This Week in APIs - January 1-7 »

The first week of the year is always a time for reflection, planning and working towards new year goals. It was no different in the world of APIs - check out the best from this week. 

 We've been talking about API design a lot lately. Check out these tips from Joannes Vermorel on lessons learned while iterating the Lokad API, including be minimalistic and have explicit input/output limitations. 2011 will see lots of companies redoing their APIs to reach greatness, and this is a good starting point. 

Investor's Business Daily has a great post for your exec team on APIs. The article notes that the business team - not just the tech team - must be involved in the "API Economy" to succeed. Also some interesting points on the role of APIs in dealing with the increasing complexity of software applications. 

Chris Crum at WebProNews has some interesting analysis on what will impact search the most going forward- including the effect of APIs, local, social and realtime. Food for thought as we head into the new year! 

Developer Candy 

• Twilio just announced a new Twilio Developer Connect mailing list to connect its developers to consulting and job opportunities. Very cool for Twilio devs and an interesting concept for API providers.
• Developers and API providers should go weigh in on Alex Williams' Weekly Poll over at ReadWriteWeb. Will 2011 be the year of the API? What will growth look like? What about mobile? Looking forward to seeing the results of this one. 
• Miso, a social platform for television, has launched an API for developers to access real-time information about shows, movies, users, checkins and more. TV is the next big platform for apps and APIs so keep an eye on what Miso does next.

This Week in APIs- October 9-15 »

"Are you there, endpoint? It's me, POST request." Check out what you missed this week in API action.

Great dive into the new Facebook Groups API by Josh Constine over at InsideFacebook. Learn about how it works, what you can do with it and if you're ready to start playing.

Best Buy announced that its API will now allow customers to make transactions on 3rd party apps or pages- no more routing to the Best Buy site for purchase. For retailers, allowing customers to view and purchase merchandise in the same place is a best practice. Great move.

Our own Mike Debnar has an article out in the E-Commerce Times called "The Rebirth of E-Commerce in the New Internet," a look at how retailers can innovate using APIs to reach the mobile, multichannel and app-driven web. Includes three rules for doing APIs right!

Hot New APIs and Developer Candy

• YouTube has added PubSubHubBub to its activities feed, making it possible to have video data pushed to your apps- no more polling! ProgrammableWeb's got the scoop on how you can get to real-time with your video apps.
• SimpleNote's got a new API in private testing that you can sign up for here. SimpleNote provides an easy way to keep things like lists, notes and instructions.
• The Next Web loops us in on a fun new API from Wibiya, a site that provides websites with toolsbars for social and sharing. They are on the hunt for some innovation!

What'd we miss? Shoot us a note on Twitter. And if you love APIs, remember to get your free "I <3 API" stickers.

This Week in APIs- September 25-October 1 »

We all know that APIs make the world go 'round. Here's what you might have missed in the fast-changing tides of the API economy this week.

Google added OAuth support to the Google Apps APIs. Google says OAuth provides better security and makes it easier for apps to make API calls. OAuth adoption is growing both at the tech titans and in enterprise APIs- Google joining is a big step forward.

MasterCard, which is planning to open APIs by the end of 2010, announced it will be focusing on mobile app development for iPhone and Android in its open API strategy. The mobile payment space is heating up as new and classic finance companies open up to let mobile in.   

Dictionary.com launched a new developer portal to get devs up and running on its API. The portal has a great gallery of apps built with it - ranging from games to education. Best practice for API providers.

New APIs and Stuff to Geek Out With

• Josh Constine at Inside Facebook has the scoop on XA.net, which provides cheap multivariate testing using the Facebook API and will now allow agencies and advertisers to manipulate campaigns themselves. As APIs become more and more integral to advertising, keep your eye on tools like this.
• Verizon released new APIs for location and subscription at its second Verizon Developer Community conference. Verizon also launched some cool tools and other tasty treats for devs worth checking out.
• We're sure you've heard about the launch of Storify, a service to let you integrate and curate content to create your own stories. The company will be launching APIs to support mobile so stay tuned.

This Week in APIs- August 21-27 »

Browsers, semantics, clouds and Tweets- APIs were busy making some of the best things in life better this week. 

Google announced the acquisition of Angstro, which provides search engine capability and an API to look up information across social networks. The acquisition should help beef up Google's social network strategy, Google Me.  

Mozilla is getting heavy into APIs with its Jetpack SDK 0.7, offering three new APIs to allow developers to float pop-up windows, get access to the systems clipboard and give users notifications. In a world that increasingly lives beyond the traditional browser model, companies like Mozilla are rapidly extending and evolving with APIs- a space to watch. 

DeltaCloud, which provides an API to support interoperability between cloud providers including Amazon, GoGrid and Rackspace, announced that they are open-sourcing their API. The DeltaCloud project is incubated in the Apache Software Foundation. Interesting development as the cloud API battles rage on. 

New APIs to Drool Over- 

• ProgrammableWeb has the scoop on Mombo, an app that mines Twitter conversations about movies and creates ratings for them. They currently provide a limited API. Mombo is part of the next generation of services built on top of popular social APIs to extract value from the crowds. 
• The USA TODAY Developer Portal just launched! While the APIs will not be available until September, the initial launch will include the Best-Selling Books API and a Sports Salaries API. 
• TextWise's SemanticHacker API, which allows you to access its semantic analysis engine for texts, has added ways to segment search results by date, source, author, product or other parameters. The bleeding edge of the semantic web is being driven by APIs and great to see better features surfacing for developers. 

What did you do with APIs this week? Let us know and hit us up on Twitter.

iOSDevCamp: APIs for Rapid App Development »

This weekend in San Jose hundreds of iPhone and iPad developers gathered for three days of learning, collaboration and coding at iOSDevCamp. Teams of devs and designers worked throughout the day and late into the nights on the PayPal campus, fueled with hot dogs, beer and caffeine to build new applications culminating in a contest Sunday evening for the best in categories ranging from Best User Interface to Best Social Game.

The amount of innovation developers can produce with the right tools and a good team never ceases to amaze. From apps that let parents give their kids allowance money (with an easy-to-use 'grounded' setting), to massive multiplayer SocialPong, to app-controlled Lego robots, iOSDevCamp was bursting with creativity and energy.

Many of the apps built at the event showcased how powerful APIs are as tools for rapid development, making powerful datasets and services instantly and programmatically accessible. The Flickr, PayPal, Twitter and Google Maps APIs were very popular, and we also saw a number of people hacking on the Twilio API to integrate voice and SMS into their apps.

Best Use of Web APIs Contest Winner
We were psyched to sponsor the "Best Use of Web APIs" award category with a grand prize of a new iPad, won by designer and mobile developer Tyler White for his Flickr Photo Map. The app mashes up the Google Maps and Flickr photos API to display images from around the world.

The app illustrates the power of APIs to build innovative things quickly. "I love APIs. They are free (most of the time), and there is a lot of opportunity right now as a lot of these datasets have never been available before now," says Tyler.  

The app is geo-location enabled, allowing you to drill into your location or any location you are interested in and stream photos from it. You can also stream photos by tags, user, location and text. Tyler is planning to submit it to the App Store soon. 

Congrats to Tyler and all the other winners! We're already excited for iOSDevCamp 2011.

This Week in APIs- August 14-20 »

REST assured, we're bringing you the best API news from the week. Tasty API tidbits served hot and on-demand for your Friday.

ReadWriteWeb's Alex Williams has a fantastic post featuring industry leaders, including Apigee's Sam Ramji, on the top 10 mistakes API providers make. Features discussion of developer community, security and scalibility best practices- a must-read for companies with APIs and the devs that depend on them. 

Facebook released their Places API to give access to user check-ins. Right now it's read-only but write functionality should be coming soon, allowing more powerful apps. 

CNet's Dave Rosenberg has the scoop on a new rev to Google's AppEngine Namespaces API, adding multitenancy support to run multiple instances of an application. Smart, SaaSy approach and good news for the number of Apigee devs on AppEngine. 

New APIs to Taste 

• Payvment, which provides an e-commerce application that can be integrated into Facebook pages, has released an Enterprise API to let retailers sync their inventory with the app. This is groundbreaking for the new world of social e-commerce- congrats to the Payvment team.  
• Google Analytics released a new API for read-only access to config data. The new API is part of Labs and returns data in a way that maps to the Analytics data model, which should make it much easier to use.  
• More API innovation from the email space with Email Yak, which allows developers to send, receive and store emails and attachments. Allowing devs to send email through APIs is a big deal for the space. It's currently in private beta so sign up to get the first bite in September.   

 What'd we miss? Hit us on Twitter and tell us what you're working on. 

This Week in APIs- August 7-14 »

While your API shouldn't keep you up at night, here's some exciting API news worth losing sleep over this week: 

Josh Constine at Inside Facebook gave the scoop on a Facebook location API that might be coming soon- possibly to allow integration for check- ins with other services. We think this would be a great move for Facebook! 

Local deal distributor Adility launched their API to allow developers to offer deals without sourcing or processing them- like what SimpleGeo does for geolocation. Very cool idea with a potentially huge market- we'll be keeping tuned! Adility will help developers make money- great best-practice for all API providers. 

Mezeo, the cloud storage platform, announced the release of an interoperability API that supports storage clouds from Amazon S3, Eucalyptus and Google Storage. Interoperability and data portability are a big deal in the cloud so we are glad to see more steps like this being taken.  

New APIs to Hack On-

• Speaking of check-in news, Gowalla opened their check-in API to all developers this week! This space shows no signs of cooling down anytime soon.  
• W3i, a company that focuses on increasing revenue and distribution of apps, launched a content API to give affiliates access to a number of its free downloads. Affiliate programs and marketing are a huge space for API innovation. 
• Google Buzz has debuted the "garden hose" API- which provides a random sampling of public Buzz posts for those who don't have the resources to deal with the full firehose API. Access to the data is free and a great way to get started! Interesting new approach, we wonder if more companies providing firehoses will follow. 

If we missed something cool- like what YOU are doing with APIs- shoot us a note on Twitter.

This Week in APIs- July 31 - August 6 »

Momma don't let your babies grow up to be APIgeeks... 

Microsoft will be phasing out version 1.1 of the Bing Search API - developers will need to migrate to version 2.0 by November 1. 2.0 has better support for source types and allows unlimited queries. The new API is also designed to accommodate changes to the API without needing to switch versions - important best practice.

Derek Harding over at ClickZ had a great post this week on APIs for marketers - we talk to more and more marketers that are interested in using or providing APIs and Derek has some important points on the benefits (real-time enablement is a big one) and challenges (versioning and technical skills required). We're glad to see more marketing people getting in on the conversation!

MyTown, a location-based service, just announced it is the first to support global check-ins via the Google Maps API - it has now expanded into Canada, Australia and the UK. One of the great things about APIs is how easily they allow globalization of services, and this is a great example!

New APIs and Opportunities:

• Gowalla has officially released its write API for check-ins. ProgrammableWeb has the scoop and we also think Gowalla's practice of offering a sandbox for API testing is great!
• The National Library of Medicine has announced a hackathon this fall to improve a database of drugs that could harm breastfeeding moms and their infants and help build a better API. Awesome example of how APIs can contribute to the greater good, and innovation in the health sector.
• InfoChimps has refreshed its Twitter datasets to give accurate information on influence, activity level and interaction, with new API calls. Great resource for you Twitter devs out there.

Miss something cool? Light the Apigee bat signal and yell at us on Twitter.

This Week in APIs- July 24-30 »

We might be a little obsessed with APIs here at Apigee- here's what made API fanaticism great this week. 

The Khronos Group released version 4.1 of its OpenGL graphics API, which promises to better support different hardware and software configurations and provide a better 3D graphics experience. It's increasingly important for APIs to address the proliferation of devices and fragmentation of mobile phone OSes, so we're happy to see an open standard making progress- plus, it's 3D! 

Google announced that they will be working with developers on supporting applications with check-in functionality on its Places API, launched this spring. The check-in app space is increasingly competitive and we're excited to see what devs come up with.

Twitter has begun testing a new streaming API that lets desktop apps automatically update their streams in real-time. The User Streams API is being utilized by TweetDeck and Echofon. By transitioning to streaming, Twitter will cut down on rate limit and latency problems- major progress! We're looking forward to seeing this roll out more widely.  

Hot New APIs- 

• Video search engine blinkx unveiled a new mobile API to give access to its huge collection of MP4 videos- including those from the AP and Lonely Planet.
• TypeKit, a font startup, unwrapped a new API that lets developers generate kits from its library and build them into their applications. Very exciting for all you typography geeks! 
• Gamerang is launching a new site to focus on the social side of gaming. As Chris Crum over at WebProNews says, Gamerang is like Netflix for video games- and its new API makes it easy to incorporate the gaming news and social content into sites and apps. 

Did we miss anything? Shoot us an @ sign on Twitter!

This Week in APIs- July 12-16 »

The top news from the API geek-sphere this week. Enjoy!

Skype released its SkypeKit SDK for Windows and Mac, giving developers access to Skype APIs and some really cool functionality- like embedding chat, voice calling and video into their apps. SkypeKit was originally released for Linux and we're glad to see more developers will now be able to share in the fun!

Evernote - the popular service to store, organize and access information across, well... your life - released the Evernote Trunk- a place that highlights cool apps and services built using the Evernote API. We love this idea- great best practice for API providers!

Apple has reportedly acquired Poly9, a mapping API provider that has built APIs for companies like Microsoft and Yahoo. Interesting news- the geolocation revolution has been largely driven by APIs and we're interested to see what Apple does with Poly9 now.

New APIs and Opportunities

• The Health 2.0 Developer Challenge, an initiative supported by the US Department of Health and Human Services, announced a developer competition for apps built off Practice Fusion's new open API for real-time health data between patients and providers. APIs for healthcare are a big space to watch. 
• Microsoft released its developer tools beta for the Windows Phone 7 and announced that the API available with it is in near-final form for the official launch.
• Sekai Camera, an augmented reality app by Tonchidot, has added an API that makes it possible to deliver content within the application. Augmented reality is the new hotness- go Sekai Camera!

If we missed something great, hit us up on Twitter!

This Week in APIs- July 5-9, 2010 »

Here's an update on API news that made our geek hearts skip a beat this week.

New APIs

This week in APIs-June 27th-July 2nd »

All the best info on APIs this week.

Mozilla's JetPack API Survey: Mozilla is getting ready to release Mozilla 4 beta, and their most anticipated feature is the JetPack SDK. Mozilla did a survey to ask which APIs developers want most. The winner? Page Mods, which allows developers to alter webpages. More browser innovation with APIs is on the way.

Alcatel-Lucent acquires Programmable web: Alcatel-Lucent acquired API news and directory site ProgrammableWeb this week. A smart move and we're exciting to keep seeing great intelligence on the API economy from one of our fav sites.

E*Trade Open API: Online trading giant E*trade just announced their first Open API for third party developers! E*trade is hoping their API will lead to innovative investing applications- we're eager to see what they come up with.

New APIs - Every week a new API is released! Here are three we <3 :

GroopBuy-GroopBuy is a company that hunts down local deals for people. It was launched this year, and they just released their GroopBuy API. Companies that look for local deals and coupons are becoming hot, and developers using their APIs is an important part of that.

Drumbone-Sunlight Labs has just released their Drumbone API for data about legislators, bills, and roll call votes. Just adds to mounting evidence that the government is moving towards Web 2.0!

NakdReality-NakdReality is a company specializing in instant on-location search and augmented reality service. They also just opened up their API for developers, adding to the Geolocation API craze!

This week in APIs- June 14-18 »

Here's the best of what happened this week in APIs!

Opera 10.6 Beta- The Opera 10.6 beta was announced- the new version implements W3C's Geolocation API. Is this a sign that the browser is moving away from plug-ins and into APIs for more functionality? Either way, we expect a lot more browser innovation with APIs.

Retail APIs- Over at InfoWorld, Neil McAllister wrote up a big new opportunity for retail: open APIs. Neil illustrates how companies like Amazon, Zappos, Tesco and Sears are opening up their APIs to reach customers in the new multi-device, multi-channel world. Big theme- the new emerging role of developers who can build APIs right. 

Twitter OAuth Switchover- The Twitter API team announced that they are moving back the date of the "OAuth switchover"- when they will no longer support basic auth. On August 16th Twitter will be ramping down rate limits on basic auth by about 10 calls/hour/day, ending on August 31 when basic auth won't be accepted.

New APIs- Every week there are new APIs! Here's what we're excited about right now:

• Plancast- a service for sharing future plans with your social network- announced an open read/write API. The world of social planning is heating up- and APIs are a critical part of the movement. 
• The State of California introduced 10 new APIs on their http://data.ca.gov/ site; including ones to get hospital locations, draw household and county population data, and find EDD office locations. Great signs that California is not only getting Gov 2.0, but also geolocation. We also like the clean way they lay out data sets- best practice for government agencies. 
• Infochimps- a data marketplace- just opened up an API which offers access to its Twitter and U.S. Census datasets. Lots of great information to build apps with and check out their business model- pricing to the API is tiered based on number of API calls per month- what do you think? 

Any major API news we missed? Leave a comment or tweet at us- http://www.twitter.com/apigee 

This Week in APIs- June 7-11, 2010 »

Check out the top news in APIs this week!

S3 Import/Export API- Amazon Web Services added an Import/Export API for its Simple Storage Service (S3), an infrastructure service for storing data. The new API makes it easier to move large amounts of data in and out of Amazon- a great move for data portability.

Twitter API Meetup- Twitter held a meetup in its San Francisco offices this week to talk about the Twitter API, showcase some cool apps and celebrate Apple's WWDC. Twitter's Taylor Singletary presented on XAuth, a new authentication method for APIs. Twitter will no longer allow support for basic authentication at the end of the month so Twitter devs, it's time to brush up on the new method! The meetup made it very clear that the XAuth standard was developed to be used across the API community and promises to make authentication safer and easier, so keep an eye out for adoption.

APIs in the world of PaaS- Over at CloudAve, Krishnan Subramanian has a post and some love for Apigee on why APIs are the oxygen of Platform as a Service offerings- check out the article for some stark examples of how APIs can mean the difference between success and failure.

New APIs! A number of companies debuted new APIs- here are a few we thought were especially cool:

• HubSpot, which launched a Lead API to connect HubSpot's lead capture tools to other CRM software. Excellent example of how APIs can be used to connect tools and unleash new functionality. 
• The New York Times introduced a Most Popular API to track the most viewed and shared content- fodder for mashups here! 
• Microsoft introduced its Trial API that allows developers to include free trial versions of their apps in the Phone 7 App Market- more signs that the mobile API world is maturing. 
• As always, ProgrammableWeb's Newest APIs list is a great way to keep on the top of the all the new delicious APIs out there. 

Anything important we missed this week in APIs? Shoot me an email at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).