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:
The new Google Patent Search API is now available and lets you search over 7 million patents via code. It is part of the AJAX Search API suite of content-specific Google search utilities such as book search, government search, code search and others.
Here’s an interesting online business you may not have heard of: Betfair. Who are they? They’re the world’s leading online betting exchange, a concept they helped pioneer back in 2000, and now have annual revenues over 180 million pounds Sterling.
Developers know that it’s a good idea to carefully read the terms of service (ToS) for APIs you use. However, it’s all too easy to ignore a ToS as nothing more than legal boilerplate.
We recently added this new API listing to the US government site USAspending.govwhich provides API access to budget data, but we didn’t notice a detail which one of our readers did: that there’s this somewhat intimidating, red-text warning on the homepage.
For the third time in as many weeks a third-party Facebook application is the subject of controversy. This time around it’s that Hasbro, the company behind Scrabble, wants to shut down the popular Facebook app Scrabulous.
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