So you’ve decided to put together an API, an excellent choice which I applaud. While this is an enormous step in the right direction, hopefully you’re aware that the there’s much more to be done–more, in fact, than I could begin to cover here. Instead, I’ve got one thing for you to focus on today. An app directory.
With Twitter adding its own photo uploads, we thought it’d be a nice time to go through some of the intelligent mashups that use photos posted to Twitter in an interesting way. I bet a lot of these will get some nice updates to integrate the official Twitter photo capability. First of all, we’ll talk about the recent Mashup of the Day, Hashtagram.
A different kind of Twitter API deadline is fast approaching, this time affecting both application developers and users. If you have a Twitter application that accesses Twitter direct messages, you will need your users to reauthorize you again by June 30th, 2011 to avoid any interruptions in receiving messages, as Twitter declared in May. The enforcement deadline is now just a few days away.
Developers are marching forward and hacking their way to create solutions for issues that they care about. Recent weeks have seen a number of hackathons where developers come together, meet up and hack the night away sometimes for up to 24 hours at a stretch to create initial versions of their applications. And if the theme for the hackathon is one that could change lives for some of us, then the effort is more noteworthy. Hack For Change saw more than 50 developers and designers create 17 useful applications that could actually do a lot of good as they develop further, including the winner, a group messaging app for neighbors built on the Twilio API.
Popular image-sharing application mlkshk now has a mlkshk API for building mlkshk-enabled applications. The service provides a social image discovery and sharing technology, with a RESTful API allowing access to a user’s mlkshk account, friends, favorites, and personal image collections also known as “shakes.”
The Google APIs Discovery API is an innovative API description service that helps make sense of Google APIs. Anyone using this meta-API can find other Google APIs and see the options available from those APIs. And thanks to this new API, ProgrammableWeb has now added “Try It” functionality to several Google API profiles in our directory. Using Google’s Discovery API, we automatically retrive resources and methods from Google, with form fields created to accept input. Without leaving ProgrammableWeb, you can now check out select Google APIs like the Google Translate API.
This week we had 22 new APIs added to our API directory including a social search and recommendation service, online accounting service, agile project management software, video game price comparison service, online appointment scheduling service, wine search service. In addition, we provided more in depth coverage of the Web’s largest index of open source applications. Below is more details on each of these new APIs.
This past week 17 new mashups were added to our mashup directory and 32 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include ActBlue, Activ Financial, Active, Business.gov , Context.IO, Dropbox, MapQuest Open Directions, RhymeBrain and SMSMyBus. The most often used APIs this week are Facebook, Google Maps and YouTube. And the most commonly used types of APIs were Shopping (4 APIs, 4 mashups), Mapping (3 APIs, 5 mashups) and Social (3 APIs, 4 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
In our writeup on Seevl, we mentioned that using the Seevl API to add context to Youtube videos would be ideal. Well, apparently, it was thinking along exactly those same lines. I talked briefly with Alexandre Passant, who is one of the main people at Seevl, and we talked about the company’s new mashup, and its future plans for the API.
Hoover’s, one of the largest providers of company, people and industry research, has just announced the winners of the Ideas phase of its Ideas and Apps contest. The Ideas stage has seen such an overwhelming response that the company has opened the Implementation phase of the contest, which invites developers to build on the Hoovers API, to the general public.
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