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13 New APIs: Twitter Search, Social Spending and Local Transit
This week we had 13 new APIs added to our API directory including a social spending service, content sharing service, smartphone setting dection service and social movie review service. Below is more details on each of these new APIs.
Ask someone what makes a map and you're likely to hear that it's the roads or the physical characteristics. A new mashup is questioning whether you can still have a map without these details, while at the same time showing off the map styles feature that Google Maps announced in May.
Here at ProgrammableWeb we do things like read terms of use for fun. That's just how we roll. We were perusing Yahoo! APIs Terms of Use when we stumbled on something that truly surprised us. Yahoo doesn't want us using their API's to operate nuclear facilities. Operating a nuclear facility through any Yahoo API is in fact grounds for having your license terminated. That's not all we found.
Twitter has gone OAuth-only and it is judgement day for the scores of Twitter apps still using basic authentication. Developers have had a few months to switch across to the new OAuth protocol (and the deadline was extended again to accommodate the World Cup), but it seems like quite a few never made the switch, or still have users running older versions of their software. A quick Twitter search reveals some frustration.
Blippy and Swipely both launched fairly recently with the hopes of making spending a social experience. Both services are very similar in that they both allow you to connect your bank and credit card info, as well as other accounts like iTunes and Amazon. After you've set everything up, as you start spending, you have the option to share these purchases with everyone. And now you can extend that sharing with the Blippy API.
Push is the new pull. And everyone's doing it. If you're still pulling, it's probably about time you stopped all of that, as Twitter announced on Monday that they are opening up the Site Streams beta. App developers are salivating at the prospect of all those status updates being showered on them from Twitter's engorged hosepipe.
Once touted as the future of business intelligence, providing quick and easy access to disparate information in one place, Enterprise Mashups, at least as a term, appear to have fallen out of favor. The topic was once written up in even non-technical publications, but both Google and our directory show it trending down. That brings up the question: what happened to enterprise mashups?
If you are building an image sharing service or a social network mashup, it's likely that you will want to incorporate face-tagging in your images. Maybe you'd like to go a step further and automatically detect faces in an image, similar to Apple's iPhoto. A Romanian developer has developed an API to help detect faces in images and return the box coordinates so that you can build any kind of app you want.
With Twitter reducing its search history to four days, it is a challenge for applications that are dependent on search results, that went not days but even months back. Several applications have taken on the challenge to fill this void and are building search indexes on top of Twitter. Topsy is one of them and it's sharing its results as an API.
Push is the new pull. And everyone's doing it. If you're still pulling, it's probably about time you stopped all of that, as 
