APIs, Web Services and Mashups: How Web Sites and Applications Socialize in a Web 2.0 world
Apr 21, 2010
How do Web sites and other applications communicate with one another? It’s all a mystery and when dealing with other developers you may be hit with a multitude of familiar and not so familiar terms. What is Web 2.0? An API? A Mashup? After this presentation, you may notice that the people you look to for technical advice are unable to clearly define these terms – but you will enlighten them. Mashups and API operations are done in almost every Web site we interact with. What are the advantages and disadvantages in building with APIs attached to other services? How do I go about creating a Mashup?
API’s, Mashups and Content
Mar 14, 2010
This class was focused on Content generation and focused in on the use of APIs and Mashups. We discussed types of content: professional content, semi-professional content, user generated content (user gen) and machine generated content (APIs were tossed into this last bucket). During the discussion on APIs we spoke about some of the early leaders like Ebay and Amazon and then went into current trends, authentication models (Facebook, Google OpenID, and more). Finally, the class broke out into groups and created their own Mashup / web service using a few APIs.
Additional readings:
Great New York Times Article that discusses trends in Hyperlocal news and spends some time with Adrian Holovaty, the founder of Everyblock and Chicagocrime.org, which was an early example of a Mashup, looking at crime data by neighborhood in Chicago, you can read more about that here from a 2005 NY Times article.
ProgramableWeb’s directory for APIs – great starting place if you are considering creating your own Mashup. List is at 1,600+ as of March, 2010.
