Week of the APIs
The world of APIs received a few new entrants and business strategies this week as companies competed for geek downtime of the holidays. Om and I sat down on Saturday evening to talk about the big changes and what they mean for startups, developers, and end users. We were joined by special guest Kevin Burton of TailRank.
This week's session is 26 minutes and 28 seconds in length and a 12.2 MB download.
Topics
Amazon introduced its Alexa web search platform on Monday that allows developers not only access to the search engine's APIs, but the ability to supplement Alexa's data with your own, process it on Amazon's servers, store the results with Amazon, and even serve your own APIs based on the combined data. The new offering creates many new opportunities for small projects and startups to get a quick start without maintaining their own crawler or hardware.
On Tuesday Google introduced the Google homepage API, opening up its personalized homepage to outside content. These newly created homepage modules can be styled to match your own branding and have some smarts.
FeedBurner launched FeedFlare on Tuesday, allowing feed publishers to easily add content to their posts from popular web APIs such as social bookmarking site del.icio.us or blog search engine Technorati.
Yahoo! released a new output format, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), for its search and maps APIs on Thursday. This new format helps developers potentially skip a step when interacting with Yahoo! data, making dynamic applications respond faster and easier to develop.
Google seeks to extend its reach into the VoIP and video IM space with its introduction of jingle, a new API for Google's GTalk client. Google proposed two new extensions to the XMPP standard used in its clients and many others throughout the world. The new libraries and APIs should extend the reach of Google's instant communication services throughout the Web.