AOL has announced that its MapQuest service now supports OpenID logins as part of the new My MapQuest capability. AOL has long been an OpenID innovator. As AOL’s George Fletcher reminds us, AOL was one of the earliest OpenID providers.
OpenSocial recently had its first year anniversary, and the specification and APIs are growing in popularity. And now, courtesy of the OpenSocial team, several new client libraries are available for leveraging server-to-server APIs. This gives developers easy access to building OpenSocial apps in languages other than JavaScript.
The New York Times made news earlier this year through its release of several APIs (our Campaign Finance API Profile and our Movie Reviews API Profile). There’s been promise of more APIs to come, and the latest prototype created by The New York Times gives a preview of what is to come.
OpenID holds much promise as a means of supporting a single digital identity that can be used across the Internet. Currently there are several types of OpenID identity providers out there, and several of the major players on the web, including AOL, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, have committed to become OpenID providers as well. While there is some concern about the ‘Balkanization’ of OpenID by these service providers (essentially the concern is over the fact that service providers will only provide OpenIDs and subsequently they will not become consumers of OpenIDs from other providers), the positive side of this adoption is that hundreds of millions of existing user accounts can now be used as OpenIDs.
Do you want to use the power of open APIs and mashups to help make the US Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent? If so, then you’ll want to enter the new Apps for America Mashup Contest from the good folks at the Sunlight Foundation. Like last year’s Mashup Congress contest, this is another notable competition from Sunlight, whose nonprofit mission is to help organizations use Internet technologies to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people to create a “catalyst for greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government.”
Over at Google Maps Mania, Keir Clarke has a good round-up of new Christmas-themed Google Maps mashups. Each year developers create new mashups with holiday themes, with most being map mashups. Two of these shown below have been added to our mashup directory. For more see our report from last year on tacky Christmas lights and finding out how far does Santa travel to you.
The United States Postal Service has devoted significant resources to providing customers with reliable online services including APIs for address and delivery information, rate calculators, shipping labels and carrier pickup. But apparently this holiday season their web service customers were met with something they did not want to see: a series of extended outages during the second week of December left customers helplessly awaiting a return of service.
Following-up on yesterday’s post on the best new mashups, here is another notable mashup from this past week, yesterday’s Mashup of the Day: Gaiagi Driver. What is it? It’s a mashed-up 3D driving simulator that uses a lot of web APIs across multiple windows to create a unique driving experience. Give it a starting and ending address and it follows the path created by the directions and shows your present position in four different views:
A quick update on a couple of the more interesting new mashups from the past week (our directory is up to 3,555 mashups using 400+ APIs):
You may remember our earlier coverage of the Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS), which provides developers with access to Yahoo’s tools and data to build applications that leverage three core elements: Yahoo Application Platform (YAP), Yahoo Social Platform (YSP), and Yahoo Query Language (YQL). Now Yahoo has released a limited beta of a new Applications for Yahoo Mail which enables developers to build applications within Yahoo Mail (more details at our new Yahoo Mail API profile).
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