7,000 APIs: Twice as Many as This Time Last Year. The ProgrammableWeb directory has hit lucky API number 7,000.
It’s been a short three months since 6,000 APIs, as the API universe continues to expand rapidly. How rapidly? In the last year we added almost as many APIs as were added to the entire directory over the six years prior. As we look over the trends, there are things you’d expect, like the continued growth in social. Also emerging from the numbers is the idea that there are many, many ways now to be an API provider and also many new tools for API consumers. The Last 1,000 APIs There are a lot of APIs, sure, but what categories do they fall into? Perhaps most surprising about the APIs added to ProgrammableWeb over the last three months is how many financial and enterprise APIs we’ve seen. Everyone Can Have an API APIs are not just for companies anymore. If a mobile app does anything interesting, it likely needs to contact an API.
API management company 3Scale (a ProgrammableWeb sponsor) added a freemium API service in May. Introduction to Digital Media. The reading for this week, Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, began to outline the concept of networks by highlighting several network theories. The idea of networks first originated with a Swiss mathematician named Euler. He lived near a town named Konigsberg which had seven bridges. The people of the town had always tried to cross all the bridges only once, but Euler offered a proof that it was impossible to cross the seven bridges of Konigsberg without crossing one more than once by laying out vertices at common points.
This spurred the idea of graph theory, which includes “a collection of nodes connected by links” (11). His graph had nodes that were pieces of land and links that were bridges. This graph theory spurred several theories about the structure of networks: 1. 2. 3. Which graph theory are you more inclined to believe? Another interesting point brought up in the reading is the idea of 6 degrees of separation. 1. 2. 3. 4. Voila! Like this: Like Loading... Blog: Empowering Social Influence With Mark Granovetter. Hearing the phrase "Social Networking" immediately brings to mind applications such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Depending on where in the world you're reading this post you may identify with a slightly different set of social networks - Friendster is still alive and now hugely popular in Asia, as well as Hi5, Bebo, Orkut, and Mixi (Japan's biggest social network).
The diversity of social networks has a rich history that encompasses some of the best Use Cases of what to do, and what not to do when building successful online communities. Each network began their approach to building their online communities from slightly different directions - specific regional or cultural communities (Mixi), common social (MySpace), collegiate social (Facebook), professional social (LinkedIn), sub-networks (Ning) etc.
Over the years many of them have expanded to overlap each other to some degree. But VCs and investors are all still asking the same questions. Enter Social Influence: Empowerment. Knowledge Cartography. Actor–network theory. Broadly speaking, ANT is a constructivist approach in that it avoids essentialist explanations of events or innovations (e.g. explaining a successful theory by understanding the combinations and interactions of elements that make it successful, rather than saying it is “true” and the others are “false”).
However, it is distinguished from many other STS and sociological network theories for its distinct material-semiotic approach. Background and context[edit] ANT appears to reflect many of the preoccupations of French post-structuralism, and in particular a concern with non-foundational and multiple material-semiotic relations. At the same time, it was much more firmly embedded in English-language academic traditions than most post-structuralist-influenced approaches. Its grounding in (predominantly English) science and technology studies was reflected in an intense commitment to the development of theory through qualitative empirical case-studies. A material-semiotic method[edit]