March 5th, 2008

Yahoo Launches Fire Eagle

Today at the O’Reilly ETech Conference in San Diego, Yahoo’s Tom Coates demonstrated their latest API, and perhaps their most unique API: Fire Eagle. It’s a platform for sharing your location online. It gives applications the ability to update, query and track your location, with user-driven privacy controls allow setting of location availability and granularity. We have created a new Fire Eagle API profile here. Yahoo’s site describes it as:

The secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy. We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.

This Yahoo diagram does a nice job of illustrating how applications can interact with the platform:

Here are some of the key details:

• It’s currently an invite only beta release (10,000 invitations sent today).
• Since privacy issues are naturally a top concern in any system capable of sharing your current location, the Fire Eagle platform has this built-in a very deep level. You can choose how specific a location to make available as well as how long to make this available (Fire Eagle can send you reminders).
• It’s unique in that it’s a pure platform play — there is currently no consumer-facing Yahoo app on top it.
• The REST-based API is one of the first from a major vendor to support OAuth as the authentication mechanism. One implication of this is that the application does not need to know the Yahoo ID of the user.
• The query API lets you retrive data in GeoJSON and GeoRSS formatted data.
• There are user-selectable levels of accuracy that range from neighborhood to country.
• The Dopplr service will be one of the first to use it.
• Initial sample apps from Yahoo will include a Fire Eagle widget badge for MySpace, an app for connecting with friends on Facebook, and an SMS updater for texting your location.
• The API includes user-specific methods like /update and /lookup, as well as general purpose methods like /recent.
• It keeps only the most recent piece of location information it received.

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Posted by John Musser as Mapping, Mobile, Yahoo at 4:21 PM | 9 Comments »

January 8th, 2008

Yahoo Launches Mobile Developer Platform

At yesterday’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Yahoo announced the early preview of their Mobile Developer Platform. This XML-based platform for creating mobile-optimized applications called Yahoo Mobile Widgets will run across a variety of devices and carrier networks. Yahoo wants this to be a one-stop solution for mobile developers and it’s another varition of write-once and deploy widely. To help track this platform we’ve now added an API profile for Yahoo Mobile here.

Mobile development can be quite a challenge due to a combination of technical hurdles like device incompatibilities as well as the business challenges of dealing with carriers. By leveraging Yahoo’s installed software mobile developers have an opportunity to get onto the handsets more easily. Note that Yahoo’s approach is different than a platform like Google’s Android in that they’re looking to leverage existing platforms rather than create a new one. Initial launch partners include MTV, eBay and MySpace.

In terms of what’s available for the development platform at the moment, you can start with the one page Overview and then move onto the more detailed 44 page Developer’s Guide (PDF). Other pieces of the puzzle including the ability to submit your apps for approval and publication to devices is coming soon.

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Posted by John Musser as Mobile, Widgets, Yahoo at 1:49 AM | 4 Comments »

November 30th, 2007

Radio Station Mashup

Lots of radio stations would be glad to have devoted fans able to create web mashups like the KEXPlorer. This mashup is intended to “enhance the listening experience” of the popular community supported KEXP station in Seattle: follow along as you stream KEXP, tag the songs you like, post comments, and send SMS to get current song info from your phone. As the live KEXP stream plays, the site shows album art, DJ and listener comments, and links to related music sites like iTunes. This mashup leverages multiple APIs including Amazon E-Commerce for things like album data and thumbnails, Mobivity for the SMS messaging, and the Rhapsody API.

One of the handy unique features is its SMS capabilities: “In the car and want to know (or remember) the song you’re listening to? With KEXPlorer you can find out by texting ‘kexp’ to 95495 to get the current playing song. The song will be auto-tagged as sms for later lookup/download/discovery! Note, this feature requires that you have created a profile that is setup for sms.”

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Posted by John Musser as Media, Mobile, Shopping at 3:20 AM | No Comments »

October 24th, 2007

Track California Fires via Mashups

Wildfires in Southern California have lead to the largest evacuations in the US since hurricane Katrina and now a variety of organizations have created interactive mashups to provide information and track status. The first comes from the LA Times whose Southern California wildfires map (see our mashup profile here), with marker popups with details including acres burned, current containment, homes destroyed, time started, and status of evacuations.

The second mashup is a Google Maps mashup from KPBS San Diego (our profile here), whose map shows fire areas but also meeting points for evacuees as well as nearby emergency services like hospitals. KPBS has also setup a Twitter page with text updates.

And lastly, this mobile mashup, WAP California Wildfires, built with the 411Sync API lets you track on the California wildfires in real time from your WAP-capable cell phone. Visit 411sync.com from your mobile device and use the keyword “calfire”.

More on mashups being used for this crisis at Google Maps Mania, GigaOm and Wired.

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Posted by John Musser as Google, Mapping, Mobile at 12:46 AM | 4 Comments »

September 10th, 2007

Twitter API Traffic is 10x Twitter’s Site

In a very interesting interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Sean Ammirati at Read/WriteTalk asks some good questions about the role of the the Twitter API in their success and plans going forward. Two things that jumps out is that Biz’s comment that the API has 10x the traffic of the website and that of all that’s happened with Twitter in the past year that “the amount of activity around the API has been the most surprising experience”. (Our Twitter API profile here.)

Read the rest of “Twitter API Traffic is 10x Twitter’s Site” »

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Posted by John Musser as Mobile, Money, PopularAllTime at 2:23 AM | 18 Comments »

June 14th, 2007

PayPal API Goes Mobile

The PayPal API has gone mobile this week with the announcement of PayPal Mobile Checkout. Using this new WAP 2.0-based platform mobile phone users can perform checkouts on mobile sites much like they do with PayPal on regular ecommerce sites. This picks-up from our report earlier this week on the new eBay APIs and shows how eBay is pushing their influential platforms in a variety of directions. Other PayPal platform news this week also includes a new certified developer program.

The PayPal API may not have the pop-culture appeal of the Google Maps API but it’s a key component of shopping as an API platform. Note that there are over 250,000 registered PayPal developers.

For some real-world examples you can see a sample of PayPal mashups in our listings including the online invoicing service Blinksale.

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Posted by John Musser as Mobile, Shopping, ebay at 12:04 AM | 2 Comments »