Have you ever wondered how much traffic Twitter handles in a given day, or what software sits behind the curtain of the popular service? A recent presentation reveals some of the answers. Twitter’s incredible growth becomes obvious when you compare the recent numbers to those announced at Chirp.
Arguably, Salesforce.com brought the software-as-a-service (SaaS) concept mainstream. Today, if software isn’t available as a service, it’s considered old school. But software — as a service or not — is just a container. What makes software valuable has always been what it does to data. Now, in the same spirit of service-oriented architectures and SaaS, a new concept is emerging, Data-as-a-Service (DaaS).
The internet is the perfect medium for matching supply with demand. You can find your next freelance job or, as Craigslist has been singled out for, find just about anything else (if you know the right euphemisms). Now, with Data Marketplace, you can request or provide datasets covering anything you can think of.
Geomena is an open geo database of WiFi access points meant to be used for geolocation. The concept is similar to Skyhook (see our Skyhook API profile) and Google’s Gears (our Google Gears Geolocation API profile). The difference is that the database is as open as Wikipedia, editable and downloadable by anyone to use however they want. Geomena officially launched an API for developers at this month’s Where 2.0 conference in San Jose (video embedded below).
Once you get beyond the most basic map mashups, you’ll run into a problem with data storage and access, because you can’t hard-code hundreds of markers. It’s a problem that SimpleGeo wants to fix. And from the looks of their new platform, they’ve gone beyond expectations.
The British government is opening up a wealth of UK government-held non-personal data with the official opening of data.gov.uk. Created with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, data.gov.uk will publish government data using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model, making it easily accessible from a wide variety of mashups.
Google has released a new API for Fusion Tables, a Google Labs app that allows users to import, integrate, analyze, and visualize data in a variety of ways. The new API allows developers to programmatically perform a variety of tasks, including data import and export (more at our Google Fusion Tables API Profile). The API itself is integrated with several other Google APIs, including the Google Maps API and the Google Visualization API. In fact, developers can also leverage App Engine to easily develop data processing and analysis apps that easily integrate with various other Google APIs.
There’s a new way to get thousands of local points of interest into your web maps: the CloudMade Data Market Place. There’s a fee for using the data, but otherwise it’s as easy as the standard CloudMade API (our CloudMade API profile). For a few hundred dollars per year, you can add any restaurant in the U.S., hospitals in the UK to your map, or one of about 80 datasets.
Structured data has an open platform, thanks to a new startup aptly named Factual. At first glance, it seems like Excel on the web. However, Factual is more database-oriented, with joining and filtering built-in. Plus, sharing and discussing the data is an integral part of the experience. Most functions on the site, including both reading and writing data, can also happen via the Factual API.
There’s a new Amazon acronym to learn. RDS stands for Relational Database Service and it is the newest addition to Amazon’s suite of web services. Unlike previous data services from Amazon such as SimpleDB, RDS is relational (our profiles for the SimpleDB API and new RDS API). In fact, it’s a MySQL 5.1 instance but the main difference is that it is hosted on a virtual server instance in Amazon’s data center. And it can expand and contract as needed, programmatically. Like the Amazon APIs before it, RDS was built to provide developers access to Amazon’s infrastructure, with pay-as-you-go pricing based on your usage.
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