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Google URL Shortener API
The Google URL Shortner API looks really nice. Has everything you’d want (analytics, etc.), and seems super-simple to use.
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Transloadit
Handy-looking file upload/conversion API
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Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective
Really great take on why the Facebook Graph API is exciting and different than anything before it.
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HTML5 Geolocation with Fallback to Google Ajax API: HTML5
This looks a bit more bulletproof than the fallback I’ve done on BarStar — might have to switch to this when I get a moment.
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Mapstraction
Pretty nice-looking abstraction API that gives you a single interface to several different mapping service providers.
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Sign in with Twitter
Now you can bitch and moan that such-and-such Twitter mashup app requires your username and password, because Twitter now offers OAuth in their API. They never did before, which is why all these Twitter-barnacle apps had to resort to shadily asking for your password.
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Nathan Borror: Creating a basic API with Django
Nathan shows how simple it is to create a basic REST API for an existing Django app, as he has done for his great new site, Readernaut.
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Brightkite API Documentation
For future reference. ;)
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HeatMap API
A nice-looking API for adding heat maps as overlays on a Google map.
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django-oembed
A Django template tag implementation of OEmbed, the afore-mentioned API for getting embedding URLs from media sharing sites. The tag was written by Eric Florenzano, and was brought to my attention by Justin Lilly. Thanks, guys!
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OEmbed - An Open Standard for Embedded Content
Leah Culver announces a new open standard for getting the URL to embedded content via an API endpoint. Smart. Currently supported by Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce, Revision3 and Hulu. Vimeo and Blip.tv are working on implementations, as well.
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Google AJAX Libraries API
Google is now serving copies of popular Javascript libraries, including Prototype, Mootools, jQuery, and Dojo, to help with caching. Nice.
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Goodlatte: Platform Atop a Platform
Dan, Justin, and Rob roll out a big new feature for StrawPoll—the ability to run your own Twitter polls. Clever stuff, using the Summize API. Nice job, guys!
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Authentic Jobs ~ API
Authentic Jobs now as a publicly-available API! I’ve been beta testing this for a while (it’s how I’m showing job related to the content of my blog entries on each entry’s page), and it works great. So, if you’ve got a clever idea for how you could repurpose the job, company, and geographic information at AJ, go register for a key and get to coding!
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Yelp has a neighborhoods API
I was checking out the Yelp APIs for an entirely different reason tonight when I noticed they have a neighborhoods API. I don’t know how new this is, but I was under the impression that urbanmapping was the only freely available neighborhoods API (it’s the one I use for geocoded content here on jeffcroft.com). At least for Seattle, Yelp’s neighborhood list doesn’t look as complete (or at least as granular) as urbanmapping’s. It’s missing such common neighborhoods as Lower Queen Anne, South Lake Union, and Interbay (I would imagine queries against Yelp’s API for Lat/Lng pairs in these ‘hoods just return the larger regions of Queen Anne, Downtown, and Magnolia, respectively). I’ll stick with urbanmapping, but it’s nice to know there’s another choice out there.
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Google Static Maps API
Similar to their charts API, Google offers up a static maps interface, whereby map images are served up directly via nothing more than a URL and some parameters. Neat.
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Google Charts template tags for Django
Jacob Kaplan-Moss has put together pretty much the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Can’t wait to play with this. Be sure to check out the example page. Sooo nice.
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Google Announces the OpenSocial API
You sort of knew this would happen with Brad Fitzpatrick joined Google, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be this soon. Awesome — can’t wait to see where this goes.
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Accidental APIs: NFL edition
My former co-worker Matt Croydon cleverly looks under the hood of NFL.com’s in-game update Flash app, and finds it’s powered by JSON-formated versions of the data — meaning it’s there for the taking. Makes me wonder how many “accidental APIs” are out there, if we check out the source XML and JSON files for various Flash widgets.
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Kottke: Facebook is the new AOL
Jason should blog more often. I mean, he’s good at posting links, but anyone can do that. When he actually writes something of his own mind, he can be downright brilliant.
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PyFacebook: Facebook Python API kit
Although you can make it work with most any Python development setup, it is optimized for use with Django. Nice.
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There’s a hole in your Twitter
Twitter’s API doesn’t subscribe to its own privacy mechanisims. In other words, all those for-friend-only tweets you’ve been sending are viewable by anyone using an API app. Whoops.
Am I the only person who has been generally unimpressed by twitter as a web service? Nevermind the fact that I just don’t get very interested in the purpose of the site, but the service itself has largely sucked. The site is sometimes painfully slow, the API is constantly unresponse (I use it myself to collect friends’ twitter status, and I get error e-mails all the time from my script saying the API URL wasn’t responding), they’ve public aired out their dirty laundry with Rails and it’s scalability (or lack thereof), and now they didn’t even bother to make the API care about privacy?
I respect Evan Williams and always thought Blogger and Odeo were quite well-done — but Twitter just seems like it’s made by the same bunch of amateurs that are responsible for MySpace. I’m sure they’re great people, but it sure seems like they have a lot of trouble with their application.
Update: It appears this report was incorrect. Rather, the lack of privacy exhibited in some Twitter API apps have been the fault of those apps, not Twitter itself. I still stand by most of what I said, though. Twitter just seems to have more problems than it’s worth, to me.
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Jeremy Keith: Ghost in the Machine Tags
Jeremy picks up on Richard’s machine tag ideas (which I linked yesterday) and implements them on his blog. I should do this too — it would fit nicely with the other Flickr API stuff I’ve been doing.
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Richard Rutter on machine tags and ISBNs
I think Flickr’s machine tags are a great idea, and Richard’s got some nice ideas on how to use them. I’d love to see the same basic machine tag format used on other web services, so as to become some kind of a standard. Good stuff.
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Mike Davidson: Security By Sexiness
The “Hot Captcha,” in which the system pulls photos of nine people (men or women) from hotornot.com and requires you to pick the three “hot” ones in order to pass the test. Freaking brilliant.
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TweetyPy: Python-based CLI client for Twitter
Stuart Colville gets his feet wet with Python by building a simple Twitter client. Fun.
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FeedBurner Awareness API Reference
I’ve recently switched all my feeds over to FeedBurner. Turns out they have quite a nice-looking API for exposing the data they collect. I see more data mashups in my future.
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Geocoding My Life
Shortly after I first integrated my Flickr photos into jeffcroft.com (using Flickr’s awesome API), the photo sharing site added geocoding features, letting members tag photos with latitude and longitude information. Being someone who is obsessed with metadata, taxonomy, and the like, I quickly and meticulously geocoded my photos.
I wanted to incorporate that geo data in some interesting way here at jeffcroft.com, but the fact that I was (at the time) using dead-end code for this site (I planned to re-write it all) made me hold off until I’d finished the new version.
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Alex Bosworth: How To Provide A Web API
Hmm, I wonder if a jeffcroft.com API would be useful? It sure would be easy, with Django powering it all. I suppose no one would really care, huh? :)
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Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use
They lose a ton o credibility by calling the Google Maps API better than its Yahoo! Maps counterpart, but still a pretty nice roundup of solid open APIs.
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Drew McC: JSON All The Way
Drew pontificates on why you ned to be providing JSON output of your data if you want anyone to actually use your API.
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Yahoo! Developer Network - Python Developer Center
Yahoo now has a large library of utilities and documentation on accessing their services using Python. You’ll notice there isn’t a Ruby development center. ;)
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From del.icio.us to ma.gnolia
The process of managing the link roll on the front page of my site (now archived in the links section) is something I’ve changed several times.
On Thursday, the popular social bookmarking application ma.gnolia (designed by Zeldman and the boys at Happy Cog) added an open API to its tool belt. After about an hour of work Friday evening, I’ve switched my link roll system once again, from del.icio.us to ma.gnolia.
I now have ratings and screenshots of each link detail page (and I still have comments, of course). Here’s an example.
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Ma.gnolia launches open API
This API is far, far more complete than that of del.icio.us. I really hope del.icio.us takes the cue and add some of this functionality, since far more people use del.icio.us than ma.gnolia.
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Basecamp API
Cool of 37s to do this. I’m not sure the Basecamp API will prove as useful as a photo (Flickr) or maps (Google) API, but I’m sure some creative people will come up with interesting things to do with it, no less.
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Adacito Elsewhere: An Ajax demo
Ajax + Open APIs = One cool demo. Way to go, Jeremy.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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