Ineteresting APIs - where to start?
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More and more companies nowadays won’t only release their product or website, they are releasing an Application Programming Interface (API) for their product, too. I think the reason for this is to enable developers to make more out of the product by building on the API, maybe to get a mobile Application (for Android and/or iOS) and to enable mashups. To name a few bigger APIs (bigger in terms of developers using it to develop applications), there’s twitter facebook and (more than one) at Google. In this post I want to introduce a few other APIs:
A list of interesting APIs I came to find
So here’s a list of APIs I found during the last few weeks and which I find pretty interesting:
- Simplegeo: They have a few APIs for location based data.
- Hunch.com – Hunch provides personalized recommendations tailored specifically for you.
- Convore is the best way to communicate with groups in real-time.
Ideas for those APIs
Now what would one do with those APIs? I have a few ideas, though I am not sure they might work, they are here to discuss it anyway:
- Combine all three of them for location-based recommendation for groups. The idea is that you have a regional group on Convore, get infos about the members from Convore, then try to find their profiles on Hunch and look for recommendations on places etc. in their area using SimpleGeo.
- Use Hunch to get recommendations based on what the user likes/enjoys and then get display a map of similar restaurants/places to what one already likes.
- Combine Convore and SimpleGeo for a map of where the posts being posted to Convore come from. It might be possible to use IP based localization (in SimpleGeo) and the Live-API (of Convore).
The technology
From what I can tell all those APIs are usable without using one specific programming language and or framework. Is it possible to write an application by just using JavaScript So it would just be a front end technology used. It would run in the browser.
Where would you start developing?
If you were to develop a mashup where would you start? Give me hints, ideas, clues, dos and don’ts … Any comment is welcome and appreciated. What would you recommend on where to start when one wants to start developing using external APIs? Please leave a comment and/or send me an email or contact me on twitter.
Some more links that could be of interest
- Yahoo!Query Language – Enables one to write mashups easily by using an SQL like language.
- Google API console – A console to test / try out Google APIs
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