The Google Maps API is listed as the most popular API in the ProgrammableWeb API directory. Because of its ease of use, plus the infinite possibilities for hacking together mashups, has made it the most popular API by far, way beyond the Twitter API and Youtube API.
Google announces more Google Plus API hackathons. YouTube explains how to best upload videos through your apps. Plus: Another heavy Google Maps API user says goodbye, music developers and 23 new APIs.
Gowalla’s rocky couple of years ended with a talent acquisition by Facebook of the former location-sharing app. Left in the dust were developers using the Gowalla API, including Ben Dodson and his field notes app for Gowalla. Dodson’s latest creation is a Gowalla-inspired app that focuses just on the gaming elements rather than check-ins. And because Dodson remembers struggling with Gowalla’s early API, the WallaBee API is available from the start. In fact, before the start.
Boasting 400,000 restaurant menus spanning over 13,000 cities, the SinglePlatform API is filled with valuable content. And it’s giving it away to developers for free. The company has big publishing partners signed on, including the New York Times and Foursquare. And restaurant menus are only its first act.
There is a restaurant near my house that I go to often, it’s hard to find and I have trouble explaining to my friends how to get there. I can’t help but wonder how much business this restaurant is losing because of its poor location. Indoor mapping company EveryScape might have the solution. It’s like Google Maps street view that doesn’t stop at the front door, it goes right inside. The Everyscape API can seamlessly be integrated into a website, allowing a developer to place the company’s immersive viewer in a relevant section of their site.
Google Maps API has become so entrenched in developer minds, that if you are looking for a mapping feature in your application, you did not look beyond them. But ever since Google announced its pricing last year, websites that have a large number of visitors have been disappointed with the potential fees that they will have to shell out for the services. These websites have responded in typical fashion and they are looking for alternate solutions. This definitely means good news to developers since having competitive choices is a positive thing.
Every day Foursquare users create millions of check-ins using the location-sharing platform. Those may be only a small fraction of the traffic seen by its API, which we’ve estimated receives at least 5 billion requests per month. The company continues to expand the local data made available via its API, so developers of all sorts are finding it a rich resource for building their apps.
Two days ago we wrote about Urban Airship grounding SimpleGeo APIs. While one API was being taken over by another company, it left SimpleGeo’s innovative flagship geo storage product stranded. Another company has quickly come forward to pick up the slack. Geoloqi created a SimpleGeo importer that will move storage from one platform to the other, where places can then be queried by the Geoloqi API.
Push notification startup Urban Airship is closing the doors on all three APIs from the geo infrastructure company it acquired in October. The data behind one of the APIs, SimpleGeo Places, will be maintained by Factual and become part of its Factual API. Other SimpleGeo functionality is being folded into Urban Airship’s platform.
In October Google announced pricing for its popular Google Maps API. Though most sites won’t hit the free limits, those with a lot of traffic may be scrambling for a solution. That was the case for a New York real estate service, which discovered their bill would be $200,000 – $300,000 per year.
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