Toluu

API Blog

APIs are changing the way online businesses interact with users and customers. An API (application programming interface) allows a user community to be directly involved in the improvements to a given web destination. This involvement increases brand loyalty and benefits both user and business alike.

Atom & RSS Make Web Services SimpleApril 28 2005

Daniel Steinberg posts comments from a talk Adam Bosworth [from Google] gave at a recent MySQL users conference regaring web services and taking the simple approach instead of the complex approach. With programming [i.e. the web] simple is always the preferred route to take if at all possible, and it usually is. But we all know that's easier said than done, especially when we're dealing with complicated data. Web services standards, usually via xml, are meant to make our lives easier but in actuality they complicate things and add a lot of unnecessary overhead to data that can usually be returned in a simple csv file.

In his Thursday morning keynote at the MySQL Users Conference 2005, Google's Adam Bosworth suggested that we "do for information what HTTP did for user interface." Ten years ago, when he first started paying attention to the web, he was interested in the idea that he could zero install applications and that they could be accessed from anywhere at any time. He said that a personal computer to him is like a phone: it is a useful access point but it is not where he stores stuff.

He went on to say...

Bosworth advocated an open model for data. Although he was not referring to open source, he expanded upon the example by explaining that customers like open source software because of the transparency. For many, th

Textamerica Developer APIApril 15 2005

Textamerica has launched their developer api, along with a contest:

To help launch our new Developer Program we will pay $500 for each of the first 20 applications (with source code) based on this API which are developed by you, and which we deem to be the most useful to the Textamerica Community as a whole. This is not a contest but merely our way of showing our appreciation for what you do.

Amazon Web Services API UpdatedMarch 26 2005

Amazon has made some minor updates to the Amazon ECS web services. Check out the Amazon Web Services Blog for the details.

43 Things Web Services APIMarch 22 2005

43 Things has just released a fresh new REST web service for accessing their content. If your not familiar with 43 Things it is a social networking web site where people with common goals can site include to stop procrastinating, loose weight, take more pictures, and so on. Goals are tagged with keywords, and you can also see which goals are popular in a particular city.

With the 43 Things web service you can access goals (add, complete, list), people, teams, tags, and cities.

Google Search API Limiting ResultsMarch 17 2005

When using the Google Search API I noticed that google there is a discrepancy between a Google search on their web site, and a google search using their web api.

Google claims that:

With the Google Web APIs service, software developers can query

more than 8 billion web pages directly from their own computer programs. The Google web search API uses the SOAP and WSDL standards. If you do a Google search for the letter a, the most common letter in the English language from Google's web site you will get 8 billion results. Now if you try this search from the Google API you only get 5.2 billion results.

Note that I have filtering turned off on both the Google Web site, and in the Google API (with filtering turned on you get about 2.8 billion results).

So the question is, where are those other 3 billion results? Google claims that you can access all 8 billion pages in their index with the API, but my results show otherwise.