api/read” (for example, http://KalaFarnham.tumblr.com/api/read). To retrieve the data in JSON format, append “/api/read/json” to the Tumblr URL. Additional options let you specify a range of Tumblr posts or a type of post (regular, photo, etc.).
The Tumblr API write function creates new Tumblr posts. Each request must include authentication (the user’s login name and password). The authentication, post content, and options are encoded into a standard HTTP POST request. See the Tumblr API documentation page for details.
As an example, the Tumblr Wall Facebook mashup application lets Tumblr interact with your Facebook account (and as you can see in our profile listing, this was created by prolific mashup developer Sebastin Sanjay who has created over a dozen mashups using 13 different APIs).
Tumblr is an interesting variation in online sharing and social networking, backed by a simple but complete standards-based API.
Posted by KevinFarnham as APIs, Media, photo at 2:41 AM | 1 Comment »
April 1st, 2008
WhitePages.com Announces API and Contest
Yesterday, WhitePages.com announced a new search API that gives developers access to a substantial database of 180 million people, which represents approximately 80% of US adult population and includes 25 million “at work listings”. There are many potential applications for this API. We’ve created a new API profile here and according to their developer documentation, the WhitePages API lets developers use HTTP GET to retrieve XML or JSON for the following types of searches:
- Find Person: search by a person’s name and location to find the person’s complete address and phone number.
- Reverse Phone: search by phone number to find the related name and address.
- Reverse Address: search by street address to find the related name and phone number.
A quick way to get started with the API is to sign up for an account, apply for a key, and then head over to the QueryBuilder, which lets you try out the API functions in your browser.
Should the API get you worried about your own privacy, follow the instructions provided by WhitePages.com on removing your contact info from its database.
One option for getting up to speed with the API is to consider entering the WhitePages.com API Contest (deadline: May 15, 2008), which is offering prizes for two categories: “best iPhone application” and “best social networking application”. The WhitePages Application Gallery gives a set sample code to implement some basic uses of the API: Outlook integration, a “Who Called Me” app, and a mashup of Google Maps and the WhitePages API.
To learn more check out the FAQ and WhitePages Developer’s Blog, both of which contain some very enlightening tidbits (and for more launch coverage see ReadWriteWeb).
Posted by Raymond Yee as APIs, Social at 2:50 PM | 3 Comments »
March 19th, 2008
When ToS Enforce the Word of God
Developers know that it’s a good idea to carefully read the terms of service (ToS) for APIs you use. However, it’s all too easy to ignore a ToS as nothing more than legal boilerplate.
Occasionally, you find some pretty unusual terms. Consider the ESV Bible Lookup API, mentioned in a previous story on New APIs: Games, Shopping and the Bible. Among the conditions of use for the API are the following statements:
This service is available for use only by individuals and non-commercial organizations that use the service in ways consistent with the historic Christian understanding of doctrine and the Bible, as summarized in the following foundational doctrines….You agree to maintain the moral integrity, spirit, fervor, and consistency in message that is inherent in the nature of the ESV Bible. This means that your use is consistent with the above statement of faith and that you give proper attribution.
It’s probably safe to say that few APIs require this level of moral introspection to use. How can one even tell that you are complying with these conditions? Ultimately, there may be no need to answer this question since there is a condition of use that trumps all others:
We reserve the right to cancel your access to the service at any time for any reason.
Posted by Raymond Yee as APIs, Law at 2:37 AM | No Comments »
March 11th, 2008
36 Photo APIs
Online photo sites have steadily grown in popularity. Millions of people use Flickr, Smugmug, Picasa, AOL Pictures, and other sites to post and share all kinds of pictures. What many people don’t know is just how many of these sites offer APIs that can be used to build mashups, photo tools, and other applications.
There are many different types of photo APIs, including photo sharing and management APIs, image editing APIs, and APIs that specialize in image slideshows, geolocation, and mapping. In fact, there are so many APIs that there’s now a ProgrammableWeb Photo API and Mashup Dashboard to keep track of them all in one place. In this post, we’ll take a look at the breadth and power of the 36 photo-related APIs and 415 photo mashups in our directory.
Photo sharing and management
About half of the available photo APIs help you manage and share your photos. The Flickr API is the standout in this category, offering API methods that can be accessed using multiple standard protocols (REST, SOAP, XML-RPC). The Flickr API lets you manage and retrieve everything from photos to contacts to comments and geographical locations. The API is well documented and their developer site links to examples in over a dozen programming languages. It’s no wonder that more than 300 mashups have already been developed using the Flickr API.
The 23 API is modeled after the Flickr API, with the objective of standardizing photo APIs and providing interoperability between photo sharing sites. Other popular photo APIs include the Google Picasa API, the Smugmug API, the Buzznet API, and the AOL Pictures API.
Image editing APIs
If you’d like to offer visitors to your Web site the ability to edit their images online, there are several APIs available that will help you accomplish this. The Snipshot API is simple to apply. You send the API the URL of the image to be edited, a callback URL, and the name of the file to be output (after the user has finished editing the image). The Snipshot Services page provides plenty of example code to get you started.
The FotoFlexer API provides access to a particularly rich online image editor. The API, which can be accessed using standard Javascript, can be extended using server-side scripting technologies such as PHP. The Picnik and Pixenate APIs also provide access to powerful online image editing tools.
Slideshows, geolocation, and mapping
There are a few specialized photo APIs as well. The imageLoop API lets you create photo slideshows. imageLoop includes more than 80 well-documented functions, and can be accessed using standard protocols. Developer kits are available for programming in Java, PHP, Javascript, .NET/SOAP, and ActionScript.
The Panoramio API enables digital photographers to geolocate, store, and organize their photos, and view the photos in Google Earth and Google Maps applications. Panoramio uses JSON data formats and the REST protocol. Panoramio was acquired by Google last year.
If you live in Great Britain and you’re wondering what you’re looking at, the GetMapping API is available to assist you. The GetMapping API provides imagery that can be accessed by Web-enabled mobile phones for any location in Great Britain. You can select your location using postal code, town/village, street name, motorway junction, or East and North position. The GetMapping photos zoom to as close as 12.5 cm per pixel, which lets you see details as small as garden furniture and road markings, anywhere in the country.
Photo mashups
With more than 400 photo mashups available, there’s a good chance you’ll find many of interest. One of the best known and most popular is Big Huge Labs, home of “fd’s Flickr Toys”. As we reported last year, it’s a great mix of over two dozen toys, games and utilities for your photos.
Some of the other more popular directory listings for photo mashups include:
- FlickrSudoku: Mashup of a popular online sudoku player and images from Flickr (more at our profile)
- Tagnautica: Experimental navigation tool for exploring the space of related Flickr tags. Type in one start tag and dive into tag space (our profile).
- A fun experiment in finding Flickr photos by color comes from Jim Bumgardner in Color Fields Colr Pickr. You can select colors directly or use the slider to adjust lightness and darkness (our profile).
The Current Photo API List
To give you a sense of the scope, here’s the list of photo-related API entries in the directory:
Summary
The spectrum of available photo APIs is broad and continues to grow. Check the new ProgrammableWeb Photo Mashup Dashboard for the latest on photo APIs and mashups.
Posted by KevinFarnham as APIs, Popular, photo at 2:59 AM | 2 Comments »
February 21st, 2008
25 Music APIs
[Editor’s note: Today’s post comes from Kevin Farnham, who we are very happy to have joining us as a regular contributor here at ProgrammableWeb.]
Whether you’re a performer or a listener who enjoys discovering great new music, there are many music APIs available to help you accomplish your objectives. Last.fm is among the most popular music destinations on the Web. Its API provides you with data about Last.fm members, artists, albums, tracks, and more. More than 36 Last.fm Mashups are available, and the list keeps growing. With the recent addition of the handy LyricsFly API and its database of lyrics for 314,000 songs, there are now 25 music APIs in the ProgrammableWeb directory (as well as 135 music-related mashups).
But Last.fm is just one example. There are APIs that help you discover music you may like, APIs that provide detailed metadata about music, and APIs that let you store and manage your music online. Other APIs provide online radio and music subscription services. There are APIs for customizing music players, finding live music, and even for selling your own music. So many that ProgrammableWeb has just added a place to track them: the Music API and Mashup Dashboard.
Managing Your Music
Managing your music collection no longer means maintaining an orderly stack of CDs. Today we enjoy music from so many different locations and on so many different kinds of devices, that it can be easy to forget where it all is. In addition, music is available everywhere, but how can you find music that you will like?
These are the types of problems that developers are trying to solve with music APIs. Here’s a breakdown of what’s available and what problem the APIs address.
Music Discovery
How do you find new music that you’re likely to enjoy? And once you find it, how do you bring it into your music collection and manage it such that you’ll be able to find it later on? We’ve already talked about Last.fm. But a lot of other good solutions are also available.
Like Last.fm, the OpenStrands API takes a Web 2.0 approach to music discovery: the API provides programmable access to the MyStrands.com community’s recommendation, tagging and playlist services. Other music search tools include the Digital Podcast API, which lets you search for music using keywords, the SeeqPod API, where you enter the name of a song you like, and API returns a list of recommended songs, and the Yahoo Audio Search API, which enables structured and unstructured queries for finding audio files and correlated music data.
The MusicDNS API deserves special mention: it will automatically compare your music with all the music in its database using algorithms, then identify artists whose work is similar to your own.
About the Music (Music Metadata)
Once you’ve found music you like listening to, you may want to find out more information, about the songs, the artists… Several APIs provide information about music — that is, metadata. Freedb / CDDB provides information about music CDs: artist, CD-title, track list, and other information. The interesting thing is that a track for which you’d like to find information can be on a CD in your computer’s CD-drive, or on many different Freedb-compliant devices.
The MusicBrainz API, Tunelog API, and Discogs API all take a Web 2.0 approach, providing access to a large database of music metadata that is maintained by or based on the collective actions of the MusicBrainz, Tunelog, and Discogs communities.
Media Management and Online Broadcasting
Several APIs are help you manage your music. The Faces.com API and Ipernity API let you share music, pictures, and video with your friends and other members of the site.
Sharing your media is not all that different from broadcasting it, today. But some sites prefer the term broadcasting, implying more professional content. The Orb API allows you to broadcast your music, videos, photos, and more. Meanwhile, the RadioTime API enables you to find and enjoy over 60,000 online radio stations around the globe.
The Rhapsody API and subscription music service lets you programmatically manage your Rhapsody playlists, search for music, and access your Rhapsody RSS feeds.
Music Players
There’s music, then there’s how you listen to it. The Yahoo Music Engine API, the Winamp API, and the MP3Tunes API each offer the ability customizable their respective music players via code.
Music Events
After listening to some tunes by a new artist, you may want to see them perform in person. The Eventful API, JamBase API, and Gruvr API all let you search for concert information and other events. Eventful goes a step further by letting you “demand” an appearance by a performer in your area. Gruvr’s API lets you integrate live music maps and concert schedules into your own site.
APIs For Performers
If you’re a performer, then you’re sure to be interested in the above APIs. You’ll want to have your music available wherever listeners are searching for new music. You want to submit your songs to MusicDNS.org so that people who like your kind of music will be more likely to discover your own music. You’ll certainly want to publicize your performance calendar using the APIs for Eventful, JamBase, and Gruvr. And when it comes to selling your recordings, investigate the SNOCAP API, which will help you set up your own music store.
Music Mashups
Music APIs make a wide variety of music mashups possible. One of the earlier and more popular music mashups in our listings is MusicPortl, which collates information about a specific artist from across the entire web, creating a page that includes biographical information, photos, album releases, videos, blogs, and more. MusicPortl applies seven different APIs to provide all this information: Amazon eCommerce API, Flickr API, Last.fm API, MusicBrainz API, Ontok API, Technorati API, and the YouTube API.
Many music-related mashups aggregate artist data from around the Web into a unified search interface. One of which is FoxyTunes, which was acquired by Yahoo! earlier this month and you can see our listing with APIs used here.
Of the 135 music-related mashups listed, some of the more popular include: TuneGlue, ZonTube, KEXPlorer.com, MusicTonic, One Hit Wonders Map, JukeboxTube, Indie Tube, NPR Station Map and Mashup Camp winners PodBop and the Hype Machine.
We’ll cover more of these in an upcoming post.
Summary
The variety of music-related APIs is enormous, and the number of music APIs keeps growing. Click here for an updated list of currently available music APIs.
- Digital Podcast - Podcast search
- Discogs - Music database
- Eventful - Events discovery and demand
- Faces.com - Photo and media sharing service
- Freedb / CDDB - Online CD catalog service
- Gruvr - Live music and concert information
- Ipernity - Media sharing service
- JamBase - Live music and concert information
- Last.fm - Music playlist management
- LyricsFly - Lyrics database
- MP3Tunes - Music services
- MusicBrainz - Music metadata community service
- MusicDNS.org - Music fingerprinting service
- MusicMobs - Social music service
- OpenStrands - Music recommendation and discovery
- Orb - Digital media remote access and management
- RadioTime - Music and talk radio service
- Rhapsody - Online music services
- SeeqPod - Music recommendation service
- SNOCAP - Digital music marketplace
- Tunelog - Music metadata management
- WebJay - Music playlist management
- Winamp - Customizable music player
- Yahoo Audio Search - Music search services
- Yahoo Music Engine - Desktop music player
Kevin Farnham runs Lyra Technical Systems, a small software consulting and publishing company where he often works with O’Reilly Media, currently as Community Manager for the Threading Building Blocks open source project and was previously the Managing Editor for the AOL Developer Community. On the software engineering side Kevin specializes in mathematical modeling, simulation, and scientific data analysis.
Posted by KevinFarnham as APIs, Music, Popular, Site News at 4:18 AM | 8 Comments »
February 13th, 2008
LibraryThing API: Mashup The Library
One of newest API directory listings is the LibraryThing API, a programmable interface to the popular book lovers site LibraryThing. The service, started as a personal project by Tim Spalding allows users to catalog their book collections now has over 23 million entries. In 2006 Abe’s Books bought a 40% interest in the company. Earlier this month the site was a pick over at the Wall Street Journal which points out that the site has 350,000 members, indexes for 252 international and 39 US libraries, and has over 700,000 user-uploaded book covers.
The API is a fairly straightforward REST API with three primary methods:
- thingLang: a “a simple, pragmatic API for determining the language of a book. thingLang uses LibraryThing’s MARC records, when it can. When it can’t it uses the Group Identifiers embedded at the start of the ISBN format. Rather than returning XML, which–ssh!–I don’t really like, LibraryThing returns a naked three-letter string, following the MARC standard.” Ex: http://www.librarything.com/api/thingLang.php?isbn=2070525570 (Harry Potter in French). Tim’s blog post on this includes some interesting, obscure trivia about ISBN’s.
- thingTitle: Feed it a title and it will return all the ISBNs from the most likely LibraryThing “work,” the LibraryThing title and a link to the LibraryThing work page. It should prove useful for people who have uncontrolled, ratty or ISBN-less data.” Ex: http://www.librarything.com/api/thingTitle/The Hobbit.
- thingISBN: Given a specific ISBN, this method will return a list of associated ISBN’s. Ex: http://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/0553212583 (Wuthering Heights).
Posted by John Musser as APIs at 2:24 AM | 2 Comments »
February 6th, 2008
Reuters Releases Calais Web Service
Last week Reuters introduced its Calais metadata generation web service, an open API available for commercial and non-commercial use. As described on their developers website:
“Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais categorizes and links your document with entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), facts (person ‘x’ works for company ‘y’), and events (person ‘z’ was appointed chairman of company ‘y’ on date ‘x’).”
Developers can call either a SOAP or a REST-based service with plain text or XML documents, and receive back the results of the metadata analysis in RDF format. The initial semantic analysis categories are geared towards business-related people and events, with more specialized metadata to come. English is the only language supported today, but the product roadmap indicates that this year will see a release for Japanese, Spanish, and French, and further capabilities for automatic metatagging of visual and audio content. The semantic metadata flows both ways - publishers who submit text for analysis can upload their own metadata, and the service will combine that information with its own generated metadata.
Calais is offering a bounty program for developers who make creative use of the API. The first contest is offering a prize of $5000 for the developer who creates the best Wordpress plugin that provides auto suggestion of semantic categories, a semantic tag cloud, and placement of a global identifier (GUID). This is now listed on our Contests page.
The Reuters technology looks to be based on their 2007 acquisition of ClearForest, whose API and 10 mashups are cataloged here including the example below, TopicTrends. The API itself is managed via ProgrammableWeb sponsor Mashery.
Open API developers previously had access to the Yahoo term extraction service, which has been available since 2005, but Calais ups the ante with a service goal of under 1 second response, a strong feature set, and terms of service that allow for commercial exploitation.
Posted by John Musser as APIs at 1:16 AM | 2 Comments »
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