8 Awesome Mashups Made Possible by APIs. This series is supported by PayPal X Innovate 2009, PayPal’s first dedicated developer conference. Register for $49 with the code ppblog3 or join us at $50 if you are a student. We here at Mashable are big fans of mashup services — it's our name, after all! And at the heart of almost all of these mashups is a term you'll see frequently thrown around related to web services: APIs, or application programming interfaces. In this feature we'll celebrate some of the great mashups we know and love that were made possible by the existence of APIs. We know there are metric tons more great mashups out there, so be sure to let us know your favorites in the comments too. Without getting too far into techno-babble land, APIs basically define a set of ways other third-party programmers can access the data and some of the functionality of a web service. 1. 2.
Another map mashup, Trendsmap mashes up Twitter Trending Topics with Google Maps as well as with the What the Trend site. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Search: party. The Evolution of the Social Media API. This post is part of Mashable’s Social Media series for developers, highlighting handy tips and resources for software developers. This series is supported by Forum Nokia’s Calling All Innovators competition. Social media services like Twitter, Facebook, and Google have been fundamental pillars for building social graphs, promoting the sharing of information, and fostering innovation. While these companies have created some incredible tools, their greatest innovation may actually be opening up their products to outside developers through the use of the API. The API, or application programming interface, is a way for outside parties to build a product or app off of an existing service. Trailblazers in social and web APIs The birth and early development of the social API can be traced to the innovations of several major players that date back all the way to the Dot Com Bubble.
eBay: eBay may have one of the oldest social APIs, dating back to the turn of the millennium. Social Web Q. This guest post is written by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google. Over the last 20 years he has alternated between giant companies and founding startups – BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati and now Google. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights Group. He wants you to remember that URLs are people too, and his URL is In this Q&A-style post, Kevin delves into the standards that make up the emerging open social stack (OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial), looking at the infrastructure problems they address, and exploring some of the live implementations, including Plaxo and Google Friend Connect. Q: We keep hearing that “Google wants to make the web more social.” Everything on the web is more interesting when it takes place with friends. But the model of going to a single website to interact with other people is changing.
How do they solve this now? Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008 - ReadWriteWeb. 2008 has seen a proliferation of new Web platforms, including a few major ones built using open standards. In this final instalment of our series of top products of 2008, we choose the top 10 Web platforms of the year. We've written a lot of times about platforms for the Web. A web platform can be as simple as an API, like the one offered by Twitter, which allows external developers to tap into a company's data. It can be software and services, like Amazon's Web Services. It can also be a fully fledged development platform, such as iPhone SDK and Adobe AIR. Whatever the case, platforms on the Web mean allow people to build on top of another company's product, so we think it's an appropriate way to close our Top Web Products series.
This is the tenth and final post in ReadWriteWeb's series of top products of 2008. Note: unlike some of our previous lists, we've attempted to order this one according to impact in 2008. 1. iPhone SDK 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Unlucky Not to Make Top 10.