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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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:
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