Archive for the ‘Programmable Web’ Category
This past week 15 new mashups were add to our mashup directory and 14 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Bing Maps and Menu Mania. The most often used APIs this week are Google AJAX Libraries, Google Maps, and Twitter. And the most frequently used types of APIs were Mapping (3 APIs, 6 mashups), Internet (3 APIs, 3 mashups), and Photos (3 APIs, 3 mashups). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Bing Maps used in ACRES Preserves Map
Freebase used in QuoteRelish
Google AJAX Libraries used in Tvitre.no
Google Analytics used in Google Analytics + Olark = Understand your Chat Conversion
Google Maps used in Baseball Stadiums Map – All Levels, Cut Your Own Christmas Tree: Ottawa Area Tree Farms Map, funda.nl, Tweet Street View
Menu Mania used in Zoodle.co.nz
Moreover used in QuoteRelish
Panoramio used in Panoramio Holiday Countdown
Twilio used in Tickets Suck
TwitPic used in Food on Twitter
Twitter used in flittr, Food on Twitter, G4M3 Twitter Flash Games, Tickets Suck, Tvitre.no, Tweet Street View
uClassify used in AgeAnalyzer
Yahoo Geocoding used in Panoramio Holiday Countdown
Mashups of the day:
And each day there is one mashup selected to be Mashup of the Day. Here are last week’s winners:
Google Analytics + Olark = Understand your Chat Conversion
If you enjoy creating fun, interactive maps, you’ll get lost in the latest functionality from UMapper (our UMapper mashup profile). With it, you can include any image–even one that isn’t a map–in its Flash viewer.
Founder Andrei Taraschuk shows off the feature in this video (embedded below):
You can add shapes, markers and media to the image, which users can then explore. In the case of this new feature, the images are not georeferenced. In other words, you cannot programmatically add elements to the page using latitude and longitude coordinates. That’s not entirely a drawback when it comes to mapping Middle Earth, for example.
Embedded below is a “map” I created in order to test out the feature using any image. Using this photo of Portland’s skyline, I outlined a couple iconic buildings using polygons.
The UMapper blog post has many other examples of maps created with the new feature.
All the old features of UMapper are there, as well, which includes six different map tile styles to choose from (including Google and Bing) and the option to make your map into a GeoDart game.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Ready to entertain those tired eyes? The mashups we’ve chosen all offer a unique ways to look at ordinary content. In one case, it’s a way to visualize how quickly tweets are shooting around the Twitterverse. Another brings what might be all of the graffiti multimedia on the web to one place. And finally, enjoy the anachronism of watching your YouTube videos in an old timey television.
Developers working on mashups may want to take note of a recent announcement by Ford that it intends to make SYNC, it’s on-board vehicle system, accessible to developers next year. The general implication is that millions of vehicles could become platforms for all kinds of mashups and apps that integrate with various parts of the SYNC system, including its stereo and navigation modules.
The idea behind the “Mobile Apps Connectivity” concept is to provide an easy way of integrating applications that run on mobile devices with SYNC, thereby allowing drivers and passengers to control the apps using built-in elements of the SYNC system, such as voice controls, in-dash displays, and more. Given Ford’s recent announcement to convert SYNC-enabled vehicles into WiFi hotspots, there is good potential for this hybrid SYNC-mobile app approach to deliver value-added tools and applications.
As Ford highlights in this blog post, the car manufacturer plans to utilize an App Store model for distribution of apps that work with SYNC:
Ford is joining millions of its customers in embracing the app marketplace. Studies show what was a nonexistent niche just three years ago is expected to blossom into a $4 billion industry by 2012. [...] Ford and SYNC will answer the consumer demand by offering the only connectivity platform available for drivers to safely manage their mobile applications in the car using voice commands and buttons on the steering wheel.
Ford plans on making the SYNC API available to developers sometime in 2010, although several teams of students at the University of Michigan-Dearborn worked on some pilot applications using iPhone-based apps that were integrated with the SYNC system via bluetooth. The students were the first ever to sign Ford’s new SYNC Developers’ License, which allowed them to gain early access to the SYNC API currently in development.
Ford Motor Company SYNC system reviewed by students and instructors. Photo by: Sam VarnHagen/Ford Motor Co. (12/21/09)
The SYNC API itself is likely to be device-independent, allowing drivers to use all kinds of mobile devices in a unified way. This is certainly an exciting new development, and we’re looking forward to seeing how this plays out next year. And of course, we’re hoping to see apps that improve the driving experience while at the same time making the roads safer.
Somewhere out there is a singer-songwriter who could use your code. And who knows, that artist — or one of the other more than 10,000 on ArtistData — might even pay you for it.
ArtistData is a site to help musicians store their information and reach out to fans in the shortest amount of time. For example, enter tour dates once, then publish to MySpace, your website and send local media alerts.
The site itself is modular, with plugins for each service, so it already looks like a complete platform. Now it’s open to outside developers who want to provide new end points for the data the artists already have stored (technical details at our ArtistData API profile).
Founder Brenden Mulligan makes a good case for building on top of his platform:
“We feel that by giving developers a robust platform to build on that is already in use by tons of musicians, development will be faster and the apps will get in front of the intended customers immediately. If you’re a developer who wants to build better mailing list software for bands, you can build it within a dashboard artists are already using. If you want to build a way for bands to calculate how much they’ll spend on gas while on tour, you can create an app that pulls existing tour data.”
Another site, TopSpin, has similar features, but appears a bit more closed. Artists must apply and be contacted before they can use the services. On the web, that usually means a sales process. And though TopSpin has partners that provide services, that is also not as open as ArtistData.
It’s not just the openness of ArtistData’s developer platform that’s intriguing. You can charge for your applications, with ArtistData taking care of the billing. There is no credit card hassle for you and artists are more likely to spend because their information is already on file with a company they supposedly trust.
Hypebot has an interview with Mulligan, where he gives a more broad view of the platform:
“My goal has always been for ArtistData to make artists as effective and efficient as possible. Providing them with a platform to access high quality tools (developed by separate, dedicated teams) in a convenient and central dashboard is very compelling to me.”
In the comments to the Hypebot post, a few musicians expressed frustration that ArtistData is just another of the many do-it-yourself tools. Others noted how they need a hub for all things band marketing.
The pitch of a single place for all that is important is compelling. Facebook makes a similar argument for our entire social lives. The question that rarely comes up in these situations (though it certainly has for Facebook) is why you? A central platform is always going to have an owner and it comes down to whether the features are compelling enough to get the attention of both users and developers.
Hat tip: Clyde Smith
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
This past week 17 new mashups were add to our mashup directory and 15 different APIs were used to build them. Some of the newer or less frequently seen APIs include Google Wave and Google Translate. The most often used APIs this week are Google Maps, Twilio, and Twitter. And the most frequently used types of APIs were Mapping (2 APIs, 5 mashups) and Social. The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Flickr used in Floreant POS Official Site
Freebase used in Comedify, QuoteRelish
Google App Engine used in Today’s Special
Google Custom Search used in Floreant POS Official Site
Google Maps used in Cut Your Own Christmas Tree: Ottawa Area Tree Farms Map, Mapiprop, TweetJourney, Wineries of Ontario
Google Talk used in Today’s Special
Google Translate used in bugaword
Google Wave used in Today’s Special
Last.fm used in Comedify, nowp.ly
Microsoft Virtual Earth used in Mapiprop
Moreover used in QuoteRelish
Twilio used in Better Talking, Goal Prompt, Menu-O-Matic, Tickets Suck, Voicify
Twitter used in nowp.ly, Tickets Suck, TweetJourney
YouTube used in Mini YouTube TVs, nowp.ly
Mashups of the day:
And each day there is one mashup selected to be Mashup of the Day. Here are last week’s winners:
There has been a lot of geo-related API news lately, and in part that’s due to the ongoing release of new APIs, features, functionality, and data for mapping and location platforms. The latest news is the addition of the recently released StreetSide panoramas and enhanced Bird’s Eye imagery to the Bing Maps API. A little over a week after these new features were added to Bing Maps they have now been exposed via several methods in the Bing Maps API (our Bing Maps API Profile).
As you may remember from our earlier post on the new beta version of Bing Maps, it relies on Silverlight, so you’ll need to update your SDK with the latest DLLs in order to integrate either or both of these features. Chris Pendleton at the Bing Maps Blog has instructions on how to download and install the DLLs.
You should note that you’ll need a Bing Maps API key in order to authenticate with the Silverlight control. You can sign up for a key at BingMapsPortal.com.
As mentioned in our previous post about the addition of perspective aerial imagery to Google Maps, the competition between Microsoft and Google mapping platforms is getting quite interesting, and this latest news from Microsoft makes the competition even more interesting.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
When you want animated maps or zippier feedback than Google’s JavaScript mapping API can provide, you can use the Flash Maps API. Yes, even Google acknowledges that its popular, full-featured platform can’t do everything. Using the Flash API used to mean you needed to know Flash. Now, you can get the benefit, but still program in JavaScript.
Web developer Nianwei Liu has released a wrapper API for Flash Maps, called Map Bridge:
“The concept is very simple: programing a flash component with JavaScript, similar to what you do with GStreetViewPanorama. This library exposes all core classes in the Flash API and packages them in an easy to use way.”
The code then becomes quite similar to the standard Google Maps API, as well as other mapping platforms. A map is attached to a DOM element via JavaScript. An included library takes over to insert the map in its place, only instead of loading tiles via JavaScript, it calls Flash functions.
An example within the announcement post shows driving directions with an animated fly-over. Like Liu’s mention of Street View, this shows why Flash can be useful for mapping. Even the geniuses that originally created Google Maps can’t get an experience as smooth as what Flash provides.
The highly technical and curious will appreciate that Map Bridge is open sourced. Like other mapping wrapper APIs, such as Mapstraction, you can alter and contribute to the codebase. Or, just find out how it works. Perhaps other API providers will learn from Map Bridge, making Flash APIs accessible to more developers by including JavaScript wrappers.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
WordPress this week opened a new web service that allows blogs to be read and posted via a Twitter compatible API. From the announcement on the WordPress blog:
Of course one of the coolest things about Twitter right now is the client applications, particularly the mobile/iPhone ones. I use Tweetie 2 on my iPhone every day. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get all your blog subscriptions and post to your WordPress.com blog from apps like Tweetie? Well here’s an early Christmas present… We’ve enabled posting to and reading of WordPress.com blogs via the Twitter API. Any app that allows you to set a custom API URL will work.
By creating a custom implementation of the Twitter API, WordPress can now leverage the developer community’s expertise and familiarity with the Twitter web service. In addition, most existing applications that target the Twitter platform can now integrate with WordPress just by changing the base URL of the web service calls, either with a very simple modification of the code, or by specifying the API root or end point in those applications that have that option, like Tweetie 2.
This new service is not intended to compete with Twitter, but rather to complement the WordPress “mega-blogging” platform with Twitters “micro-blogging”, as Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, explains:
New forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging.
One of the many uses of Twitter is to link to and promote your blog posts. (And other people’s blog posts.) As we grow, so do they, and vice versa. I blog when I have something longer to say, like this. I tweet when it’s the lowest friction way to talk to my friends, or get distribution for something longer I did somewhere else.
It’s not really a “versus,” it’s an “and.”
Custom implementations of existing APIs are nothing new – Wine has been providing the Windows API on Linux for years. However, it does raise some interesting legal issues. Can an external API use the trademarked names, like Twitter and ReTweet, as a function name? Is it possible to reprint the existing documentation? Currently the Twitter Terms Of Service does not deal with these situations, although there is an interesting discussion on Google Groups that could address some of these questions.
With new APIs being created on an almost daily basis, developers will certainly appreciate not having to learn yet another API when targeting the WordPress platform. This move could also mark the beginning of the Twitter API as a de facto standard in micro-blogging.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
Google has released a new API for Fusion Tables, a Google Labs app that allows users to import, integrate, analyze, and visualize data in a variety of ways. The new API allows developers to programmatically perform a variety of tasks, including data import and export (more at our Google Fusion Tables API Profile). The API itself is integrated with several other Google APIs, including the Google Maps API and the Google Visualization API. In fact, developers can also leverage App Engine to easily develop data processing and analysis apps that easily integrate with various other Google APIs.
The new API was announced on the Google Code Blog, which provides some additional insight into some of the benefits of the API:
Is your dataset active, always changing? Is it being collected right now on cell phones or websites? With the new Fusion Tables API, you can update and query your dataset in Fusion Tables programmatically, without ever logging in to the Fusion Tables website. The API means you can import data from whatever data source you may have, whether a text file or a full-powered data base. On the more exotic side, imagine you’re collecting data via survey software on GPS-enabled cell phones, as the Open Data Kit project is doing. Open Data Kit uses Google App Engine and the Fusion Tables API to instantly map locations of survey results.
The RESTful API supports both GET and POST requests, and currently it is limited to 5 requests per second. A subset of SQL is used to query and retrieve data, insert new data, update existing data, and delete data. Google has made various resources available for developers including reference documentation, tutorials, a FAQ page, tutorials, a code sample (Java), and a Google Group. Note that authentication is needed in order to access both public and private tables.
The video below provides a good overview and case study that will bring you up to speed on the Google Fusion Tables app and its powerful data analysis, collaboration, and visualization capabilities.