iKnow, a social learning site launched last month by Japanese company Carego, have launched an API (our iKnow profile) to allow third parties to “add a little Learning and Linguistic magic to [their] applications, widgets and other mashups.” iKnow allows users to take virtual English and Japanese language lessons (other languages are promised for the future) and guides and tracks their progress. Through the social component users can share their progress with friends, leave comments, keep journals, and compete for rankings.
Hot on the heels of its Campaign Finance API, the New York Times has officially announced the Movie Reviews API, which gives third-party developers access to “over 22,000 New York Times movie reviews going all the way back to 1924″ (and we’ve updated our Movie Review API profile with the updated details).
The business networking site LinkedIn has now launched a new application platform they call InApps. It’s an OpenSocial-based platform that enables third-party developers to create applications that get embedded into LinkedIn user’s profiles. While this follows along the model used of Facebook, MySpace and host of other social platforms, it differs in its emphasis on being business centric in nature and, like the service itself, follows a much more controlled and button-downed approach. And like the LinkedIn API that we reported on last year, access is limited based on an approval process.
As we discussed earlier this month, Yahoo! had been slowly but steadily introducing parts of its Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), including the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), one of the two platforms that comprise Y!OS. Today Yahoo has announced the release of Y!OS 1.0.
Microsoft this week joined the cloud computing party in a big way. Ray Ozzie yesterday kicked-off their annual Professional Developers Conference (PDC) by announcing Windows Azure, Microsoft’s highly anticipated OS in the cloud. It’s a vast suite of offerings that takes their Software + Services strategy to a whole new level and puts them in direct competition in the cloud with Amazon, Google, and a growing host of large internet players and a raft of startups.
Multimap, the UK-based online mapping provider that was acquired almost a year ago by Microsoft, has released a new API that allows users to embed customized Multimap maps in web pages using a single line of HTML code. This new functionality is similar to the existing custom map embedding functionality provided by Google My Maps and third party integrator Map Channels.
Google has just announced the addition of a valuable new feature for the Google Maps API (the most popular API in our API directory): reverse geocoding. If you are not familiar with geocoding, it is the process of converting an address into a latitude/longitude pair. Likewise, reverse geocoding is the process of converting a latitude/longitude pair into an address. Developers using the Google Maps API have had access to geocoding since its release in June 2006, and geocoding has been integrated with many of the map mashups developed with this API.
Federal Computer Week (FCW.com) recently published an interesting piece written by John Moore about the use of APIs and development of mashups for use by government managers. Titled “Getting on the same page”, the 1200+ word article cites the problem-solving value of mashups in the government sector.
Google has just announced a nice addition to the Google Gears Geolocation API: the ability to use WiFi on laptops to locate users to within 200m accuracy in major desktop browsers in hundreds of cities around the world. We originally covered the GeoLocation API back in August, when Google first announced the release of the API for use in mobile devices to get a more precise estimate of a user’s location.
While map mashups are what have defined this genre of application, the second most popular type of web mashup here on ProgrammableWeb are photo mashups. How popular? Just this past week the number of photo-related mashups passed the 500 mark, and there are now 505 listed.
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