When Google announced its Maps Data API (our Google Maps API profile), it provided programmatic access to the features available in the Google My Maps product. With it, developers can create, organize and update maps. Could it also replace a database for holding geographic points?
Making your own map imagery is now much, much easier. Tile Drawer is an Amazon EC2 (our Amazon EC2 API profile) machine image with all the software needed to create your own map tile server.
The Google Static Maps API (our Google Static Maps API Profile) is quite popular with developers looking for a relatively lightweight method of including Google Maps as rapidly-loading images on web sites. If you’re not familiar with this API, it essentially allows you to add a custom Google Map (including markers and paths) as the source for an image element on a web page.
The Sunlight Foundation is wrapping up its second Apps for America contest, and it wants your help picking a winner. Amongst the three finalists are a government notice archive, data masher and what Sunlight’s director calls “EveryBlock for federal data,” referring to the site recently acquired by MSNBC.com.
It may be a long way from first place in API mindshare, but web mapping pioneer MapQuest has been making major upgrades to its Flash and JavaScript APIs (our MapQuest API profile).
It’s rare that developers run from an API that just lost its “beta” tag. That may be the case with FriendFeed, which stole its own spotlight when it was acquired by Facebook.
This past week the new mashups added to our mashup directory were built using 22 different APIs. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Authentic Jobs, Evernote, Nabaztag, and Yes Broadcast DB. The most often used APIs this week are Amazon eCommerce, Facebook, and Twitter. And the most commonly used types of API were Music (4 APIs, 5 mashups), Mapping (4 APIs, 5 mashups), and Shopping (2 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
This week we had a range of new APIs added to our API directory including the 5 outlined here. They include an API that gives you access to a comprehensive food and nutrition database, an API for registering domains cheaply, an online document signing API, one for managing subscription-based payment services, to one API for [...]
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has just announced a new geolocation API that will be available to developers fairly soon (Twitter API profile). The new API, which will likely be rolled out in Twitter clients before being available on the Twitter site, will allow users and developers to add latitude and longitude to tweets, thereby adding a valuable new layer of meta information to tweets.
How do you attract developers to the world’s first grocery API? How about by promising it won’t go away any time soon? That’s what Tesco’s Nick Lansley has done in his recap of their first developer conference.
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