The API landscape is an extremely well chronicled and championed space. Every product has its own API nearly, and developers still get excited about digging into the newest, greatest data on the market. It’s the developer equivalent of having to have the newest Apple gadget, right when it becomes available.
In our zeal to access more and more data though, we’ve forgotten what working with data is supposed to be all about.
The DataSift platform allows users to define a “stream” using filtering parameters such as keywords or locations. Users can immediately begin to receive data in real time as comments are posted on social media sites. With a license to access Twitter’s full “Firehose”, we offer users the ability to search for posts using all the metadata contained in a Tweet, making it a far more powerful search. Though we make the search available via the simple Datasift API, there’s actually quite a bit that goes into it.
Exchanging currency for items or services is such an old time tradition and yet there are so many ways it can be done. I’ve just taken a stroll through the payment systems neighborhood and I’ve felt inspiration from the innovators FaceCash & Dwolla, pride in my home state operator PowerPay, and murky suspicion toward JunglePay.
This week we had 69 new APIs added to our API directory including a mobile image editing service, mobile payment service, small business phone service, indoor mapping service, hotel reservation service and online meeting service. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.
The daily deal space is hot, and has been for some time now. In the past year 23 million Americans have purchased a daily deal or group coupon according to a survey conducted for the American Institute of CPAs by Harris Interactive (source). Not to mention Freelance websites, such as Freelancer and Elance, have been flooded with thousands of “Groupon clone”, “daily deal site” and related job postings – a general sign that many more businesses are still trying to get in.
A long time ago in Internet years, in a galaxy not so far away, a handful of tech titans in Silicon Valley and Seattle began building business platforms and battling for supremacy. The mobile device and app revolution hadn’t yet begun. Terms like “social networking” and “wisdom of crowds” were going “viral”. Web services and APIs were still emerging. The Google IPO of late 2004 had effectively slammed shut the Web 1.0 dotbomb era, paving the way for the amazing evolution of Web 2.0 services in 2005 that hit the mainstream in 2006.
This past week 9 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 39 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include 5min, 8tracks, FanSnap, Google Places, Howcast, Movieclips.com, New York Times Movie Reviews, Songkick and VideoSurf. The most often used APIs this week are Facebook, Google Maps and Yelp. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Video (9 APIs, 9 mashups), Shopping (4 APIs, 4 mashups) and Music (4 APIs, 4 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Panelists and presenters at last week’s Open Government West 2011 conference in Portland, Oregon tackled the topic of government sponsored app contests. Attendees asserted that not all app contests are designed the same way and there are different benefits and drawbacks with each kind. An overarching issue seemed to be the value returned to the public on government investment in app contests. Governments are looking for the best way to offer services to the public in the face of budget cuts and are eyeing citizen generated apps.
“Hey Smitty, I got this guy’s email address. Can you do some digging and tell me more about ‘em? How much does he make? What are his hobbies? Oh, and I want to see pictures of his pet dog too. Can you do it?”
“Yea boss, I’ll get you your information, buckets full of it. I’ll make it rain!”
This is the imaginary old timey gangster context I imagine around the idea behind Rainmaker, its contacts service and Rainmaker API.
If you are looking to display social networking statistics on your site, Shared Count just showed up with about the simplest tool you could ask for. Given a URL, the Shared Count API will contact the APIs of Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon to retrieve their statistics.
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