Indie rock band Arcade Fire used HTML5 and the Google Maps API in its latest video to transport us to the neighborhood we grew up in. Director Chris Milk worked with the Google Chrome team to blend music, art, and place into an interactive experience called The Wilderness Downtown. The video mashup takes us into the memories of our youth through Street View and 3D rendered map tiles.
One of the questions that I am most frequently asked regarding content APIs is “how can I make money with my API?” Before answering that question, however, it is important to ask for whom the API is designed. After all, the audiences for your API will determine what business opportunities exist.
Developers looking for trends in Twitter search are finding it more difficult now that the micro-blogging site has decreased the search history to four days. Previously going back weeks and months, the backlog has steadily decreased, now too short for some types of applications. At the same time, the newer streams have become the go-to API for former search use cases.
Get ready for slides and monkey bars. You can now access nearly two dozen Google JavaScript APIs in the AJAX playground. YouTube, Friend Connect and a host of options join Calendar, Blogger and, of course, Maps.
ProgrammableWeb has seen many notable milestones since our inception five years ago. We were excited when the repository of APIs grew to 100 entries (now over 2000), when the count of mashups hit 500 (now nearly 5000), and seeing the myriad of ways open APIs have become such a phenomenon. And now today we are excited to say that ProgrammableWeb itself is entering a new phase of growth with the announcement of our acquisition by Alcatel-Lucent.
After nearly a year with two mapping platforms running in parallel, Google announced today that Google Maps V3 had graduated from Google Code Labs to become the primary maps API. Previously the newer version was recommended for mobile applications, the original reason behind the platform rewrite. With V3’s graduation, V2 becomes deprecated, but will continue to work for now.
While Twitter mashups continue their tremendous growth, there’s another area we’re also noticing blossom: Twitter APIs. These developer-created apps process data from Twitter, adding value and sharing that back out for developers.
Google has released a new geocoding web service that is sure to bring a smile to map mashup developers working with the Google Maps API. Announced earlier this week on the Google Geo Developers Blog, version 3 of the popular geocoding web service has been released, with several improvements and new features that will make it easier geolocate addresses. The new geocoding web service shares many of the geocoding improvements included with v3 of the Google Maps API.
A number of companies are making a push to move traditional desktop applications into the cloud. Programmers have not been left out of this revolution, with several sites offering IDEs in a web browser. Here are 5 online IDEs.
It’s 54 degrees today in Mountain View, which any Googler could tell you by looking outside… or by using the company’s undocumented weather API. The service was created for use with iGoogle, but the interface is easily discoverable and covers a handful of other features, in addition to weather.
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