The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/all/20051124104726/http://www.apiblog.com:80/

Phone Notify Web Service

Friday, September 16, 2005

The PhoneNotify web service will call a phone number and say a text message.


I can see this one getting abused very quickly by college students and pranksters. Especially since you can enter any phone number as caller id source!

WS Finder

Monday, September 12, 2005
The new web site: wsfinder.com is a wiki for finding web services, and open API's. There are currently 101 api's and 22 examples listed.

Microsoft to release more APIs

Friday, September 09, 2005

Microsoft has announced that it will be releasing some APIs next week:


Microsoft will detail its "Web platform" strategy at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles next week... It intends to publish the application programming interfaces, or APIs, to some of its public Web sites, including MSN Search, and deliver better tools to write those applications.

Via: Read Write Web

Yahoo Comparison Shopping Web Service Released

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Jeffrey McManus, the Director of the Yahoo Developer Network announced yesterday their latest web service - a comparison shopping web service.


Like the other Yahoo Web Services, it is a REST web service, and very easy to use. Just pass in what product your searching for and it returns a result of offerings in XML.


Tim O'Reilly is excited about it:



I'm excited to see "Web 2.0" style web services -- that is, syndicating content and services outward, where they can be used by other sites, hopefully creating new services by combining pieces from multiple sites



So the real test of whether this is interesting is going to be whether people start building new services in which Yahoo! shopping is just a component, rather than the main point.

Implementing the Findory API

Wednesday, July 20, 2005
I mentioned in my last blog post about the findory api that it was a very easy to use API. So to test my claim, and to take up Greg Linden's challenge I went ahead and implemented the api into two of my web sites.

I added it first to my tag aggregator called TagBert. Since I had already had code to parse RSS 2.0 it only took me about 5 minutes. Check out the tag page for coffee.

Next I added it to my site for finding deals using the amazon api, dealazon. This time, I timed it, and it ended up taking about four minutes and thirty seconds to add. Check out the new Coldplay album, blog entires about it are on the bottom.

Chances are I will need to do some more tweaking on dealazon to get better results. But implementing a base prototype took very little time.

Findory API

Findory has released a very easy to use REST API for searching blogs, and news. Just pass your in your search terms, and an RSS 2.0 feed is returned with the results.

Greg Linden, Findorys founder, wants to see some sites using the feeds to create mashups:

I particularly like the ideas for mashups, such as combining Amazon's and Findory's APIs to provide product information, news stories, and blog articles about the latest Harry Potter and other top selling titles

Google Maps API Released

Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Yeah, this is going to be some pretty cool schtuff! Google has opened up an API to Google Maps and thoughts on mapping and Flickr are whirling around in my head. My homies over at iUpload had already put a hack together and integrated Google Maps feature into their Perspectives application but now there's no need to reverse engineer.

From the Google Maps API site
The Google Maps API lets developers embed Google Maps in their own web pages with JavaScript. You can add overlays to the map (including markers and polylines) and display shadowed "info windows" just like


Here's the line I love...
...Google retains the right to put advertising on the map in the future.


Some of the fine print includes the limitation of each api key only being valid for a single directory on a single domain. So you can't use the same api key on multiple domains or even multiple directories on a single site, kind of weird but I can dissect that later, for now it's not important.

You can't hide the results of your mapping stuff from end users so that means you can't use it to create a paid service or members only type service, even if its free.

All in all this is smelling a whole lot more like another AdSense network than a freely available API. I'll have to tinker before I can offer more input so stay tuned.

Atom & RSS Make Web Services Simple

Thursday, April 28, 2005
Daniel Steinberg posts comments from a talk Adam Bosworth [from Google] gave at a recent MySQL users conference regaring web services and taking the simple approach instead of the complex approach. With programming [i.e. the web] simple is always the preferred route to take if at all possible, and it usually is. But we all know that's easier said than done, especially when we're dealing with complicated data. Web services standards, usually via xml, are meant to make our lives easier but in actuality they complicate things and add a lot of unnecessary overhead to data that can usually be returned in a simple csv file.

In his Thursday morning keynote at the MySQL Users Conference 2005, Google's Adam Bosworth suggested that we "do for information what HTTP did for user interface." Ten years ago, when he first started paying attention to the web, he was interested in the idea that he could zero install applications and that they could be accessed from anywhere at any time. He said that a personal computer to him is like a phone: it is a useful access point but it is not where he stores stuff.


He went on to say...
Bosworth advocated an open model for data. Although he was not referring to open source, he expanded upon the example by explaining that customers like open source software because of the transparency. For many, they know what they are getting because they can read the source. For the most part, they do not actually read the source, but it is comforting to know that if the software doesn't work, you or someone else can fix the code if that is required.

Imagine if you can query any data that is available anywhere in the world. Bosworth said that what this requires is a single, simple, open wire format for items. The format needs to be simple for any P programmer to deliver and any JavaScript programmer to consume. He also pointed out that "complex things tend to break and simple things tend to work." Google has the simplest query language in the world. There is no structure and no syntax.

Bosworth predicts that RSS 2.0 and Atom will be the lingua franca that will be used to consume all data from everywhere. These are simple formats that are sloppily extensible. Anyone who wants to can use these formats to consume content or to author content. Contrast this with the Semantic Web, which requires that you get a large group of people to agree on the schema of everything.


The only question I have is why Google implemented such a complex web services platform. I mean you can access their api from every conceivable web service method except RSS and Atom... hmmm. Now the blogger boys are using Atom and have been big proponents of it but I wish that would catch on over on the Google side of the cafeteria.