Ask someone what makes a map and you’re likely to hear that it’s the roads or the physical characteristics. A new mashup is questioning whether you can still have a map without these details, while at the same time showing off the map styles feature that Google Maps announced in May.

Perhaps Maps Without Maps isn’t that useful, since it’s missing those elements that so many consider a map prerequisite. But it’s pretty fun to drag around and zoom in on areas you think you know, with only the city names (and some highway labels) visible.

The site achieves the effect thanks to a new and mostly unused feature of Google Maps. The map styles feature uses CSS-like syntax within the map’s JavaScript, so that you can change colors of the map. Or, selectively show and hide portions of the map, with about two dozen options to choose from. Of course, in the case of Maps Without Maps, it means making almost every element invisible.

Google isn’t the only mapping provider to allow styled maps. CloudMade provides a style editor which provides even more options in a point-and-click interface.

Hat tip: Mike Duffy and Kottke

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Google Maps API Profile, 2051 mashups

Here at ProgrammableWeb we do things like read terms of use for fun. That’s just how we roll.  We were perusing Yahoo! APIs Terms of Use when we stumbled on something that truly surprised us.  Yahoo doesn’t want us using their API’s to operate nuclear facilities. Operating a nuclear facility through any Yahoo API is in fact grounds for having your license terminated. That’s not all we found.

Yahoo tells us that we SHALL NOT…

Use the Yahoo! APIs to operate nuclear facilities, life support, or other mission critical application where human life or property may be at stake. You understand that the Yahoo! APIs are not designed for such purposes and that their failure in such cases could lead to death, personal injury, or severe property or environmental damage for which Yahoo! is not responsible;

Upon additional reflection these seem like a good ideas.  Yahoo appears to be watching out for those of us that might tend towards these types of uses. They also forbid using Yahoo APIs to traffic in body parts or materials urging acts of hacking.

The rest of the terms are pretty much standard language like you can find everywhere.   They state in one place that  ”Any construction or interpretation to be made of the Terms of Use shall not be construed against the drafter.”  This might be saying that if you interpret the terms of use to allow the operation of a nuclear reactor or your uncle Don’s life support – don’t blame Yahoo if something goes wrong.

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Yahoo Mail Applications API Profile

Twitter has gone OAuth-only and it is judgement day for the scores of Twitter apps still using basic authentication. Developers have had a few months to switch across to the new OAuth protocol (and the deadline was extended again to accommodate the World Cup), but it seems like quite a few never made the switch, or still have users running older versions of their software. A quick Twitter search reveals some frustration:

• rsalas96: @Twitterrific my ipod touch twitter login fail, it look like API Problem
• sarumbear: @PockeTwitDev I’m quite unhappy that someone as capable as an XDA developer would fail to see the Twitter API change announced so long ago
• tazhossain: twitter #fail. Iphone not connecting to API – keep getting errors !
• sn0w_crash: twitter disables basic login over api, HTC Peep has never been able to work with oauth @htc fail. So HTC Peep is dead atm.

It is not all doom and gloom: many apps, including Echofon, TweetDeck, Twitterrific, Seesmic, and Twitter for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry, are already using OAuth. Some of the complaints are from users who still have older version of these applications installed. However the rich mashup ecosystem built on the Twitter API will likely thin out over the next few weeks as those applications that have not been updated to conform to the new API requirements die off.

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Twitter API Profile, 454 mashups

Blippy and Swipely both launched fairly recently with the hopes of making spending a social experience. Both services are very similar in that they both allow you to connect your bank and credit card info, as well as other accounts like iTunes and Amazon. After you’ve set everything up, as you start spending, you have the option to share these purchases with everyone. And now you can extend that sharing with the Blippy API.

Make no mistake, this service is definitely for the over sharers. While both Swipely and Blippy have had somewhat slow starts, both have proved themselves interesting enough, growing great user bases just itching to brag to their friends what they just purchased.

With Blippy and Swipely being so similar, it really comes down to who opens up first and it looks like Blippy has beaten Swipely to the API goldmine. By opening up their API, Blippy hopes that developers can take the the service to places and applications that we haven’t quite figured out yet. Having an API like this is an incredibly important move for a new service taking on such a new niche.

Following the trend to kill off basic authentication, the Blippy API is “oauth and oauth only“, a great choice for security reasons. After you’ve leaped the authentication hurdle, you can easily go to town making calls through the RESTful API.

Developers have a great deal of access to Blippy data, including individual purchase items, basic user data, products, and even friendships. This level of access really opens up what can be done. From a full-fledged Blippy mobile app to integration with existing applications. Blippy has also injected their humor into the API, with the addition of a “Unicorn” API call (seriously), allowing you to “fetch a rainbow” or “Gets a human reaction to seeing a double rainbow (sometimes triple)”

Currently, some things that I’d like to see in the API are missing. For example, you can’t submit a purchase to Blippy and you can’t update user information. I expect this to change, as the Blippy developer team is working pretty rapidly to roll out new API calls.

Blippy’s development team wants to remind developers that the API is still fairly new, but all in all, it’s pretty rich. You can head on over to Blippy’s developer page right now and get started with their API and documentation. There is also a Google group to help you along the way.

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Blippy API Profile

Push is the new pull. And everyone’s doing it. If you’re still pulling, it’s probably about time you stopped all of that, as Twitter opened up the site streams API to beta testers. App developers are salivating at the prospect of all those status updates being showered on them from Twitter’s engorged hosepipe.

As a service, Twitter is experiencing increasing difficulties with the demand constantly being heaped upon it from the many client applications and mashups using the REST API. Switching over to streaming is definitely a more effective means of relieving all that pressure. The bonus is that apps built to use this torrent of data can benefit from real-time updates.

This is fantastic news for desktop Twitter clients and apps that do huge processing of individual tweets because it eventually means there could be no rate limit. Rather than polling and caching (to avoid the rate limit), all your app will need to do is listen out for updates, queue them and process when ready. Twitter’s user stream API is also currently in beta, with desktop-only clients for now.

Access to the site streams beta will be opened wider than user streams, but is currently on a whitelist basis, requiring developers to request access and await authorization. There are some usage limits for now, although it’s expected that these will be lifted as the API steadily comes out of beta. The Streaming API team over at Twitter HQ have also made it quite clear that functionality is likely to break during the beta and endpoints will definitely change during the shift over to a full-strength production setup.

via Techcrunch, photo by saebaryo

Sponsored by

Once touted as the future of business intelligence, providing quick and easy access to disparate information in one place, Enterprise Mashups, at least as a term, appear to have fallen out of favor. The topic was once written up in even non-technical publications, but both Google and our directory show it trending down. That brings up the question: what happened to enterprise mashups?

Google Trends, which shows search volume over time, clearly shows a peak in 2008, with a mostly downward trend since. Consider that in 2006 Google put its weight behind the idea with a potential partnership with BEA. By 2008 there was an enterprise mashups conference. And not even a year ago saw the creation of the Open Mashup Alliance.

Our directory shows 184 enterprise APIs, a healthy amount. There’s obviously popularity on the provider side. However, we only show 92 enterprise mashups. In fact, only 17 of the enterprise APIs have more than one mashup and 83% of those APIs have no mashups listed in our directory.

One potential explanation is that many enterprise mashups are built to be internal tools. Indeed, some define an enterprise mashup as a secure mashup, which would explain why so few are listed on an open directory.

Another reason may be that the term isn’t in vogue, while the concept still is. It seems unlikely that, with open APIs becoming more common across the web, apps built for the enterprise would disappear. Could tools like Social Salesforce (pictured above) be the new normal? What do you think is going on?

Sponsored by

If you are building an image sharing service or a social network mashup, it’s likely that you will want to incorporate face-tagging in your images. Maybe you’d like to go a step further and automatically detect faces in an image, similar to Apple’s iPhoto. A Romanian developer has developed an API to help detect faces in images and return the box coordinates so that you can build any kind of app you want.

Face detection made simple

The API is RESTful, so you can get up and running pretty quickly. You simply send your API credentials via BASIC auth along with the URL of the image you want to use. You are returned an XML tree of “faces”, with 4 box coordinates. Like I said, very straightforward and simple. What’s kind of cool and very handy here, is that the Face Detection API takes image URLs instead of image data. This means you could essentially run the API on any image publicly hosted on the web.

So how’s it do?

I made a few test calls on some images in my Flickr gallery and my Facebook photo albums and the results were pretty good. Every once in a while, the API will miss a few faces. In its defense, those faces were somewhat obscured or very out of focus. The APIs response time is fairly impressive as well. A large image with 6 people returned box coordinates in about 3-4 seconds.

While this API is extremely useful, it is very rough around the edges, currently. The API documentation is not complicated, but it’s missing some key documentation elements, like response examples. The Face Detection API is also very simple, and not a lot of options seem to be available (for example, returning a JSON response).

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

FaceDetection API Profile

With Twitter reducing its search history to four days,  it is a challenge for applications that are dependent on search results, that went not days but even months back. Several applications have taken on the challenge to fill this void and are building search indexes on top of Twitter. Topsy is one of them and it’s sharing its results as an API.

Topsy just indexed its 5 billionth Tweet, so it is giving developers access to a lot of data. The Otter API is a REST-based interface to the Topsy Search Engine. Topsy, which claims to be the largest searchable index of content posted on Twitter, is driven by an architecture that spans a cluster of 500 servers and a petabyte of data. It ranks links, photos and tweets by the number and quality of the tweets.

The Otter API makes available to developers some fairly interesting data that has been mined by Topsy. You can find users who have mentioned a term, or look for experts on a particular topic. Topsy’s author influence is used to sorts results.

The entire set of Otter API Resources provides a developer, interesting indexes to search for. For example, if I wanted to find out the experts on Mongo DB, I can use the /experts resource of the Otter API. There’s no API Key required, so you can dive right in. Here’s the Mongo DB example:
http://otter.topsy.com/experts.json?query=mongodb.

Topsy is one of 54 Twitter-derived APIs, which includes 5 Twitter search APIs. We wrote about how Twitter is giving birth to APIs in April, when there were only 43 Twitter APIs.

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Topsy API Profile

Web designers are rejoicing. Real fonts have finally come to the web and they’re easier to use than ever before. Gone are the days of Cufon and sIFR, as @font-face is finally beginning to shine. But the impending onslaught of fonts on the web may well be thanks to Google.

With a number of the more popular foundries evolving to extend their reach to the web and browser vendors working ever harder to support the latest standards and trends, web fonts are exploding onto consumers’ desktops. The challenges of licensing and distribution are steadily fading away. And Google is trying to lead the way.

With the Google Font API, the search behemoth has made sure we can all have access to better type. By licensing a set of very nice fonts and making those freely available on their vast CDN, there’s no excuse to use Comic Sans any more.

The API itself is very easy to use. If you want to just get going, you can use some Google-generated CSS and drop one line of code into your web pages. If you want a little more control over how fonts display (in case a font fails to load for instance) you’ll need to use the Web Font Loader.

It’s a straightforward API that works with Google’s font library and is open enough to work with almost any of the other hosted font systems out there – providing the same events hooks for all.

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Google Font API Profile

Rap enthusiasm site, Rap Genius has gone through the impressive tasks of combing rap and Google Maps. Rap Genius’ Rap Map is a Google Map-based visual almanac of all things rap. You can scan an area and view rap landmarks and places mentioned or referenced in some famous rap lyrics.

The Rap Map doesn’t just cover major cities and famous rap locations like Atlanta and New York. A quick scan of Paris turns up some interesting information as well.

This is definitely one of the more entertaining Google Maps mashups. You get kind of caught up in it like you would with Wikipedia (admit it, you never stop at just looking up a movie). It’s currently uncertain if Rap Genius plans to expand on Rap Map, adding more features and more information. I would certainly be interested to be able to sort by artist or area or maybe have it jump around, randomly, presenting me with rap trivia. As strange as it may sound, there’s lots of room here for this to get more interesting over time.

Now where’s the equivalent for other genres? Maybe Pitchfork could roll one out for rock? And for as many stories as there are in country music, CMT would have plenty to include in its own twangified version of the rap map.

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Google Maps API Profile, 2051 mashups

Today could be the last day for some web applications built purely with client-side JavaScript and the Twitter API.  According to Twitter, Basic Authentication has been permanently shut off, as promised. While the move should bring better security for many users,  it will also make building JavaScript apps without server-side support for OAuth practically impossible due to security issues.

Developers that are using JavaScript to create client-side only applications find themselves in a catch 22. The OAuth information would have to be hard coded, which removes the extra security of using OAuth. Anyone using the app will potentially have full access to the developer’s account. Twitter’s Taylor Singletary described the problem on the developer mailing list:

There is no secure method to accomplish this purely in Javascript, as you would have to hard code your consumer key & consumer secret as well as an oauth_token and oauth_token_secret for the Twitter account you want to use for all operations. With these pieces of information, anyone would be able to tweet on behalf of your application and account.

In a case like this, you’d want to implement most of this logic server-side, where you can keep the hard-coded credentials securely. You could potentially use Javascript to speak to your own servers to hustle the process along.

Yes, this change will lead to better security because important information never leaves the server. It also has the effect of reducing the number of options for creating a JavaScript app. However, those using the search API with JavaScript will be unaffected, as it does not require authentication.

Developers have had plenty of warning. Twitter first announced the move in April, then extended the deadline from June to August and finally implemented a gradual phase-out. Twitter appears to be letting a trickle of connections through with the old method, but expect even that to end soon, as the company’s statements all point to Basic Auth being really, truly gone.

The change to OAuth means increased security for users because “Applications won’t store your username and password, and if you change your password, applications will continue to work.” OAuth is a token based authentication system. Individual applications are granted access through a key passed from the server. Applications that use Basic Authentication store the password in the app and send it to the server when they make a call.

Is giving up client-side-only applications significant? Is it worth the security? Let us know in the comments.

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Twitter API Profile, 454 mashups

The ‘Big Data’ service Infochimps now offers IP geolocation from Digital Element. Infochimps is best known for making huge datasets available as bulk downloads and through RESTful APIs. Digital Element has traditionally offered enterprise level services to large companies like AOL, CNN, and Ask.Com. Both companies hope that the Infochimps RESTful API interface and aggressive entry pricing will entice smaller companies to use the service.

IP Geolocation takes an IP address from the computer visiting a web site and associates it with a location. This can be as specific as an address but is more likely to be a zip-code or neighborhood. Digital Element claims that it’s service can identify the correct city for an IP address 95.5% of the time.  You can get the correct country 99.9% of the time.

GPS-enabled smartphones and WiFi Geolocation offer better precision, but those location methods can be overkill for some applications. They can also be impractical when most visits are generated from home computers. Airlines need to know which countries customers come from when they buy tickets online. A political campaign might want to target specific content on their site by city of origin. Once you have a location match you can use the API to find facts including primary or secondary language spoken, Age by Gender, City, connection speed, and domain server name.

Infochimps substantially reduces access barriers to Digital Element IP location business by integrating it into the Query API. The service is free for 5,000 calls per month. A $20 “Brass Monkey” subscription that also includes other Infochimps datasets will get you 500,000 calls per month.  In return Infochimps can offer a highly accurate enterprise IP geolocation service to complement the other IP geolocation products in it’s marketplace.

Photo by Marc Levin

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Infochimps API Profile, 1 mashup

Twitter recently added more data to each tweet it returns via the API. Now your applications can access the number of retweets, whether you have retweeted a tweet and additional information about the user who wrote the tweet. The new information used to require subsequent calls to the Twitter API, or perhaps looking up a cached value from your own database.

Twitter Developer Advocate Matt Harris announced the four new data fields on the Twitter developer mailing list. The fields include:

• statuses/retweet_count (integer) – number of times a status has been retweeted using the Twitter retweet action. May not exist for older Tweets, or when this feature is disabled (see below).
• statuses/retweeted (boolean) – true if the user you are authenticating as has retweeted this status.
• users/listed_count (integer) – number of public lists in which the user appears.
• users/follow_request_sent (boolean) – true if the user you are authenticating as has requested to follow the user you are viewing.

Unfortunately, some bugs were identified in retweet_count and that feature has been disabled for now.  Because Twitter sometimes turns features off to maintain site stability, it recommends that you always write your app code to handle missing fields or empty values.

All these new fields also exist in the Twitter Streaming API, except for the retweeted count, which has no meaning in that context.  The Twitter Search API does not support the new fields.

One more change: the users/showmethod was changed to return an HTTP 403 error (instead of 404) when an account has been suspended.  This change was made in response to users who wanted to distinguish between deleted and suspended accounts.  Calling users/showon a suspended user will return the error message “User has been suspended,” which indicates the account still exists on Twitter.  Deleted accounts will return “Not found.”

Complete documentation should be available soon at http://dev.twitter.com.

Hat tip: Damon Cortesi

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Twitter API Profile, 454 mashups

This guest post comes from Eric Ulken, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the former editor for interactive technology at the Los Angeles Times. He blogs infrequently at Ulken.com.

The fusion of technology and journalism continues apace. On a Manhattan rooftop next month, an emerging breed of journo-geeks will enjoy a coming-out party of sorts, in the form of a Hacks/Hackers mixer at Gawker’s NoLIta headquarters. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, there’s less glitz but growing interest in the marriage of news and technology, as evidenced by the European Journalism Centre’s standing-room-only roundtable on data-driven journalism last week in Amsterdam. (I attended and spoke about the creation of the Data Desk at my alma mater, the Los Angeles Times.)

Talk at the event centered on:

• The movement to open up government data in Europe, where freedom of information laws are generally less liberal than their American equivalent. Lorenz Matzat of Germany’s OpenData Network talked about some nascent efforts (none of which appears to actually be live yet) to make government data in his country available online. And Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation presented the group’s Open Data Commons, a stab at plain-English licenses for data in the style of Creative Commons.
• Publication of the Afganistan war logs and efforts to help online readers make sense of the documents. Simon Rogers of the Guardian and Alan McLean of The New York Times discussed how their organizations handled the release of the secret documents shared with them by WikiLeaks, and Nicolas Kayser-Bril of the French news site OWNI showed his team’s crowdsourced effort to translate some of the documents and the glossary of military jargon into French.
• Tools and technologies for working with data — even if you’re not a programmer. Frank van Ham, who helped build IBM’s acclaimed Many Eyes data visualization toolkit, talked about its evolution and mentioned Many Eyes Wikified, a version that enables the use of external datasets. Tony Hirst, a professor at the Open University, runs the OUseful blog, which is chock full of how-tos for non-programmers on using web-based tools like Yahoo Pipes to do, well, useful stuff. Richard Rogers, a professor at the University of Amsterdam, demoed one of a number of interesting visualization tools he developed that work with data scraped from search engines, Wikipedia, Delicious and other sites. And a couple of presenters mentioned Google Fusion Tables, a simple hosted database tool, as a useful way around Google Spreadsheets’ 400,000-cell limit.

Each presentation was itself visualized in a decidedly non-digital way: “Visual sensemaker” Anna Lena Schiller was on hand to draw the conversations in real time (embedded above). Also, Ultra Knowledge compiled stats showing the most active tweeters at the event. And Chrys Wu pitched in from New York to assemble the various links tweeted out.

These sorts of data journalism meetings are becoming more common. In addition to the upcoming Hack/Hackers event in New York, another meeting on data journalism in Berlin promises some further discussion in the area of open government in Europe.

Sponsored by

As a DC-area resident, I’ve been one of many local developers saying that the DC Metro needs some sort of API. If anything, just to be able to build or integrate transit routes into existing apps. The wait appears over and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority now has an API.

Currently, the DC Metro API offers some basic, but useful transit information. You can get a list of Metro lines and stations, as well as pull access station routes and entrances. The API also offers incident information for rails and elevators, so that developers can build tools to help steer Metro riders away from delaying hazards.

The documentation is kind of light right now, but this is a great start to what could be a very powerful API for DC-area developers. It’s clear the transit authority is listening, as there’s already been a developer conference and a contest is in the works. In terms of features, I’d love to see more time and pricing information. Maybe be able to tell me how much it’ll cost me to get from Franconia to Lafayette on a given day, or how long I can expect to be on the train. I’m certain the Metro has the ability to track car congestion. It might be cool to be able to see, programmatically, if it’s a busy day for the Metro or not. Such a feature would be great for trip planning. No word on if this API will extend to Metro Bus data, but that would be welcome, as well.

As expected, the API is RESTful and returns a JSON response, which makes this an excellent and simple API to build on. We will most likely see a handful of mapping and day planning apps, as well as possible integration with existing apps like Yelp.

via Andrew Leyden

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

WMATA API Profile

This guest post comes from Pamela Fox, a developer advocate at Google. Pamela has supported the Google Maps and Wave API communities, in addition to helping developers get started with other Google APIs.

One fateful summer 5 years ago, I discovered ProgrammableWeb and the joy of APIs. I spent my mornings coding on the Amazon, Flickr, and Google APIs, and spent weekends prepping entries for the API contests — I actually made some good cash, student-wise, from those. At the same time, I was struggling to find a job that met my interests. I then discovered this “Developer Relations” department at Google, where I could spend my time teaching others how to use APIs, talking about them at conferences, and giving feedback to the API engineering teams. As someone who loves APIs and teaching, that sounded just perfect to me. So, about 8 months after getting my start with APIs, I began work at Google as the Google Maps API support engineer.

I’ve been at Google ever since and watched as we’ve released API after API — challenging myself to try each one. We’re at about 80 APIs now, and I shall have to concede defeat. Still, I’ve got a sense as to our API landscape, and that’s what I’ve been talking to developers about lately, giving a talk called Google APIs: A-Z (embedded below).

.prezi-player { width: 600px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }

There are many ways to try to categorize our APIs, so in trying to explain them, first, I divide our APIs into 3 separate types. There are HTTP APIs that you typically interact with from the server-side – like the RESTful Google data APIs, the RPC-based Geocoding API, and SOAP Adwords API. Then there are HTML/JS APIs that you use on the client-side – like the classic Google Maps API, and the newer Google Visualization and Chart APIs. Finally, there are Extension/App APIs to extend our products – like the original gadgets API, Chrome Extensions API, Google Talk bots, and Android SDK.

Almost always after I give a talk about APIs, developers ask “but why is Google offering this API?” We do offer many free APIs, and you guys want to know what’s in it for us. Well, first there’s the monetization reason: by offering APIs that make your websites better, more people use the web, which means more people click on Google ads, and we make more money which we can use to offer more APIs. Then there’s branding awareness: every time someone sees a Google map embedded on a page, they see a Google logo, and subconsciously fall in love with us (or that’s the theory :). Besides, we feel very strongly that users should have control over their data, and we’ve even created a team called The Data Liberation Front to help make that happen. By offering both user-friendly import/export options and developer-ready Google data APIs, we give our users the ability to copy their data into and out of Google in a number of ways.

So, after hearing about our APIs and why we offer them, you may still be asking yourself why you should use them. Depending on what you do, there are a few different reasons. First, you can use the extension APIs to reach Google users, like creating an Android App for their Marketplace, where you’ll reach thousands of users who are actively searching for ways to enhance their phone experience. Second, you can use the Google data APIs to make your apps more compelling by letting users import from or export to various Google Apps. The Eye-fi card is a great example of this — an SD card with a wireless microchip inside that automatically uploads to the photo website of your choice, like Picasa.

Similarly, you can use our HTML/JS APIs to enhance your website, sprinkling it with additional bits of functionality, like how the PerezHilton.com celebrity blog site embeds a Google translate widget to instantly appeal to a more global audience. We also offer several APIs that let you directly monetize your work. The most recent of these entries, the Google Apps Marketplace, lets you offer your business applications to Google Apps domains with whatever pricing model works for you (free, freemium, per user, etc), and all you need to do at the minimum is integrate Google single sign-on with your application. Generally, when you’re using an API in your application, you are choosing to save money or time by outsourcing some piece of functionality or data to Google — like deciding to use App Engine instead of building your own scalable infrastructure, or using a Google custom search box instead of writing your own search engine.

I’ve only really introduced a small portion of our APIs, and just a few different ways of thinking about them. To see the full gamut of the offerings, visit Google’s directory for a complete list and to keep up to date with new APIs, subscribe to the Google code blog. Next time you’re working on a product or a hobby project, think about what our APIs (or anyone else’s) can do for you. Happy mashing!

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Google Code Search API Profile, 2 mashups

This week we had 16 new APIs added to our API directory including a social movie review service, twitter management service, online payment service and weather mapping service. Below is more details on each of these new APIs.

CloudCache API: CloudCache offers an API with a RESTful interface to offer memcached-like cache in the cloud. Using OAuth, it looks very much like S3 and features fast, transient key-value store. The API offers open source language bindings for Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, and more to follow.

Connect2Field API: Connect2Field is a field service software for your service business hosted in the cloud. It allows you to schedule work to your staff and dispatch the work to their mobile phone. The API allows you to send and receive client and job data and features a RESTful interface.

CyberSource Simple API: CyberSource helps you accept payments on your website. The service supports payments by credit card, electronic check and PayPal. There are several methods that can be used and developer kits in a number of languages.

Dropstr API: Dropstr is a cloud management service that allows for the creation of shared environments for friends and coworkers. The Dropstr API allows users to create applications for a way to access stored online data. Depending upon what type of data and/or functions are requested will determine what type of authentication required. The basic RESTful API call can access all public files and folders without any functions required. For modifying, editing, or accessing more private information, users will need to access our Oauth API. Public documentation is not currently available.

EdisonAve Geocoder API: Provides both forward and reverse geocoding on a per-use cost. The service turns a latitude/longitude pair into a meaningful address or place name. An address or name can also be turned into coordinates.

Elastic Email API: Elastic Email provides direct email sending through a REST API. Elastic Email is a simple email delivery service for cloud applications. The API allows users to send an email to a single recipient or group of recipients, get the status of a single send transaction including delivery statistics for recipients and determine how much credit you have left in your Elastic Email account. Responses are formatted in XML. Code samples are provided for PHP, C# and Java.

Entireweb API: The Entireweb Search API provides direct access to the search engine's results. Since you receive the results as XML or JSON, you will have full control of how the results are presented on your page. The service is free up to 1,000 daily requests.

LoopFuse API: LoopFuse provides a webservice API for getting and inserting information from your LoopFuse OneView account programatically. LoopFuse OneView is an enterprise marketing automation platform. Among the methods the API performs are sending email campaigns to a prospect, getting lead information list management. The API uses a RESTful protocol with responses formatted in JSON.

Mombo API: Mines Twitter for movie-related tweets and attempts to determine the sentiment. Provides methods to search movies, find lists of the most popular and retrieve details, including tweets, about the movie. Read our Mombo API overview post.

My Tweeple API: My Tweeple is a people information management tool. The majority of its data comes from Twitter and its primary purpose is to help users decide which people to follow on Twitter. My Tweeple has a number of export features, including its API. The API features a RESTful inteface and returns data in the XML format.

Poligraft API: Feed in a news article, blog post or press release, and Poligraft will present you with an enhanced view of the interconnections between the people, organizations and relationships described in the piece. Read our Poligraft API overview post

ScraperWiki API: The ScraperWiki API lets users retrieve data from the ScraperWiki datastore to use in their own applications. ScraperWiki is an online tool to make that allows users to write screen scraper code. The API uses RESTful calls and responses can be formatted in XML, JSON, PHP, YAML or CSV. Read more in our
ScraperWiki API overview post.

Shareaholic API: The Share API allows developers to give users the ability to share content/links from their (or any) website, desktop app, mobile app, etc to any of 300+ supported destination services.

UK Postcodes API: The UK Postcodes API allows users to access the site database. UK Postcodes provides postcode lookup services. Using the RESTful API, users can return data for a given postcode. Responses can be formatted in XML, JSON, CSV or RDF.

WeatherBug GEO API: Place radar, satellite, temperature images over Google and Bing Maps. The WeatherBug GEO API returns the images in tiled format, for use in overlays with existing map tiles. Read more in our WeatherBug Geo API overview post.

WebFaction API: The WebFaction API is a XML-RPC interface for managing many control panel and account tasks. With the WebFaction API, users can automate application installation, email address configuration, and more. WebFaction is an internet hosting service. The WebFaction API allows users to write scripts to automate certain tasks that would normally be accomplished via the control panel or SSH. The API is a set of methods available via XML-RPC calls.

Sponsored by

This past week 43 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 53 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include CyberSource Simple, FatSecret, Google Fusion Tables and Yahoo Contacts. The most often used APIs this week are Flickr, Google Maps and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Mapping (9 APIs, 33 mashups), Social (9 APIs, 22 mashups) and Internet (6 APIs, 6 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:

 Amazon eCommerce used in KindleNeeds.com

 Bebo used in MeechMe

 Bing used in GovIntegrator

 Bit.ly used in ShowTribe

 Box.net used in Box.net and Live Documents, Netsuite and Box.net, Quickoffice Connect and Box.net, SugarCRM and Box.net

 CyberSource Simple used in Online Activity Catalog

 DHL used in DHL Tracking

 Digg used in MeechMe

 ESRI ArcGIS JavaScript used in California's National Parks, California: Spending and Schools

 Facebook used in DataCalifornia, MeechMe, ShowTribe

 FatSecret used in The Foodmarkit

 Flickr used in Attendr, Cahella, California's National Parks, Dancing Jasper, Jigsaw Flickr, MeechMe

 Foursquare used in My Foursquare, Proximity Checkin, Social Map of California Colleges & Universities, WeePlaces.com FourSquare Visualization

 Friendster used in MeechMe

 geocoder used in California View, Farmers Market Finder, GovIntegrator, Speed Camera Europe

 Google AdSense used in Cahella

 Google AdWords used in Speed Camera Europe

 Google Ajax Feeds used in Dancing Jasper

 Google AJAX Language used in Speed Camera Europe

 Google AJAX Libraries used in GovIntegrator

 Google Ajax Search used in GovIntegrator

 Google Analytics used in Speed Camera Europe

 Google Base used in The Big Property List

 Google Chart used in GovIntegrator, ShowTribe

 Google Client Authentication used in California View

 Google Earth used in Are You Safe San Francisco

 Google Fusion Tables used in California View, GovIntegrator

 Google Latitude used in Proximity Checkin

 Google Maps used in Alaska Travel Guide, Are You Safe San Francisco, Attendr, Cahella, California View, Dancing Jasper, DataCalifornia, DHL Tracking, Explore California, Explore California, Farmers Market Finder, Go Gas, GovIntegrator, Let's dig the earth, Social Map of California Colleges & Universities, Speed Camera Europe, The Big Property List, TNT Tracking, Tripcatcher, ZonabilitySF

 Google Maps Data used in Cahella

 Klout used in Twittsdaq Twitter Profile Statistics

 Kwwika used in Kwwika-Superfeedr Demo

 LinkedIn used in MeechMe, Social Salesforce

 MapQuest used in Are You Safe San Francisco

 MaxMind GeoIP used in Speed Camera Europe

 MySpace used in MeechMe

 NetSuite used in Netsuite and Box.net

 New York Times Article Search used in Cahella

 New York Times Best Sellers used in WorldCat + New York Times

 Panoramio used in Cahella

 Photobucket used in MeechMe

 Salesforce.com used in Social Salesforce

 Superfeedr used in Kwwika-Superfeedr Demo

 Technorati used in Attendr

 Tinylink used in Go Gas

 TweetPhoto used in MeechMe

 TwitPic used in MeechMe

 Twitter used in DataCalifornia, MeechMe, paper.li, Publitweet, ShowTribe, Social Map of California Colleges & Universities, Tweet-U-Later, Twittsdaq Twitter Profile Statistics

 TwitterCounter used in Twittsdaq Twitter Profile Statistics

 WorldCat Search used in WorldCat + New York Times

 Yahoo Contacts used in MeechMe

 Yahoo Geocoding used in Are You Safe San Francisco, Attendr

 YouTube used in MeechMe

Mashups of the day:
And each day there is one mashup selected to be Mashup of the Day. Here are last week’s winners:

 Are You Safe San Francisco

 California View

 California's National Parks

 Farmers Market Finder

 Go Gas

 Jigsaw Flickr

 ShowTribe

Sponsored by

The humongous amount of data that Twitter generates daily, is spawning a new breed of company that is analyzing the data and providing value-added services on it. While the data mining and intelligence applications are still in their infancy, there are interesting applications that you can use today.

Mombo is one such application. As per their site, Mombo collects and analyzes all tweets around popular movies and provides users with a rating based on the crowd’s opinion. They currently provide a limited API, that gives you access to topical lists of movies, detailed information about movies and even a search for movies. The results are returned back in JSON format.

The consumer facing site, similar to Fflick (which we covered recently), is well designed and gives a quick access to user sentiments about a particular movie. You can find out about current movies in theaters, coming soon, most liked, most tweeted and so on. The Mombo engine gives a sentiment rating based on various parameters but it is not clear at this point, how they determine the rating.

It is easy to dismiss applications like Mombo as just a Twitter application that searches and displays data. But that is too simplistic a way to look at. What these companies are doing are mining through loads of data and building out sophisticated algorithms. For e.g. in Mombo’s case, their core IP is a sentiment-analysis engine and the web site is just a consumer facing movie review site.

Social Networks contain large amounts of information that is now being analyzed by a growing number of companies. The goal seems to help make a decision and in many potential cases, can even be used for targeted marketing and advertising purposes.

Sponsored by

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Mombo API Profile

Web APIs and mashups are not only of interest to the developer community. There are also research activities that look at how to improve various aspects of API design as well as services’ and mashups’ implementation and deployment. If you are interested in a cutting-edge research that may influence the future of Web APIs, then you should look at series of workshops on Web APIs and Service Mashups.

The workshop’s website explains:

Services computing and Web 2.0 are converging into a programmable Web today that provides the basis for Services Mashups – end-user-oriented compositions of Web APIs, Web content and Web data sources. The result is a disruptive class of diversified, agile and interactive software systems that offer unprecedented user experience and open up new fields of application.

As in previous years, the workshop will target the best practices in Web APIs and mashups development as well as emerging topics and trends in both academia and industry. The topics include novel languages for Web API’s descriptions, frameworks and platforms for service compositions, Quality of Service for mashups such as performance, reliability, and security, mashups’ scalability in the cloud, end-users engagement in mashups development, or mashups distribution and social media.

The workshop, in its fourth year, is co-located with the European Conference on Web Services in Cyprus in December. The workshop usually has a mixture of research work presentations and a keynote from industry such as from Google, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe. Interested in speaking? See the call for papers for instructions and deadlines.

Sponsored by