Imagine being able to watch your favorite game on the go, receive constant score updates, interact with your friends and even win really cool prizes for your fanaticism. If that piques your interest, then Fanatix is definitely something you should check out. With the Fanatix API, developers can easily take these features and integrate them into existing platforms.
One of the bigger challenges with anything having to do with software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications is how quickly they can sprawl out of control. Before most organizations realize it they wind up with multiple silos of SaaS applications that are even more difficult to integrate than traditional enterprise applications.
Urbanesia, the leading Indonesian lifestyle directory website, announced the launch of an open API. The open API enables third-party developers to incorporate Urbanesia’s location data into third-party apps. The API allows developers to retrieve location data generally or in categories (e.g. restaurants, tourist spots, etc.). Selina Limman, Urbanesia CEO, commented: “We hope Urbanesia’s API can increase the developers’ creativity as they can [now] focus more on application development rather than data collection.”
If you want to attract developers to your platform, obviously great API documentation is important. But that’s really only one piece of the story. The reason clear docs are great is that they enable that first test of an API, the “hello world.” There are several ways to accelerate that process, as described in the five keys to a great API. Below you’ll find six ways to reduce that TTFHW, or time to first hello world.
Win a full conference pass to TwilioCon 2012. Viddy opens up its API. Mashape goes public with API Marketplace.Plus: Sunglass API Fuels CAD Connections, Facebook is rolling out an Instapaper-style ‘save it later’ feature and 13 New APIs.
Our API directory now includes 221 marketing APIs. The newest is the Front Door Daily Deals API. The most popular, in terms of mashups, is the SendGrid API. We list 10 SendGrid mashups. Below you’ll find some more stats from the directory, including the entire list of marketing APIs.
The recent controversy over Governor Romney’s surge in Twitter followers once again brought up the issue of the true value of a follower count. Whatever the cause of Romney’s sudden gain in followers, it is clear that follower count is a number that can be manipulated, therefore it has little value as a measurement of social media success. At the same time, follower count is the principle metric used by the press to measure the popularity of politicians and celebrities on social media. I also see this in my work with clients, who want more followers, but aren’t sure what to do with them. This is an unsustainable pattern. If follower count is the most important Twitter metric, and validity of follower count is becoming more questionable, we are racing towards a cliff.
Google has been a leader in providing innovative APIs as well as providing infrastructure and software paradigms (including map-reduce) that have helped make the internet better. The enormous investment that Google has put in these infrastructure efforts is yet to pay off directly, but it has brought many developers a choice and flexibility between the usual options. Of course if computing shifts to the cloud, Google will reap a big dividend from both retail as well as enterprise software customers.
SAP announces their new mobile developer program. CBSSports.com 2012 Fantasy Football Challenge is accepting submissions. Plus: VC’s bet on API Tech Management, Sticher unveils API for the Connected Car and 17 New APIs.
We covered Mashape last fall in our overview of 11 API management tools. But Mashape is a different sort of management company, with an open listing of APIs and the ability to buy (and therefore, sell) APIs.
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