As Google continues to set the bar for website analytics, Hootsuite, the social media management service, is promoting its ability to create sophisticated visualizations based on data available through the Google Analytics API. In the crowded world of social management and analytics tools, Hootsuite is poised somewhere between a multichannel social publishing platform and social analytics tool. Their recent focus on data visualization shows just how important the analytics part of the business is. While Hootsuite offers a free entry-level service the advanced Google Analytics integration is only available to paid subscribers.
The semantic text mining Alchemy API is now a member of the API Billionaires Club. The service, which makes sense of raw unstructured data, averages 65-75 million requests per day, according to Alchemy’s Elliot Turner. That brings the monthly count above 2 billion API requests.
APIs are now an integral part of any product offering. Developers have continuously pushed the envelope in terms of the features that they want from APIs and API companies have responded from time to time, paying attention to design, reducing the amount of response data and also using performance tuning tools for APIs. In the light of that, Google expanded a feature that it introduced a year back: partial responses and updates.
As the Web API space heats up, it’s becoming more difficult to differentiate yourself and attract developers. And so it’s crucial that your API can perform well. Performance isn’t just about processing requests and delivering responses quickly. As Netflix experienced this year, understanding how users makes calls, why they make the calls they do, and what should be contained in your API payload is critical.
We write a lot about the growth in the number of APIs on ProgrammableWeb. But how about usage? Some APIs see so many requests that they measure in billions. We refer to these companies as the API Billionaires Club. The image below, which comes from ProgrammableWeb Founder John Musser’s talk later today at Glue, shows the big names that make up this exclusive club.
Sometimes, when assessing a website, it helps to know how popular it is. These days, there are a lot of ways to learn this, including a few recent mashups. There are also other apps that assess popularity, using different APIs and analysis to do so. Below we have a selection of some of the recent mashups that dig into determining ranking and popularity.
We have seen an explosion in the number of APIs that are now available to developers. It seems like almost everyone has one and those that don’t are scrambling to get one. The focus now is clearly not on just having an API, but having a “great API.” Two excellent presentations from Cloudstock, held earlier this month, give you an overview on the current state of the API market and tips on what makes a great API.
Tynt, an innovative service that provides you more insight into how user engage with your web site content, now provides a Tynt API to access the analytics. The company and is expecting users to develop interesting mobile and web mashup applications with it.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular, and free, ways to track web site statistics. It is not uncommon for web masters to use Google Analytics to monitor several different domains, possibly using more than one Google account to do so. But while Google Analytics is a powerful tool, getting a concise overview of these separate statistics can be difficult. The folks at Trakken GmbH thought so too, and so they used the Google Analytics API to create Trakkboard.
PollDaddy, one of the most popular online poll and survey creation services, recently opened their new API to the public. The basic PollDaddy service provides free accounts for creating polls and surveys, or a Pro upgrade that eliminates sponsored links and allows higher numbers of survey responses than the free version. Now with the API, the core poll creation and reporting services are available to developers (details at our PollDaddy API profile).
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