Twitter is now reporting the real number of retweets in the Twitter API, which means we now know how crazy the retweet counts go on celebrity tweets. And did Newt Gingrich lose in Florida because he didn’t have an API!? Plus: 6 new APIs.
There is the old hat of publishing giants struggling to find viable business models in the digital world. Then there are countries and legislations that are even trying to turn the very principles of the internet upside down, by making the creation of links an act that one should pay for. On the other end of the spectrum there are newspapers that have public APIs to their content. These newspapers are striving for innovation, by exploring new grounds, instead of sticking to what they know.
Factual continues to spread its points of interest database across the Internet. SimpleGeo will incorporate Factual’s business listings into its SimpleGeo Places API. Developers will then be able to access 30 million places across 45 countries to become what is likely the largest business listings database available via API. Factual is also the source of Facebook’s popular Places feature.
If there is a segment that is ripe for integration it is travel. APIs in the travel segment have been around for a very long time. In fact, some of the earliest APIs are based on Electronic Data Interchange, which dates back to the 1960s. Granted many of these connections are highly complex enterprise only integrations, it is a history that should bode well for modern day integrations, should it not? Despite a long history of interconnectedness, much of the travel space still remains behind closed doors. The major global distribution systems, represented by Sabre, Travelport, and Amadeus all offer powerful APIs of their own, but their commercial requirements tend to be out of the league of most application developers.
In spite of the limitations the travel industry has effectively self imposed, there still exists many opportunities to monetize sites using travel APIs. There are several types of APIs available in the travel space. Most are transactional and some are content driven. Let’s take a look a broad categorization of available travel APIs.
API conference GlueCon is a little over a month away and the event organizers are showing their commitment to content over cash. Today Alcatel-Lucent (GlueCon community underwriter and parent company to ProgrammableWeb) and GlueCon announced the 15 companies selected to receive demo space at the conference for free, an initiative we covered in January. Among those selected are open source software, cloud solutions and, of course, several APIs.
This past week 16 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 23 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Abbreviations, Kynetx, PubSub, Qwerly, Superfeedr and Yahoo Music Engine. The most often used APIs this week are Google Maps, Twilio and Twilio SMS. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Social (4 APIs, 4 mashups), Reference (3 APIs, 4 mashups) and Mapping (3 APIs, 6 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Despite attempts to reinvent it, email is still one of the most popular ways to communicate across the internet. Developers have long been able to take advantage of Emails popularity using various libraries that support POP, SMTP and IMAP. This is fine when you have access to a publicly available web server, but for small and hobby developers this can be an unacceptable cost.
As more and more people are using Twitter as a means of sharing and communicating, it seems that almost every web and mobile application on the planet as a “Share this on Twitter” feature. Most of the time, this feature is welcome. Posting Foursquare mayorships, new blog posts, entertaining YouTube video, etc. But sometimes, it’s a problem. Namely, when a web application doesn’t include the option to not post to Twitter or makes the button hard to find or easy to miss.
With a domain like map.pr, you’d think this would be another link shortener. Instead, it uses the Foursquare API to give you a great way to visualize popular places on FourSquare. And, if you’re following the World Cup, you can also use Mappr to find spots frequented by fellow fans.
This past week 15 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 24 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include After the Deadline, CitySearch CityGrid , Outside.in and Sensebot. The most often used APIs this week are Facebook, Google Maps and YouTube. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Shopping (3 APIs, 3 mashups), Search (3 APIs, 4 mashups) and Tools (2 APIs, 2 mashups).
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2012. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
