You may not be familiar with Green Thing, a web based service that inspires people to lead a greener life, but you should be. With the help of brilliant videos and inspiring stories etc. from creative people and community members around the world, Green Thing focuses on seven things you can do – and enjoy doing.
In what might be a first in the world of open APIs and mashups, a developer has been sued by a major corporation for developing an application using a third party web service API. As TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid reports, Ryan Sit, the talented developer behind a number of popular mashups is being sued by EMI for his application Favtape because it uses the Seeqpod API. Of course it’s not unusual for a record label to aggressively use the courts to defend copyright, but this appears to take the battle to a new ground. As Jason describes:
Whether you’ve heard of it or not, Platform as a Service, or PaaS, is an emerging trend that is quickly giving way to thousands of mashups across the web and corporate Intranets. A new article in the E-Commerce Times entitled “The PaaS Era, Part 1: Everybody’s Pounding Out Mashups” highlights the growth of mashups as web startups and established companies continue to open up their platforms to third party developers.
Google’s App Engine product has been available for developers to build upon since last April, and in that time has been free to all, up to certain resource limits. Many have taken advantage of that capability to build thousands of apps including some now in our directory like the iTunes clone The Cloud Player and the Yahoo BOSS search mashup 4hoursearch. But the most common request from App Engine developers has been the ability to go beyond the initial resource limits. As of today, Google has lifted those limits and will let apps scale beyond those early free quotas.
CalorieKing has launched “a Web service which enables other developers of weight management applications to readily incorporate CalorieKing’s more than 65,000-item food database”. The CalorieKing database is the primary source of the well-known book “The CalorieKing Calorie, Fat and Carbohydrate Counter”. Initial API details at our new CalorieKing API profile.
A few weeks ago we reported on the release of the Kiva API, which provides access to the Kiva.org global microlending database. Not long after the API’s release, blog posts from Bill Zimmerman and the Kiva team report that several developers are already working on Kiva mashups:
With close to 50 Google APIs in our directory and the single most popular API for mashups, Google is building a large developer ecosystem. And with whole new platforms like Android and AppEngine, there’s a lot for developers to learn about. So, coming later this spring Google will be hosting their second annual multi-day developer event in San Francisco: Google I/O, May 27-28. Last year’s I/O Event drew over 3,000 developers and featured the launch of AppEngine. This year’s recently announced event looks to be bigger and broader with 80+ sessions including:
If you are not familiar with the Google Documents List Data API (our Documents List Data API Profile), it allows client applications to upload documents to Google Documents and list them in the form of Google Data API (“GData”) feeds. Until recently, the API enabled users to download files in their original format, but the developer community was active in requesting exporting capabilities, and today developers can use the API to download documents in a variety of formats including PDF, Microsoft Word, SWF, RTF, and Open Document Format.
What’s the hottest API on ProgrammableWeb today? It’s the Twitter API. This is not surprising to folks tracking the latest news on Techmeme where hardly a day goes by without another Twitter-related headline. And indeed we’re seeing the impact here on PW, with a large spike in the number of Twitter applications being added to our directory. Just look at today’s entries where all three of the new mashup listings use the Twitter API. We now have 120 Twitter apps in our directory.
The New York Times have just announced their latest web service API: TimesPeople. With this new API, the newspaper of record is giving developers access to their own Times-centric social network. This community feature, launched last spring, lets readers connect via their interest in the paper’s content. The TimesPeople API now provides access to TimesPeople data for any user, including their profile, activities, news feed and social network (our TimesPeople profile).
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