Updates to the API Console: Get to the APIs You Want Faster, Beta Test v2 »

Apigee API Consoles help you learn, explore and test the APIs you love. We've been listening to your feedback, and we've got a few updates that make it easier to find the APIs you want to use with a new Providers page, explore what they've got to offer with a new API Resources page, and start playing sooner with an updated beta of the "v2" API Console, currently available for Twitter. Check out details below!

New Providers Page

It's now much easier to navigate to the APIs you want to use with our Providers page, which shows all the APIs we support and lets you quickly get started with them - no sign up or log in required. Now that we support 21 top APIs including Twitter, Facebook, Twilio, Instagram, GitHub and Foursquare (and stay tuned for more!), the Providers page makes it easy to see and start. 

New Version of the Console, Now With A Better Way to See API Resources

We've also been improving and beta testing a new version of the API Console, designed to make working with your favorite APIs faster and more intuitive. You asked for a better way to explore all of the resources an API has to offer, so as part of the "v2" experience, we just launched a new API Resources page. It lets you quickly view all of the resources available (with auth requirements and color-coded verbs), find the ones you want to play with, and launch the API Console - prepopulated with your request. 

Right now the new version is only available for Twitter, and we want to hear your feedback. Email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or sign up for our beta group. (You can still get the original Twitter Console on Twitter's developer portal).

This Week in APIs - November 13-19 »

We just spent a great few days geeking out and talking about APIs at the Defrag conference. Here's all the other API news from the week. 

Great article out in Business Week on how the "app economy" and mobile era are encouraging top payment and credit card companies to open up to third party developers with APIs. The article takes a look at how Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and American Express are working with developers to innovate. Keep watching this space and look out for new entrants like Ixaris.   

HootSuite launched a new API and App Exchange to let developers quickly build and get out new apps and integrations. As Tris Hussey at The Next Web points out, this is significant because it marks the expansion of the HootSuite platform beyond Twitter.   

At Defrag, the year's best conference focused on data, analytics and APIs, Twitter announced a partnership with Gnip to offer 50% of all Tweets for $360K/year. This will allow companies to innovate in the social analytics space and, as Marshall Kirkpatrick points out at ReadWriteWeb, might help ensure that everyday developer access to Twitter remains free. Check out the story and make sure to check out Defrag next year, and Gluecon, a related conference, coming up in May! We'll be there too.   

Stuff to Play With

• Social gaming platform MindJolt launched a set of APIs called "AdJolt" which allows developers to integrate advertising and virtual currency to monetize content. This combines three hot stories in APIs right now - gaming, virtual currency and developer monetization. MindJolt's head is the former CEO of MySpace, Chris DeWolfe. We're excited to see where AdJolt goes and how it helps developers make bank!  
• ProgrammableWeb's got the story on the new Wordnik API, which targets word game developers by giving access to its online dictionary. Coolest part? Wordnik has a write feature so you can manage your own word list.  
• MailChimp, a popular email platform, is launching a $1 million integration fund to support developers and projects building applications around their API. More than 80,000 users are already on the API.

What'd we miss? Hit us up on Twitter. 

This Week in APIs - November 6-12 »

Here's a wrapup of the best news as we head into the weekend. Stay safe out there kids. Hold the OAuth handshake and look both ways before crossing the streams.  

Twilio, the API that lets developers bring the power of telephony into their apps, raised $12 million in Series B funding. The money will go towards product development and more staffing. Congrats to Twilio and make sure to check out our new API Console for the Twilio API.   

Zend released version 1.11 of its PHP framework in GA. Notable is the addition of support for the Simple Cloud API, which provides a common interface to major cloud providers, allowing portability and helping developers avoid cloud lockin. Charles Babcock from InformationWeek has some great analysis here.  

Twitter announced that they will be ending support for XML on all streaming APIs on December 6. For now, this doesn't affect other Twitter APIs. Taylor Singletary gives details over at ProgrammableWeb.  

Developer Candy:

• PaidContent has a great article out on how TV is bringing new opportunities for developers with a range of APIs opening up and disrupting the industry. For example, PlayJam, a TV games distributor, will be launching an API in an upcoming beta. This is a space to watch and a must-read by Robert Andrews.  
• eBay announced that it has added Microsoft's OData protocol to its API. OData is a standard way to access and query data in an API, and has lately had a number of blue-chip implementations. What do you think?  
• If you're going to Dreamforce, or if you're going to be in San Francisco in early December, and you love APIs, check out Cloudstock- the Woodstock for cloud developers. Hang with the top API companies, code, compete, and hey- a gaming arcade. Best part? It's free.  

Ruby Devs - Build Better Twitter Apps with Apigee and Heroku »

Earlier this year we launched the Apigee add-on for Heroku, which offers Ruby devs much improved rate limits for the Twitter API when using OAuth. The combination of Heroku's cloud platform and the Apigee add-on gives Twitter devs the ability to easily and gracefully scale their apps, and we're excited to announce today that the add-on is out of beta and available free to all Heroku users. Read the Heroku docs or check out this video to get started:  

Thanks to all the developers who gave great feedback that let us move to general availability. We also have plans to extend the Apigee functionality available in the add-on so that developers can benefit from features like debugging, API analytics and rate-limiting within the Heroku environment.  Stay tuned and make sure to check out Heroku's new Add-on provider program, which includes a REST API to let providers easily integrate with the Heroku platform. This is a great example of how APIs and cloud services enable innovative self-service models.

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.

Social App Workshop Wrap-Up: A Ton of Developers, a Few APIs, and a Whole Lot of Magic »

This past Saturday we collaborated with Heroku and Twilio to put on Social App Workshop, an all-day hacker event in San Francisco focusing on people building applications with the Facebook and Twitter APIs. Over 130 developers gathered early in the morning to hack, learn and collaborate. 

We heard some cool presentations and Twitter launched their bridge code for the @Anywhere service! Documentation is coming soon but you can check out some of it here. The Twitter team had been up working on it until 1:00 am the night before! 

Here's some top trends from the event: 

1. Simplicity is everything

Presentations by Oren Teich of Heroku on cloud services and hacker advocate Abraham Williams on minimalism in feature design shared a common theme: simplicity is key - both for applications and the infrastructure, tools and languages that are used to build them. With the immediacy of social tech, increasing mobility, and intense app competition, fast and easy is the new imperative. 

"Make it as easy to use as possible. Then make it easier." - Oren Teich

"Users are lazy…. Make your web app like AAA - only there when you need it" - Abraham Williams 

2. Innovate Faster

A big buzz topic during afternoon coding was the need for speed- and languages, cloud services and developer tools that let people build and deploy applications quick. As presentations on the Twitter API by Matt Harris and the Facebook API by Matt Kelly showed, simple, logical APIs with easy-to-understand structures are a critical element for fast innovation. API providers who align with developers' mission to build-and-deploy in lightspeed are more likely to succeed.  

3.  The Mashup New School 

The concept of "mashups" that combine services and APIs from multiple sources has been around for awhile- but the new school of mashups is all about taking different capabilities from across industries and putting them together to create entirely new functionalities. Take Twilio- which provides an open API for building voice and SMS applications and can bring the world of telephony into your apps. We're seeing more and more industries- health care, 3D, semantic analysis- innovating with APIs and making a whole new school of mashups possible. 

4. Ruby is HOT

Social app developers love Ruby! Tons of attendees were either Ruby experts or trying to learn- there was even a "Ruby N00bs" informal group that got together in the afternoon to collaborate on getting up and running. Developers like Ruby because it lets them build fast- especially when combined with cloud platforms like Heroku. 

Thanks to everyone who participated! You can see more pictures on Flickr and we hope to see you at an event soon. In the Bay area and have ideas on developer events? Shoot us an @ sign 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

Social App Workshop for Devs Building Facebook and Twitter Apps »

We're psyched to be working with Heroku and Twilio to organize an an all-day hackfest in San Francisco for developers building applications on the Facebook and Twitter APIs.

Social App Workshop is a one-day coding event for new and experienced developers building social apps. We'll have speakers from the Twitter and Facebook platforms- including Matt Harris from Twitter- and food, drinks, lots of coding time, plus lightning talks from experts on strategies, tools and tactics for creating awesome apps. It'll be at Heroku's new offices in SOMA and we'll be breaking them in!

If you are a new or experienced Twitter or Facebook developer and you'll be around downtown San Francisco on Saturday, July 24, you should come and hang out- it's free and a good chance to learn new things, do some networking and build something cool. Check out the website at http://www.socialappworkshop.com or follow the event on Twitter- http://www.twitter.com/appworkshop. 

If you are a new or experienced Twitter or Facebook developer and you'll be around downtown San Francisco on Saturday, July 24, you should come and hang out- it's free and a good chance to learn new things, do some networking and build something cool. Check out the website at http://www.socialappworkshop.com or follow the event on Twitter- http://www.twitter.com/appworkshop. 

If you are a new or experienced Twitter or Facebook developer and you'll be around downtown San Francisco on Saturday, July 24, you should come and hang out- it's free and a good chance to learn new things, do some networking and build something cool. Check out the website at socialappworkshop.com or follow the event on Twitter- twitter.com/appworkshop. 

The Apigee AwesomeBar- Work with APIs, Now More Awesome »

Here's a quick video on one of our favorite new features for the Apigee Facebook and Twitter API consoles- the AwesomeBar. This feature makes it easier to explore the APIs and their structure by making suggestions and offering auto-completion for method URLs.

Alex Williams from ReadWriteWeb just wrote up this feature and our new Facebook API console yesterday-thanks Alex! 

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 

How to use Apigee’s Twitter API Test Console. »

Sam Ramji discusses Apigee’s new Twitter API Tools with Robert Scoble. »

Robert Scoble of Rackspace caught up with Sam Ramji to discuss the latest release of Apigee and all the new Twitter centric features. Check out the full interview below!