This past week 18 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 32 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Bing Translator, Google Distance Matrix, Google Page Speed Online, Martindale-Hubbell, National Library of Medicine DIRLINE, NHS, PeerIndex and Yahoo Address Book. The most often used APIs this week are Google Maps, Twilio and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Mapping (4 APIs, 8 mashups), Shopping (4 APIs, 4 mashups) and Other (3 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
This week we had 45 new APIs added to our API directory including a hosted MongoDB database, live chat platform, fact sharing service, podcast retrieval service, distributed graph database, and a flight and travel search engine. In addition, we covered the launch of the Pearson Plug & Play Platform. Below are more details on each of these new APIs.
BodyMedia provides insight into your body’s physical state through four scientific measurements. It uses a pedometer-like device to measure physical motion and steps, but also has galvanic skin response, skin temperature and heat flux measures. The BodyMedia API will give application developers access to all these metrics on your body’s recent activity. FitBit is in a similar space, but FitBit just doesn’t have as many measurements to use in its applications.
Asking the simple question to API maintainers of how scalable is your API seems to conjure some awkward pauses. The Easy API recently discovered how well equipped we were to handle a massive influx of requests to our system. Quickly it became evident that the system wasn’t able to handle over a million requests a month, and failed under heavy load. This article discusses programming, servers, and monitoring changes that helped bring The Easy API back online and into the next level. The techniques discussed played a critical role in helping The Easy API scale to over a million requests a month and growing rapidly.
If you’re not familiar with Marco Arment’s Instapaper, here’s a quick break down. Instapaper is a great little service that allows you to store articles for later on your iPhone or iPad (as of this writing). Instapaper filled a huge gap. Not as high maintenance as an RSS reader, and 100% articles I saw somewhere but didn’t have the time to read.
ProgrammableWeb has reached a major milestone by adding its 3,000th web service API to our API directory. We’ve come a long way when you consider there were only 105 listed at the end of 2005. As we’ve noted previously, the growth rate of APIs doubled, which led to an influx of new services. Below are some of the trends we’ve spotted as the directory marks a new high.
This week we had 54 new APIs added to our API directory including a speech recognition service, business instant messaging software, blogging platform, event listing service and URL shortening. We looked more in-depth at some of these, including Wisconsin Transit Tracker, a Geo API for Wikipedia and Cohuman’s API Contest. Below is more detail on each of the 54 new APIs.
After holding off for months on an official API, popular photo sharing service Instagram has opened sign-ups for a public beta of its Instagram API. With it, developers can access the 300,000 photos uploaded daily by its more than 2 million users.
The Facebook API is a great thing. Since Facebook’s launch of its API, we’ve seen some incredible applications and tools developed that help us connect and socialize. Likewise, we’ve seen a growing number of high profile companies create their own Facebook applications as well as some thriving companies generating millions with their own, original Facebook applications and games.
It’s a good time to be a Facebook developer, because the social network keeps adding new ways to interact with their Facebook platform. Along with the create application API we covered, there’s an improved events interface and the long-awaited ads API.
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