Developer’s interested in giving back to the community should check out All for Good’s new API (our All for Good API Profile). If you are not familiar with All for Good, it is a new service that lets you browse volunteer activities and find events based on your location or interests.
In a first for US mobile carriers, Sprint has opened up an initial set of REST services for developers to play with for free at their new developer sandbox. With these services (Sprint API profile), developers can now access location, simple presence, and send SMS messages to Sprint handsets without requiring any software installed to the device.
No sooner had we seen a record number of APIs used in a single week last week, than this week we now saw 53 different APIs used to build the 22 new mashups were add to our mashup directory this past week. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Amplify, AOL Video [...]
Here are 6 of the newest APIs added to our API directory. They include a Danish registry of biodiversity data such as species data, including plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms; an API for conducting polls, a pair of stock APIs to get you finance data, an SMS API for marketing campaigns, and Google’s new Virtual Keyboard API which we reported on earlier this week.
What’s hot in APIs these days? If you look for clues in what APIs are most often used in new mashups listed here on ProgrammableWeb, it’s the Twitter API. Not a surprise given how hot the Twitter service is this year. As you can see from our recent weekly mashup summaries, hardly a week goes by without Twitter being one of the top 3 APIs. The chart below shows the top 10 APIs for the past two weeks:
Google has just released a new Virtual Keyboard API as part of its AJAX Language API that should enrich sites that use forms to collect information from multi-lingual users. This new API (our Google Virtual Keyboard API Profile) allows users to input text into form fields in a variety of languages (and corresponding characters) without the need for a physical keyboard or specialized software.
Have you noticed an increase in the number of reports about malware and compromised web servers? Recently, a computer exploit known as Gumblar has been making news for its ability to launch exploits via drive-by download. Gumblar silently installs itself on a computer if a user simply visits a compromised web site, where it proceeds to steal FTP logins and replace legitimate Google search results with redirects to sites of the attacker’s choosing. Despite the threat of Gumblar and malware exploits like it, users of recent releases of the Firefox or Chrome browser have an extra layer of protection provided by their use of Google’s Safe Browsing API.
Why is it that the most common questions people have about providing open APIs are often about monetization? While there are many possible answers, two reasons that stand out are: a) the API is a distribution channel, and when you think new distribution channel there is an expectation around revenue opportunities; and b) if you are the person in your company trying to define the business case for an API to the executive team, there is a big hurdle to overcome, because business executives tend to see an API as a cost center and want to know how to measure the pay-off.
While Google leads the way in web search and Yahoo leads the way in answers, many upstart services are attempting to help you make decisions by giving you smarter answers to your questions. Microsoft has billed its new search offering Bing as both a “decision engine” and an “answer engine.” Now there’s Hunch, a new start-up founded by Flickr’s Caterina Fake, which also aims to be a decision engine, but using a very different model. By first asking the user questions ranging from food preferences to pet peeves, Hunch tries to provide answers to questions that best match the user’s interests based on crowdsourced data collected from other users.
In addition to the 6 new APIs we reviewed yesterday, another 7 were added to our API directory this week. These includes APIs for collaborative, social translation of site content, a service for personalized apparel, an API for sharing music links on Twitter, a microblogging service that lets users share information by answering the question “What are you trading?”, and finally a very useful API that gives you access to the rich datasets from the United Nations and the World Health Organization. Here are more details on each of these services:
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