Avvo, the lawyer and doctor directory we profiled last week, has recently opened its Avvo API for wider use. To understand Avvo’s plans for its API, we spoke with Joshua King, Vice President, Business Development & General Counsel at Avvo. It is interesting to note that Avvo prioritized the release of its API over other opportunities that it had. Read the full Q & A with King below:
Lawyers and Doctors have a special place in our society. Most of us need them at some time or the other. Avvo is a directory focused on lawyers and doctors, allowing us to search them based on their area, expertise, user ratings and other criteria. Now its Avvo API provides the same functionality to your applications.
There are no secrets on the Internet. And now, thanks to StealthModeWatch, it’s even easier for people to find your secrets–if you’re a company with outside investors. The service, which also includes an API, digs through public records to expose new investments and the people attached to them.
Here at ProgrammableWeb we do things like read terms of use for fun. That’s just how we roll. We were perusing Yahoo! APIs Terms of Use when we stumbled on something that truly surprised us. Yahoo doesn’t want us using their API’s to operate nuclear facilities. Operating a nuclear facility through any Yahoo API is in fact grounds for having your license terminated. That’s not all we found.
Yahoo has removed the commercial restrictions on Yahoo Updates API, its social streams service that provides real-time user activity data. In addition, Yahoo increased the usage limits to make the platform more viable for commercial websites.
If you’re developing mobile websites or native apps, you’d better take a closer look at the fine print. Some APIs, including one from Amazon, specifically exclude mobile applications. And there’s not much explanation–or logic–behind the exclusions.
The site claims a “huge collection of hit lyrics.” Your next music application can tap into the database with the new ChartLyrics Lyric API. You can use it to search in several ways and, more importantly, obtain the text that makes up the words to popular songs.
Do you live in the now or keep a foot back in the past? Better yet, what should an API provider do?
At the end of July Last.fm (our Last.fm API profile) shut off some old API calls, to the disappointment of some mashup users and developers. The company had some good reasons, but it raises the question about what developers should expect, especially from free APIs.
Popular social news service Digg has announced some changes to its API (our Digg API Profile) that should make existing and prospective developers who use the API a bit happier.
Here is some interesting news that may impact developers using the Google Maps API (our Google Maps API profile). Google has recently made a couple of updates to their terms of service and have posted the the new terms of service here. There was an initial update made in early November, but one that lead to some debate and confusion about a couple of points, which in turn to a subsequent update. The net result is that the terms of service have been streamlined and some previous restrictions have been removed, including a restriction on the use of Google Maps in desktop applications. Here’s a summary of the changes:
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