Factery is a search API with a twist. Instead of links, it returns facts. Actually, it returns links, too. But the real interesting stuff is that it extracts the sentence or two that best answers a user’s search.
The writing has been on the virtual wall for some time, but it’s official: mashup pioneer Platial (our Platial profile) is shutting down. Former CEO Di-Ann Eisnor cites server costs of $7,000 per month in an interview with GigaOm.
Normally earthquakes are detected with sensative instruments, under the care of trained seismologists. With the Twitter API (our Twitter API profile), the ability to detect and report quake locations may fall into anyone’s hands.
Location-based social game FourSquare no longer has limits to where it can be used. When users click on their city name below the header of the website, they see a search box to enter a new city. Previously the service supported about 100 cities worldwide and anyone who lived elsewhere was out of luck.
Though a few shopping APIs are some of the earliest examples we have, their popularity has continued to grow for a simple reason: there’s an obvious revenue model tied to them. When developers use one of the 82 Shopping APIs in our directory, that can mean money in the pocket of the API provider. And, by virtue of various affiliate and revenue-sharing programs tied to many of these APIs, it can also mean money in the pocket of the developer.
Google has just opened the gates to a public preview of Google Wave to a lucky 100,000 users. This is big news for developers as anticipation for the release of invites continued to build up over the last few days. Google Wave is still trending in Twitter.
The popular picture-sharing empire behind I Can Has Cheezburger lets you view, caption and share funny images. You can do this via its sites and, the now, thanks to their API, you can do it via code (technical details at our Cheezburger API profile).
Popular micro-blogging platform Twitter has announced new “retweet” feature that will be added soon, complete with a new retweet API that will allow developers to access retweets in a variety of ways. As many of you know, the Twitter API (our Twitter API Profile) has quickly become one of the most popular APIs in our API Directory.
This past week 22 new mashups were add to our mashup directory and 35 different APIs were used to build them. Some interesting or less frequently used APIs that were mashed-up this week include lyrics APIs like Lyricsfly and LyricWiki; lots of e-commerce APIs like Oodle, PriceGrabber, CNET, Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com, and Shopzilla; messaging and telephony APIs like Skype and Twilio; as well as plenty of Google APIs including Google Translate. The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
As far as web search tools go, few have generated as much hype as Wolfram Alpha. The service, which bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine,” differs from search engines such as Google, in that it does not return lists of web pages. Rather, Wolfram Alpha attempts to calculate answers to user queries. For example, a query of “los angeles county median household income” will return the result “$43,518.”
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