WSFinder

More APIs

Ok it's been a while since I've posted and there a bunch of new APIs and examples out that have come in.

APIs

CommonTimes - Manage personal news feeds
Simpy - Todos, notes and reminders
Geocoder.ca - Get latitude/longitude of Canadian addresses
Airset - Great group calendar, lists, blog, contacts
Last.fm - XML and RSS feeds of user profile, artist, tag, group

Examples:

paintr -  Repaints flickr photso with colors
taggling - Includes color sin tag searches

Olive Branch to Programmable Web and Web API Tracker

Well I've been looking around at some of the other Web Services and Open API directories that have sprung up and I have to say that I think it's great that people are interested in providing this resource to the community.

One thing that I've been thinking about is though is - does it really make sense for all of us to have our own sites?

So - consider this an olive branch to the good folks over at Programmable Web, the Web API tracker and anyone else that I may have missed.

Let's join forces.

Let's give the community one definitive place to go rather than three different places when they want to go look for new APIs to play with or when they want to let people know about the cool APIs that they've got.

Any takers?

I propose a summit at the Web 2.0 conference coming up at bar in neutral territory. I'll buy the first round.  :)

Chris

More APIs

We got more APIs and examples in over the last few days:

APIs:
Prodigem - Gives you API access to the Bittorent Hosting Service

This API was added and was pointing at the right place but right now it's pointing at a Microsoft site. Can someone update this URL? I'll remove it tomorrow if we don't get it fixed...

localsearchmaps.com geocoder - Geocodes world addresses/geographies using a javascript API that is compatible with MSN Virtual Earth, Google Maps, or your own Javascript method/API

Examples:
Glendor.com - Jobs search demo for the Bay Area
Govtrack - Track information about legislation and senators and reporesentatives in the U.S. congress.
Newsweek - Most blogged about Newsweek articles in the past week
Knubi - High quality gallery application, ease of use
Andale -  Manage multiple storefronts on Ebay, Yahoo etc.
Mpire -  Revolutionizing the way entrepreneurs sell

I wanted to call out Niall Kennedy in particular for some great updates to the Technorati description and cool examples of their APIs in use.

If people have time please drop me a line to let me know who you are and what you've edited.

Map of the Web 2.0 World

When looking at the world of web 2.0 I think that you can categorize the companies and products into a few different areas:

Data Silos:
Sites that create or originate content but do not share them openly are what I call data silos. Many of the "Web 1.0" companies fall into this area. Examples include: Match.com, Career Builder,

Web Service Providers :
Sites that expose functionality and data openly are what I call web service providers.
Examples: Google Maps, eBay API, Flickr

Data Silo Aggregator:
Sites that unify data from separate data silos into one common view.
Examples: AP News Wire (offline), Indeed.com, Oodle

Web Services Aggregators:
Sites that unify separate web services and/or data silos.
Examples: Chicago Crime Guy, Weatherbonk, Craigslist/Google maps mashup

If you want to see a more detailed break out of companies and where I think they fall please go here.  It's in wiki form so please check it out and add.

I'd also love to get people's thoughts about how they are thinking about categorizing the web 2.0 world.

Chris

We're back up and on Jotspot.

OK - looks like Go Daddy has resolved the problem they had before and we're back up again.

You'll notice some changes when you come to the site now. I've switched wikis to Jotspot.

I know this will sound like a commercial but it's completely unsolicited.

Here's why I switched:

1. Order of magnitude improvement on the user experience.
   The ability to edit things in jotspot in a wysiwyg fashion is amazing and I predict that we will have a lot more people participating than we would otherwise. Since the wiki gets better with more people contributing this is a very good thing.
2. Ease of maintenance.
   To get the original site up on the wiki we were using before was time consuming and painful. You'll notice that the wiki uses tables fairly extensively.  Jotspot handles these very nicely (not perfect but pretty good).
3. Ease of use
   This is so important I'm putting it in again. In order to change the way the other wiki looked and worked I was going to have to muck around in CSS. With Jotspot I've got an Office like environment to do this in.

So hat's off to the folks at Jotspot for making a great product.  So far I highly recommend them. Trying it out is free...

Chris

Technical Difficulties...

ARGH... ok so I was having Paul switch us over to Jotspot as our Wiki instead of Moin and evidently Go Daddy mucked up the transfer. <sigh> Just when we had our Map of the Web 2.0 World up too... stay tuned on the blog and I'll let folks know when we get it resolved.

Anyone know anyone at Go Daddy who can make this go faster for us?

We are Incident:050914-000257

Chris

People like us... they really like us...

We've gotten some cool posts from Marc Canter, Brad Feld, Robert Scoble and Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Watch.

I think that there's a general sense that this is a useful resource. Hopefully the APIs will keep coming in and we'll see!

Chris
 

3 More APIs

Got a few more APIs in today. It's intersting, I never realized that there were so many related to travel...

Latest APIs:

Air Travel Center -  Free RSS Airfare Feeds
TravelWisdom -  Live Travel Feed
Colr - Generate color schemes from photos

Thanks to the contributors!

Chris

Goals

Maybe it's the product manager in me but I always like to have goals for the things that I'm trying to do. I thought I'd share them with folks who might be following along. I don't have it down to pithy statement yet but I will. I'm open to suggestions too so please drop me a line if you've got any.

wsfinder wiki goal - be a great community resource for people to share and discover the web services and open APIs that are the underpinnings of the new Web 2.0 world.

The goal that we have for the blog is a little different though. While there are a few blogs like techcrunch and web 2.0 that are talking about new companies that are emerging in this field, I haven't managed to find a blog that focuses the discussion how the world changes once web 2.0 comes into existence. To be fair, John Battelle's Searchblog, Marc Canter's blog, danah boyd's blog and others touch on this theme every once in a while.

wsfinder blog goal - to promote web services and open APIs but also to foster a discussion on how this new web 2.0 world will manifest itself and what some of the implications are.

In my mind there are some important questions that remain unanswered that I hope to think about and to discuss within this blog:

What does it mean to be a web 2.0 company?
"Web 2.0" has come to be a catch all term that encompasses almost all new companies. Is there a definition that we can agree on? As danah boyd points out the wikipedia entry isn't exactly too focused and yet her idea of glocalization isn't one that I necessarily can buy into either.

How can web 2.0 companies be financially successful?
Yes - I know that folks like Google, Amazon and Yahoo are successful and they've embraced this but are there examples of other companies that have gone this path first and made it? Flickr seems to be the only one I can think of, and yet their path to financial success was being bought out by Yahoo. Is this the only route?

Who owns what in a web 2.0 world?
One thing that strikes me as I look through the wsfinder wiki is that many of the APIs don't allow commercial use. Does that mean that we'll never have a set of viable companies created around them? Who has the right to control where the content in RSS feeds appears? When I was at Tribe we ran into a situation where we were bringing in RSS feeds and showing advertising around them and the content owner complained that we were cutting him out of the revenue loop. Should we have been allowed to take that content and show ads next to it?

What does the Web 2.0 value chain look like?
At the risk of going all MBA on folks, I think that there's a real question around what the value that these web 2.0 companies are really creating. Who benefits from their existence? Who's lives are made better by them being out there?  How does this flow through the ecosystem of companies out there?

What does the map of the world for web 2.0 look like? Who's doing what?
I've seen a lot of companies started that are ostensibly web 2.0 companies but I haven't seen a comprehensive list of them in a good categorization scheme. I'm thinking of starting another wiki that will take care of this.

I invite people to join in the conversation and see if we can figure out how this new world is going work.

Chris

Breaking 100

Alright we did it! 101 APIs over the weekend.

It's great to see the community embrace the effort to share  these and get the word out about them. Thank you and please keep them coming!

Latest APIs:

Department of Informatics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München - Biological Markup Services - Tag protein identifiers or names in free text
Department of Informatics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München - Biological Name Service - Mapping between names and identifiers of proteins
ip2location - geolocate IP address to Country, city, region
Zimbra    Email, calendering and contacts
Wordtracker - Keyword research for Search Engine Optimization
NASA - Satellite pictures of the whole world

Latest Examples:
NASA picture browser - Interactive browser of NASA pictures
Adactio Elsewhere - Very cool aggregation of a content from across different silos like Flickr, Amazon, and Del.icio.us
AppleScript - Sample code for an xmlrpc code

Chris