January 4th, 2008

YottaMusic and the Limits of APIs

Web APIs rarely do everything the underlying site or service does. They are typically a defined subset of the total functionality. While understandable from a business strategy and resource perspective, these limits can be frustrating for developers. Sometimes this leads them to find a solution using undocumented APIs, often services used by the UI of the site, that provides them enough functionality to meet their needs (which was essentially the case with the original Google Maps, an undocumented JavaScript API until Paul Rademacher reverse engineered them and built HousingMaps.com).

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Posted by John Musser as Featured, Issues, Law, Music at 2:31 AM | 1 Comment »

November 19th, 2007

eBay Serves 5 Billion API Calls Each Month

The first of the Web 2.0 APIs came from eBay back in November 2000 and they’ve come a long way in the 7 years since then. Our eBay API Profile is one of the most frequently visited on ProgrammableWeb. As you can see in this recent post from the eBay Developer’s Blog comes some interesting metrics:

• Over 60,000 developers have registered as members of the eBay Developers Program, with 20,000 new members in the past year
• Nearly 10,000 live applications – an increase of 17% in just the last quarter
• 60% of all eBay listings are listed through eBay services, of which about half come though 3rd parties
• Over 5.7 billion API calls are made every month

And currently the most popular mashup listing on ProgrammableWeb uses the eBay API, the Wii Seeker mashup which finds retail addresses, locations, shipment dates, and local eBay auctions for the Nintendo Wii.

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Posted by John Musser as Featured, Shopping, ebay at 12:36 AM | 2 Comments »

November 16th, 2007

How to Avoid Extinction

How much impact does your daily activity have on the environment? You might be able to answer this question using new carbon footprint calculation mashups built with our recent API listing: AMEE, the Avoid Mass Extinctions Engine. AMEE launched their platform in June of this year and their mission is to “Enable any climate campaign to use a common standard for Carbon Footprint Profiling and Measurement”. The underlying data comes from a variety of sources including the UK government. The software portion is available as open source and the developer, dgen.net, offer professional services to groups looking to build on the platform.

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Posted by John Musser as Featured, Gov, Green, Nonprofit, Popular at 2:05 AM | 3 Comments »

October 22nd, 2007

Enterprise Mashup Challenges

In another one of his thorough and insightful looks at the mashup space, Dion Hinchcliffe outlines The 10 top challenges facing enterprise mashups. Here are some of the key points:

• No commonly accepted assembly model: Lots of tools appearing but lots of differences in the approach they take to building mashups.
• An immature services landscape. Mashups need services and data to work from, but at this point there are a limited number of sources available.
• The splintering of widgets: many differences among vendor offerings and no official standards yet.

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Posted by John Musser as Enterprise, Featured, Issues, Tools at 12:05 AM | 1 Comment »

October 16th, 2007

Successful Developer Programs

There were a number of interesting sessions at yesterday’s Business of APIs Conference hosted by Mashery. Dave McClure, who previously oversaw the launch of the PayPal developer network, gave an engaging, to-the-point talk entitled “Successful Developer Programs”. If you’re running an API developer network or even thinking of running one, here’s a summary of good ideas and important questions to ask yourself:

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Posted by John Musser as BestPractices, Events, Featured, Money, Popular at 7:17 PM | 1 Comment »

October 8th, 2007

Using APIs for Charity, Part 2

In this second and final installment of our mashup case study on Giveness, we pick-up from Part 1 and our conversation with founder Richard Waldvogel by digging into more details on REST vs. SOAP, caching and other mashup lessons learned.

Q: Do you find the Amazon or the ebay API easier to work with?

Getting our eBay API account set up required more attention than with Amazon. You have to store a DevId, AppId, CertId and tokens for REST and SOAP to authenticate your requests. A unique set of these are required for Sandbox and Production communication. Once you save these values to a config file, your done, but it’s a little bit more work up front comparatively.

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Posted by John Musser as CaseStudies, Featured at 1:24 AM | 2 Comments »

September 4th, 2007

Shopping Mashup Case Study: EarlyMiser

The shopping comparison service EarlyMiser is a classic example of a useful eCommerce application built using a set of third party APIs. In this case study interview we speak with EarlyMiser founder Brian DeSpain who gives us the background on this application, its business model, and some interesting insights from their experience in working with web services from some of the leading eCommerce providers including the Amazon E-Commerce API, the eBay API and the Shopping.com API.

Q: What is Earlymiser and why did you build it?

A: Earlymiser.com is a meta comparison shopping engine. It pulls the best prices on products from Shopping.com, Ebay, Amazon and Yahoo Shopping. We built it because no one shopping engine covers all the outlets where you can buy a product. For example, auctions are completely neglected in most comparison shopping engines today. Some great deals can be found there. Ultimately earlymiser.com is there to help consumers find the best price on items and cover enough of the market so that users can be sure that they are getting a good deal.

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Posted by John Musser as CaseStudies, Featured, Money, Shopping at 1:24 AM | 3 Comments »

August 15th, 2007

The Mobile and Telephony Mashup Market

How do you keep track of the ever expanding API universe that, with nearly 500 APIs, is over 10 times larger than it was when ProgrammableWeb launched just two years ago? Try using ProgrammableWeb’s newest major feature: Markets. Markets is a set of new content areas that gives you a way to track APIs and mashups by industry segment, aka vertical. We’re starting with three markets, each with it’s own distinct section that aggregates topic-specific news, APIs, mashups, tutorials and other resources:

• Mapping
• Shopping
• Mobile / Telephony

On the Mobile / Telephony side alone you’ll notice that there are over 25 different APIs that fall under the Telephony and Messaging categories along with 104 ‘mobile’ mashups and 113 tagged ‘messaging’.

This is a rapidly evolving marketplace with lots to follow. In order to make sure we have the right expertise to cover this topic, I’m excited to annouce telephony expert Thomas Howe as ProgrammableWeb’s first content partner. Besides bringing 20 years experience in that industry, Thomas also knows the API and mashup world very well: earlier this year he won the O’Reilly ETel 2007 Mashup Contest with After Hours Doctor’s Office. This innovative and useful application transcribes office voicemails left by patients for doctors into text and then sends them via SMS to the doctor. It was built with a variety of APIs including StrikeIron SMS Pro and Amazon Mechanical Turk and you can read more about the development of this mashup in our first telephony mashup case study.

To get you started in this segment Thomas Howe has written a great introduction: Mobile/Telephony APIs and Mashups: The Big Picture. It gives a clear and concise overview of mobile APIs, call control APIs, messaging APIs and business models.

Stay tuned for more on our Markets sections and keep in mind that three’s just the beginning. Social, video, government and enterprise are on the horizon.

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Posted by John Musser as Featured, Site News, Telephony at 12:27 AM | 3 Comments »

May 18th, 2007

Congress Exposed via Sunlight Contest

Earlier this month the Sunlight Foundation announced the winners of their Mashup Congress contest. See our earlier coverage Mashup Congress, Win Money for some background. The judges included Esther Dyson, Craig Newmark, and Jimmy Wales. In the end the contest was a success and as they note “Each entry proved the case for more transparency in Congress and the creativity of American citizens if provided access to data.” Who won?

• The winners of the first place $2,000 prize were Skye Bender-deMoll and Greg Michalec who created Unfluence. Built using the Follow the Money API it gets you more insight into the truth of campaign finance via an interactive network map of state level political contribution data.



• Citycon: Another good contest entry and first runner-up. Lets you find detailed information about any member of the current 110th US Congress.



• Congress Meets Second Life: One we covered earlier that uses the SunlightLabs API to create an info centers on the Second Life Capitol Hill that offers detailed information on members of the U.S. Congress. Our profile link takes you to a YouTube video of the mashup.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Contests, Featured, Gov at 12:03 AM | 1 Comment »

May 12th, 2006

New Scientist: Mashups as Hacker Dream

The current issue of New Scientist has a good story by Paul Marks on mashup security entitled “Mashup websites are a hacker’s dream come true”. This is an interesting topic that hasn’t received a lot of attention yet, but will once a few headline-grabbing security breaches occur via mashups.

It covers a variety of issues in security, privacy and identity — many of which were discussed earlier this year in a MashupCamp session lead by Hart Rossman, chief security technologist for SAIC. Hart’s quoted in this article along with myself, Bret Taylor from Google Maps, and Ben Metcalfe from backstage.bbc.co.uk.

On the privacy front, the story cites one of my favorite mashups (or proof-of-concept of one), Banned Books from Tom Owad.

The graphic chart that goes along with the article is a nice variation of the pie chart here of top mashup tags.

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Posted by John Musser as Featured, Issues, Press, Security at 12:02 AM | 3 Comments »