- Under the Hood of App Inventor for Android — regular readers know I’m a big fan of visual programming language Scratch, and apparently Google are too. They’ve got twelve university classes testing App Inventor for Android, a visual connect-the-bits programming environment for Android. University classes probably because one of the co-creators is Hal Abelson, coauthor of the definitive programming textbook. Also found online: the PR-type announcement, a Professor using it, and @AppInv (nothing juicy on Twitter–it looks like might be a channel for tech support for the students). (via Hacker News)
- Google Web Optimizer Case Study (Four Hour Work Week) — GWO manages A/B tests for you, with a lot of statistical analysis. It’s a fascinating read to see how these should be done. Every equation may halve the readership of a book, but every table of numbers and relevancy analysis doubles the value of a post like this. (via Hacker News)
- Opening Up The BBC’s Natural History Archive — the BBC are releasing programme segments and a whole lot of metadata around their programming. Audio and video segmented, tagged with DBpedia terms, and aggregated into a URI structure based on natural history concepts: species, habitats, adaptations, etc. Gorgeous!
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Yahoo! Term Extraction API to Close — Internally, both services
share a backend data source that is closing down, so the publicly-facing YDN
services will be closing as well. I think it’s the most significant casualty of Y! outsourcing search to MSFT, as this API was used by a lot of projects. (via Simon Willison)
"APIs" entries
Four short links: 13 August 2009
Four short links: 30 July 2009
Brooklyn Museum, Early Release, Toy Chest, Open Science
- iPhone App v1.3 Released — revealing glimpse into how third-party apps (such as this iPhone app, built on the Brooklyn Museum’s API) reflect on the institution providing the API. Brooklyn Museum has dealt with this sensitively and intelligently, a model to all. As always, I want to marry the Brooklyn Museum and raise a posse of online apps.
- Embrace the Chaos — I can never be told “release early, release often” enough. When to release? As soon as you’ve got something that’ll be useful to other people.
- Toy Chest — “Toy Chest” collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects. (via Simon Willison)
- What, Exactly, is Open Science? – In general, we’re moving towards an era of greater transparency in all of these topics (methodology, data, communication, and collaboration). The problems we face in gaining widespread support for Open Science are really about incentives and sustainability. How can we design or modify the scientific reward systems to make these four activities the natural state of affairs for scientists? Right now, there are some clear disincentives to participating in these activities. (via Glyn Moody)
Four short links: 16 June 2009
- Dealing with Election Results Data — taking the raw UK European election data into Google’s Fusion Tables to try and make sense of it. More cloud-based tools for the data scientist within. (via Simon Willison)
- Time for an Open 311 API — “311” is the US number to call for non-emergency municipal services. There have been a lot of individual projects to hack together web sites that provide the single coherent view of government services that the government itself is unable to offer, but the individual projects have all built their own APIs. SeeClickFix suggest these be unified so tools can be written (e.g., iPhone apps) that run across multiple municipalities. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
- Shoppers Cars Soon Able to Power Supermarkets (Daily Mail) — At the Sainsbury’s store in Gloucester, kinetic plates, which were embedded in the road yesterday, are pushed down every time a vehicle passes over them. A pumping action is then initiated through a series of hydraulic pipes that drive a generator. The plates are able to produce 30kw of green energy an hour – more than enough to power the store’s checkouts. (via Freaklabs)
- Humans Prefer Cockiness to Expertise (New Scientist) — the blogosphere explained in one paper. (via Mind Hacks)
Four short links: 9 June 2009
Biological Radio, Laggy Smart Grids, API Moneys, and Pubsub Server
- Drawing Inspiration From Nature To Build A Better Radio — based on the design of the cochlear, this MIT-built RF chip is faster than others out there, and consumes 1/100th the power. Biomimicry and UWB radio are on our radar.
- Why the Smart Grid Won’t Have the Innovations of the Internet Any Time Soon — While it’s significant that utilities are starting to build out smart grid infrastructure, utilities are largely opting for networks that provide connections that are far from real time, and this could stifle the desired innovation. […] smart meter data that is pushed to Google’s PowerMeter energy tool has to make its way back to the utility before it can be sent to Google. That means that even for Google’s energy tool, there can be both a significant delay before information reaches consumers, and significant gaps in energy data details. These delays and gaps can undercut the premise of how smart meter technologies will empower consumers to make decisions about their energy use based on real-time costs. Smart grids (houses and devices able to take use of instantaneous pricing changes) have the potential to help us with our energy obesity problem, but the architecture must be right.
- API Value Creation, Not Monetization — On the side of the unexpected but interesting outcomes, Kevin said they have seen a flurry of internally developed business applications. In the past many valuable, internal-facing projects were turned down because the programs had to meet strict top line to bottom line ratios. With the availability to data and services, many teams within the company now have access to things they didn’t in the past, and project costs have been minimized. Throughout the company, consumers of the API have been able to launch successful projects that have created additional revenue and have reduced the overall development costs for new projects. Some solid numbers and names to help convince businesses to offer APIs, though the battle is still much harder than it should be.
- Watercoolr — a pubsub server for your apps. A channel is a list of URLs to be notified whenever a message is posted to that channel. Clever little piece of infrastructure for web apps, embodying the Unix philosophy of small tools that each do one thing very well. (via straup on Delicious)
Four short links: 5 Mar 2009
Google Books, conference books, a museum API, and some number silliness that makes me happy.
- Jon Orwant on Google Book Search at TOC — Jon drops info on conversion rates, future plans, mobile, etc. See this post for a roundup of blog-world commentary on the talk.
- Brooklyn Museum Collection API — I’ve linked to this amazing museum work before. Now they have an API. Search collections, fetch items, embed in your sites. (via the announcement)
- Not So Empty Book — a magazine, built from conference content, four editions of of which were published during the brief course of the LIFT conference this year. Brilliant!
- March 5 is the Square Root of Christmas (Ned Batchedler) — maths geekery like this is why I found it difficult to date when I was younger. (I solved the problem by marrying someone who, when I read this post to her, said “oh COOL!”)
Four short links: 4 Mar 2009
- Wall Street on the Tundra — Michael Lewis’s long but fascinating glimpse into Iceland’s rise and fall as hubris-filled banker to the world. One of the many lessons is not to believe the post-hoc explanations for success: “Icelanders—or at any rate Icelandic men—had their own explanations for why, when they leapt into global finance, they broke world records: the natural superiority of Icelanders. Because they were small and isolated it had taken 1,100 years for them—and the world—to understand and exploit their natural gifts, but now that the world was flat and money flowed freely, unfair disadvantages had vanished. Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, gave speeches abroad in which he explained why Icelanders were banking prodigies.”. For more on the financial meltdown, also read The Real Cause of the Financial Crisis–it’s spot on.
- The Cult of Done Manifesto (Bre Pettis) — magnificent call to arms for JFDI, Just Do It.
- Twilio — your web apps can trigger voice calls and respond to incoming calls through a simple REST and XML API. It’s wildly simple. Using it, This Line Is Secure was able to launch very quickly. I’m still not able to think in terms of phones, unable to see when a voice-drop or numeric-key interface works for an app, but I’ll bet that playing with Twilio will help me develop that sense without the cost of Asterisk hardware.
- Let Startups Bail Us Out — Reid Hoffman writes in favour of ensuring an adequate supply of startups. “Consider a few start-ups from the past century: Microsoft, MTV, CNN, FedEx, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Burger King. Each opened during a period of economic downturn. Today, these brands employ hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. We need to prepare for the next Burger King. By empowering individuals and small businesses, an innovation stimulus can help germinate stable industry players for the long term.” (via Caterina)
Four short links: 10 Feb 2009
Happy Monday! Kid coding and web-powered political transparency form the artisanal wholewheat organic bread slices around a sandwich filling of meaty (or tofuy) web travel APIs and blogly angst:
- Art and Code — conference on programming environments for “artists, young people, and the rest of us”. Alice! Hackety Hack! Scratch! Processing! And more! March 7-9 at CMU. Want! (I’ve written before about my ongoing experiences teaching kids to program)
- TripIt API — clever, they’re building a single point where hotels, airlines, travel agents, mobile apps, etc. can access your integrated booking (use case: flight delayed, which hotel and mobile car rentals learn and react to by not assuming you’ve bailed on them) (disclaimer: OATV has invested in TripIt).
- Organically Grown Audiences (Danny O’Brien) — good point from Danny that I’ve been thinking about for a while: maintaining an audience is hard work, and the audience isn’t necessarily comprised of people you’d choose to hang out with. Perhaps the answer is to grow the audience slowly, but I’m not convinced. I’d say that unreciprocated intimacy from your audience is a sign that you’re doing things wrong, but it’s how fame works: the things people say to people in the public eye, on and off the web, are astonishingly presumptuous and familiar. Then again perhaps I should retreat back to the British Isles from which my frosty social distance comes and tend my tweed elbow patch farm until I die from bad teeth, bad beer, or a surfeit of Benny Hill.
- Promoting Open Government (Economist) — state and central governments are making expenditure public, in varyingly useful ways. Links to Missouri Accountability Portal and ReadTheStimulus.org (the former as well-designed, the latter as crowd-sourcing).
Major milestone for ProgrammableWeb & "The Web as Platform"
Last week marked an important milestone for the "Web as Platform" as the 1,000 API was added to the ProgrammableWeb registry. John Musser (see: Web2.0 Report) started tracking the first few web service API's back in 2005. How do these 1000 APIs break down by type? The following chart, derived from our database, shows the the top 15 sectors…
Open beats Closed: Best Buy’s new APIs
Best Buy is a pioneer when it comes to unleashing the talent of their own staff; from the Loop Marketplace that allows employees to submit ideas for Digg-style ranking AND funding across divisions (for example an HR manager can fund an idea from a customer service employee) to their use of prediction markets and their support of the employee-driven social network, Blue Shirt Nation.
Portable Contacts API Starts to Get Real
This evening Joseph and John of Plaxo and I have been hosting a hackathon at Six Apart for the Portable Contacts API (video about PorC). The Portable Contacts API is designed "to make it easier for developers to give their users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the…