This past Valentine’s Day, DuckDuckGo announced via Twitter that their search engine had “received over 1,000,000 direct searches yesterday for the first time ever!” A major accomplishment for a search engine that is essentially unknown. And this search engine has an API.
API service provider Mashery (a ProgrammableWeb sponsor) has launched a new app directory at SXSW which features apps built on Mashery hosted APIs. It’s a great thing for three distinct groups. First, it helps the API providers who partner with Mashery by encouraging API usage through the apps. Second, it helps app developers seeking to build an audience. Third, it helps consumers that might be interested in finding an app that uses a particular API. Granted, those would be your super savvy mobile app consumers, but that doesn’t seem so far fetched after a week at “spring break for geeks.”
Our API directory now includes 57 chat APIs. The newest is the Imo Games API. The most popular, in terms of mashups, is the Skype API. We list 28 Skype mashups. Below you’ll find some more stats from the directory, including the entire list of chat APIs.
For the past few years there has been a sharp rise in self-employed workers as well as workers who perform the majority of their duties from home. Many companies have workers scattered across the globe, making efficient online communication and collaboration an absolute necessity. This post highlights several feature packed and versatile online project management and collaboration platforms.
Zazzle is one of the most popular and largest online marketplaces for custom products with millions of unique product designs available. Users also have the ability to choose from over 50 product categories and create unique customized products from scratch. Many businesses are taking advantage of Zazzle’s customization technologies to sell business branded products on Zazzle.com. In addition, many businesses are successfully using the Zazzle API to commercialize their websites.
There are 96 Google APIs in our directory. The search giant has been working on a single site to house the developer offerings. It has come a step closer to that, launching a new app gallery to showcase many of the apps developers have made. The company also unveiled a new “Google Developers” logo.
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.
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