Move over, Instagram API, there’s a new hotness. In a similar way that developers sought out Instagram, photo tagging site Pinterest has its share of API sniffers and unofficial wrappers. That and the official Pinterest API is said to be coming soon.
Even though Alaska Airlines was one of the first airlines to offer an iPhone application, allowing travelers to check-in and use their phone as mobile boarding pass, early efforts were essentially just “screen-scraped” from the companies website, providing a very poor user experience, not really delivering on the process of the mobile web. Since you’re a ProgrammableWeb reader, you can probably guess what the company needed. After all, mobile has fueled API growth.
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.
Roll-your-own API service Usergrid has been acquired by API management company Apigee. Usergrid could potentially help Apigee reach out to mobile developers increasingly finding themselves needing APIs to interact with their apps. It’s part of a trend of developers not only being API consumers, but also API providers–at least privately to their own apps.
Matthew David from TheAppBuilder.com is an intense individual. He has seen the opportunity lying in front of mobile application developers and I suspect that it’s keeping him up at night. No, its not tied to a single platform. The opportunity he sees is based on a trend that involves billions of mobile phone users around the globe. “There are 7 billion people on the planet, 4.5 billion of them have cell phones” David explained, “currently 5% are smartphones. By the end of 2012, we’ll see that number move to 20%.” That’s about 700 million new smartphones, for those of us counting along, that will be coming online this year. Let that number sink in for a moment. If you’re a bit skeptical, note that some projections put 2012 iPhone says at between 125 and 200 million, and that’s just one phone in the market.
Urban Airship, the API company providing push notifications to smart phones, is now powering notifications on the new Amazon Kindle Fire. The company’s Urban Airship API simplifies push notifications for developers using iOS, Blackberry and Android. Because Kindle Fire is built on Android, the company’s work to integrate push to the Fire was already done.
Have you ever wondered why some popular sites do not provide an API but ship a great mobile application that works with their data? It is easy enough to conclude that beneath the layers of the mobile application, there are indeed API calls but just that the API is private and not yet made available. If you are itching to discover the APIs but did not know how to, help could be on the way.
Our directory recently passed 4,000 APIs, each one different than almost every other one. There is a single defining factor of all 4,000: in some way, they’re available for any developer to use. They’re public. There is a virtual ocean below our directory of APIs that are currently private. These APIs drive mobile apps, connect strategic partnerships and exist within organizations large and small to facilitate data sharing.
Some of the APIs in our directory look like cousins of the private API. Their documentation is only available by request, or access is only offered to approved partners. And increasingly, there is a paid barrier to many we list. In some cases, the entire business is an API or collection of APIs.
Perhaps the biggest surprise in today’s Apple announcements is that the voice command feature, widely anticipated since the largest mashup acquisition ever, is keeping the name “Siri.” The newest version of Apple’s iOS for iPhone and iPad will include the features of the voice command iPhone app that some called the “ultimate mashup.”
In this post I’ll describe how we planned, built and tested a truly real-time location-based game with Socket.io, Redis, Node.js, and what we learned along the way. Over the past few months, we’ve spent the majority our free time building a real-time game as a test for our location platform, Geoloqi. We call the game MapAttack! due to its map-based nature. Two teams compete to capture the most points on the gameboard. The gameboard, in this case, is the city streets of the neighborhood the players are in.
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