A week after launching the Swedish API directory it has already grown by 10%, from 200 to 220 Swedish APIs. We are very happy with this and with the great feedback we have received.
To further help focus the attention on local Swedish APIs we are now starting a competition to find out which is the best Swedish API. After about 2 weeks of voting we hope to present the best API the country has to offer!
We at Dopter have just released the Swedish API directory. It is a directory with over 200 Swedish APIs organised and easily searchable.
We have noticed a real need for this during the last few years when we have been working with our customers and their APIs. There have been a real lack of a one-stop-shop to let developers find Swedish APIs and it has been hard for Swedish API providers to reach developers. Now we hope to have solved that problem…
By their very nature Mashups are built on trust..
All these things makes me a bit nervous, as I am a bit paranoid (note: this has not been clinically proven, I still think that THEY are out to get me). So how to mix a healthy bit of paranoia into my mashup building and get something good out of it all? What I do is that I always try to be aware of that I might have to switch API provider. Are you building a Twitter mashup? Why not also take a look at Jaiku’s API, or Pownce’s API (or Plurk or FriendFeed etc etc). You dont have to build your mashup so you can switch API provider in a matter of minutes, just be aware what else is out there so that you see the commonalities and don’t use to many features unique to one provider. This is the approach I am currently using when I am building mashups, at least I know that if shit hits the fan I can always go with somebody else. It will hurt a bit and take some effot, but I am not dead in the water. For the Google Maps example this would mean looking at Yahoo Maps and see what features the Yahoo Maps API have in common with the Google Maps API, and just use those common features. This can also come in handy if you hit the maximum number of requests on Google Maps, then it would be nice switch to Yahoo Maps automatically.
The risk with all this is of course to spend to much time preparing for something that won’t happen. It is the same situation as developers spending so much time making their code perfectly scalable and optimized that they acctually never ship anything in time. So dont go too far, but be aware of the situation. Trust is nice, but trusting several API providers to always do a good job and to not be evil in order for you to survive is quite risky.
As anyone that has surfed the web during the last years have noticed comment spam is wide spread, and highly annoying. Check the comments on blogs or web apps and you will find plenty of links left there by helpful people that really would like you to enlarge certain organs, sell you rolexxxes or need your help to get some dough out of Nigeria (I am the former prime ministers first bastard son, promise!). Fighting spam in your mail inbox is pretty simple these days, thanks to Thunderbird’s and GMails excellent anti-spam filters. Doing it in your WordPress blogs have also been a walk in the park for a long time, simply use the Akismet plugin you get with any WordPress installation and they will take care of it. Akismet is developed by Automattic (the company behind WordPress) and describes itself as “a big machine that sucks up all the data it possibly can, looks for patterns, and learns from its mistakes”. Send your comment data to them and they will compare it to their database and tell you if it is spam or not.
Now when I am writing some of my own web apps I would like to avoid spam to overwhelm me, both via contact forms and comments. Lo and behold, Akismet is available as a web service, and via some ready made libraries it is very easy to use from outside WordPress as well. I am using Elliot Haughin’s CodeIgniter Library, but there are also libraries for PHP, .NET, Ruby on Rails, Drupal etc etc. All you need to do is to get a Akismet API Key from WordPress.com (register, then go to My Account and Edit Profile and you will find the key), download a library (or start writing your own from Akismets API) and start sending all comments to Akismet. The API Key is free for personal use, cost $5/month if you make more than $500/month from your site and cost a bit more for Enterprises. Well worth it I say, it will save you time and frustration all around, and make your website so much cleaner. There is no longer any excuse to suffer comment spam.
Thanks Akismet for one of the best and most usefull web services around!
I have some friends on Twitter, a couple on Pownce and Jaiku is the platform of choice in the swedish tech sector so I am getting into Jaiku as well (I am “andreaskrohn” on all of them). Which platform you use depends on what technology you prefer and where your friends are. I don’t really care about the technology at the moment, I just want to keep in touch with my friends (yes I know that Pownce API kicks Twitters ass and that Twitter goes down more than an intern in the Clinton White House, but believe it or not, I prioritise friends over tech). These are 3 different platforms, each trying to be a community. But the community of any one person will not live on one platform, unless that platform gets to be either completely dominant or the technical platform providers takes a step back and let the community live across providers. The latter has happened with telephone services (you can call friends with a different cell phone provider) with email (i can mail people that are stuck on Microsoft Exchange from my Gmail) etc etc. I can not wait until this happens to the microblogs!
It is quite easy to post to several microbloggins services at once. Jaiku does a great job of importing RSS feeds, so posts to Twitter or Pownce can easily be imported to Jaiku. Via Twitterfeed it is easy to get an RSS feed into your Twitter as well. I haven’t found any easy way of getting an RSS feed into Pownce. Also there are apps like Twhirl that let’s you post to all 3 platforms at once. In my case I also use the Twitter Facebook app to get my tweets into my Facebook status and I am looking for a way to do the same with LinkedIn (no success yet). So posting cross-platform is not a problem, even if it means that you need to do some configuration and that all your posts gets trippled or quadrupled.
Reading friends posts from several platforms could also easily be done. I could of course go to all the different services and read each posts on each one, but since I want to do other things with my day than that I would rather use services like FriendFeed or SocialThing that aggregates it all into one place. FriendFeed imports from most sources and have some nice comment features, but the UI really desperatly needs a designers touch. SocialThing imports from just a few places so far (please please add RSS now!) but I still prefer it to FriendFeed. These services and others make it easy to see your friends posts from several platforms in one place. What is missing is a way to naturally post back to the microblogging platforms from these services.
What is needed, and what will come very soon I am sure, is a mashup of all these microbloggin platforms to allow users to be active on several platforms at once all from one place. I would like to see an app that allows me to interact with Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku completely. This means reading other peoples posts, replying to posts to have a conversation going cross-platform and posting to all platforms at once. Since all of the platforms have APIs this should be possible to implement (and for all I know it already exists somewhere, if you know of such an app please let me know through a comment on this post!). This would be a great mashup that would breach the community silos that exists today. Short of everyone moving to one platform a mashup is the best answer to this problem.
Btw, I have some extra SocialThing invites so if anybody wants one please let me know via a comment on this post.