Major U.S. music festival Lollapalooza is catering to hackers with its new Lollapalooza API and a contest. Even though music may be of interest to those who program, music festivals normally don’t fall under our purview here at ProgrammableWeb. We’re excited that this acclaimed music festival is making its data available to the public this year so developers can build applications involving their scheduling and artist info.
File sharing service drop.io last week struck a deal with Facebook in which the larger company will acquire “most of drop.io’s technology and assets.” Founder Sam Lessin, a friend and former schoolmate of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will go work for Facebook in product management. As of the announcement, users ceased being able to create new “drops” (the service’s term for file uploads) for free. Existing premium users will have access to their accounts through December 15th, after which time all accounts will be terminated and all stored content will be deleted. Not all of drop.io’s products are being wound-down quite as quickly, and at least some of the developer APIs will be remaining up for longer than the main service.
Ever wondered what impact your active presence on the Web has? For example, when you write a blog post or tweet about something, you may be interested in how many tweets your post receives and how many users can potentially reach your post. There are many ways to measure your social impact, however, to cover all social channels and platforms can be difficult to achieve. A Silicon Valley based company BackType builds an analytics platform that helps you understand your social impact at large.
BackType’s major goal is to give users a very comprehensive view of all social media. Today, it supports over one million sites and networks including Twitter and Facebook. When your app wants to get all the data that comes from Twitter, you can use the Twitter’s Streaming API which is the subject to various limits. BackType, however, belongs among those few that have the unlimited access to the full Twitter firehose. It can access more than 50 million tweets a day coursing through Twitter.
Recently, blogging service Posterous thought it would try and help ease the burden of moving from other places on the web to its blogging platform by developing a bunch of migration tools. All of these tools were built on other services’ open APIs and designed to go in, grab your content, and republish it through Posterous maintaining as much metadata as possible. Things were fine until photo-hosting service Twitpic caught wind and cut of Posterous’ API access.
OCWSearch, the search engine for OpenCourseWare courses, has launched a search API. With courses from major universities such as MIT, Stanford or Yale, OCWSearch API now lets you search the full index and get information about course title, date, description or names of instructors.
For decades, public radio in the United States has provided accessible news and educational content to millions of listeners. Despite its popularity, traditional radio has a local broadcast range and limited opportunities for interactivity, and the rise of online social media has challenged public broadcasters to redefine their roles for the Internet age. National Public Radio (NPR), which produces popular programs such as All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation, has been a pioneer in embracing web technology by making its content available through a rich, standards-based API. Until now, the API operated much like a broadcast radio station, as it could only be used to retrieve content from a central location. However, NPR has taken a major step toward incorporating the read-write capabilities of the web for content delivery, with its announcement of a new feature called API Ingest. This update which will allow authorized stations to not only download programming, but to post content to the NPR API.
When it comes to video (and audio), it seems every device uses its own special format. There is a good chance the format used by your camera can’t just be copied to a web site and viewed as is. The process of converting between formats is known as transcoding. It is a CPU intensive job, and with hundreds of formats to choose from presents developers with a significant challenge. Zencoder is a new web service that is looking to provide a solution.
My previous posts focused on COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) and content modularity, the fundamentals for ensuring that content can be managed and distributed to virtually any platform. But ensuring that your content can be delivered to those other platforms does not mean that it can display appropriately on them.
The digital media world is in the process of dramatic change. For years, the Internet has been about web sites and browser-based experiences, and the systems that drove those sites generally matched those experiences. But now, the portable world is upon us and it is formidable. With the growing need and ability to be portable comes tremendous opportunity for content providers. But it also requires substantial changes to their thinking and their systems. It requires distribution platforms, API’s and other ways to get the content to where it needs to be. But having an API is not enough. In order for content providers to take full advantage of these new platforms, they will need to, first and foremost, embrace one simple philosophy: COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere).
National Public Radio (NPR) has just opened another means for developers to access content from NPR.org: a new API for transcripts. This API provides access to tens of thousands of transcripts from some of the most popular programs on NPR. As we covered last year and in our NPR API Profile, their APIs open-up a range of interesting possibilities.
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