As a developer, good ways to store those often-reused snippets of code that correctly solve a common problem is always useful. Now, there are other solutions to this problem, such as the Snipt API, which I covered previously, but Pastebin.com is the most often used, perhaps because it has beeb the favored place for notes from hacker group LulzSec. Pastebin has a nice, full-featured API, and is simple and free to use, at least at a basic level.
If you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to tell you about Freshmeat. This repository of open source code and projects has been around quite a while, and is used by a number of prominent projects. What you may not know, however, is that Freshmeat offers a well-designed Freshmeat API to help developers access the data on Freshmeat for any purpose that makes sense.
Snipt is a web service that attempts to solve a simple problem: storing commonly used snippets of code, and sharing them with your fellow coders. It seems to do that pretty well, with lots of good options for storing and sharing. Better yet, it has its Snipt API so coders can use this simple storage engine within their own programs.
When you want animated maps or zippier feedback than Google’s JavaScript mapping API can provide, you can use the Flash Maps API. Yes, even Google acknowledges that its popular, full-featured platform can’t do everything. Using the Flash API used to mean you needed to know Flash. Now, you can get the benefit, but still program in JavaScript.
The non-profit built for “opening America’s government” has created an app to show off its Congressional data, as well as its API (our Sunlight Labs API profile). You can’t get this app on the web, though, as it’s available exclusively for the Android phone platform.
Forget venture capital. The new hip funding source is to get a grant. That’s what the company behind Walk Score did and as a result the mashup will go open source.
There’s no doubt that Twitter mashups are very popular. Programmable Web listed 120 in February, 200 in June and 238 Twitter mashups today.
Search engines such as Google have been making life a lot easier for developers. They have huge development resources that startups just don’t have, and when they make their APIs available, everyone benefits. But when it comes to using APIs, especially AJAX APIs, it can be a challenge for developers to use these in a search-friendly way.
Are you a developer who wants to get your news immediately? The New York Times NewsWire API, which provides links and metadata for Times articles the moment they are published, might solve your problem. But what if your news alert mashup doesn’t quite get every bit of your undivided attention? Jer Thorp’s NewsAlarm (our Mashup of the Day), combines the NewsWire API and an 85 decibel smoke detector into what might be the loudest mashup on the planet.
Take a look at our API directory and you will quickly note that the Google Maps API continues to reign as the most popular API used for mashups. As the API continues to gain momentum, several new utilities have emerged to improve the user experience (or UX as it has come to be known).
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