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BlogsTags > APIsFour short links: 25 April 2013By Nat TorkingtonApril 24, 2013 Alcatraz — package manager for iOS. (via Hacker News) Scarfolk Council — clever satire, the concept being a UK town stuck in 1979. Tupperware urns, “put old people down at birth”. The 1979 look is gorgeous. (via BoingBoing) Stop Designing … Making government health data personal againBy Julie SteeleMarch 19, 2013 Health care data liquidity (the ability of data to move freely and securely through the system) is an increasingly crucial topic in the era of big data. Most conversations about data liquidity focus on patient data, but other kinds of … Who's using your API?
By Bruno PedroMarch 10, 2013 "Who's using your API" was the title of my presentation at the API Strategy & Practice Conference that happened on February 21 and 22, 2013 in New York City. One of the conference takeaways was the concern that almost everybody... Masking the complexity of the machineBy Jon BrunerFebruary 15, 2013 The Internet has thrived on abstraction and modularity. Web services hide their complexity behind APIs and standardized protocols, and these clean interfaces make it easy to turn them into modules of larger systems that can take advantage of the most … A Publisher’s Job Is to Provide a Good API for BooksBy Hugh McGuireFebruary 1, 2013 Intro Here is a radical statement: A publisher’s job is to provide good APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for their books. Now that almost all books are made into digital products (that is, ebooks), good publishers of the future will be … Buy once, sync anywhereBy Oliver BrooksDecember 3, 2012 This article by Oli Brooks is a preview to the the Buy once, sync anywhere session he’s part of at TOC NY 2013 in February. Use the discount code below to register for the event and learn more about Oli’s vision … Creating reader community with open APIsBy Leonhard DobuschNovember 15, 2012 I spoke at the “Frankfurt Digital Night” at this year’s Frankfurt Book fair, making essentially three points (see slides embedded below): first, publishing requires – and has always required – a commitment to creating and courting communities of readers. Second, there … Four short links: 18 September 2012
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 18, 2012 The Rapture of the Nerds (Charlie Stoss, Cory Doctorow) — available for download and purchase under a CC-A-NC-ND license. Amazon Maps API — if there is an API layer of general use to developers, Amazon will build it. They want … True data liberation with IFTTTT and Google Drive
By Edd DumbillSeptember 4, 2012 The web service IFTTT (If this, then that) accesses popular web applications via their APIs, and lets users create new actions based on changes. For instance, actions such as “upload photos to Flickr when I add them to my Dropbox … Four short links: 31 July 2012
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 31, 2012 Christchurch’s Shot at Being Innovation Central (Idealog) — Christchurch, rebuilding a destroyed CBD after earthquakes, has released plans for the new city. I hope there’s budget for architects and city developers to build visible data, sensors, etc. so the Innovation … Four short links: 30 July 2012
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 30, 2012 pathod — A pathological HTTP daemon for testing and torturing client software. (via Hacker News) A Walk Through Twitter’s Walled Garden (The Realtime Report) — nice breakdown of Twitter’s business model choice and consequences. Twitter wants you to be able … Four short links: 26 July 2012
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 26, 2012 Drones Over Somalia are Hazard to Air Traffic (Washington Post) — In a recently completed report, U.N. officials describe several narrowly averted disasters in which drones crashed into a refugee camp, flew dangerously close to a fuel dump and almost … Four short links: 30 May 2012
By Nat TorkingtonMay 30, 2012 Wide Open Future of the Art Museum (TED) -- text of an interview with curator at the Walters Art Museum about CC-licensing content: reasons for it, value to society, value to the institution. What I say in a very abbreviated form in my talk is that people go to the Louvre because they’ve seen the Mona Lisa; the reason... Developer Week in Review: Are APIs intellectual property? 
By James TurnerMay 4, 2012 We look at the legal status of APIs and how the Oracle versus Google suit may be affecting it, along with the relative popularity of languages and the world's worst C programs. Four short links: 28 February 2012
By Nat TorkingtonFebruary 28, 2012 Designing RESTful Interfaces (Slideshare) -- extremely good presentation on how to build HTTP APIs. Manipulating History for Fun and Profit -- if you want to make websites that are AJAX-responsive but without breaking the back button or preventing links, read this. Why Textbooks Are So Broken (Salon) -- Let's say a publisher hires a developer for a certain low-bid... Unstructured data is worth the effort when you've got the right toolsBy Suzanne AxtellFebruary 7, 2012 Alyona Medelyan and Anna Divoli are inventing tools to help companies contend with vast quantities of fuzzy data. They discuss their work and what lies ahead for big data in this interview. Unstructured data is worth the effort when you've got the right toolsBy Suzanne AxtellFebruary 7, 2012 Alyona Medelyan and Anna Divoli are inventing tools to help companies contend with vast quantities of fuzzy data. They discuss their work and what lies ahead for big data in this interview. Stickers as sensors December 6, 2011 Put a GreenGoose sticker on an object, and just like that, you'll have an Internet-connected sensor. In this interview, GreenGoose founder Brian Krejcarek discusses stickers as sensors and the data that can be gathered from everyday activities. Stickers as sensorsBy Audrey WattersDecember 6, 2011 Put a GreenGoose sticker on an object, and just like that, you'll have an Internet-connected sensor. In this interview, GreenGoose founder Brian Krejcarek discusses stickers as sensors and the data that can be gathered from everyday activities. Exposing content via APIs November 21, 2011 APIs enable developers to work with your content like a box of Legos, building solutions you may never have dreamed of. In this TOC podcast, Fluidinfo CEO Terry Jones says the real world is "writable" and describes how APIs can offer powerful publishing solutions. Exposing content via APIsBy Joe WikertNovember 21, 2011 APIs enable developers to work with your content like a box of Legos, building solutions you may never have dreamed of. In this TOC podcast, Fluidinfo CEO Terry Jones says the real world is "writable" and describes how APIs can offer powerful publishing solutions. Jonathan's Card: Lessons from a social experiment November 21, 2011 Jonathan Stark raised eyebrows last summer when he made his Starbucks card available for anyone to use. Here, Stark looks back on the "Jonathan's Card" experiment and examines its lessons. Developer Week in Review: The hijacking of an insulin pump
By James TurnerNovember 3, 2011 If you own an insulin pump, someone out there might have a hack with your name on it. Google decides to make high-volume Maps API users pony up some cash, and the creator of Linux goes after C++. API Versioning
By George ReeseOctober 12, 2011 API versioning is something a lot of API designers don't worry about until the second version of their API. API versioning, however, is a controversial subject with strong opinions on both version representation and behavior. Four short links: 12 October 2011
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 12, 2011 Steve Yegge's Google Platforms Rant -- epic. Read it. Guidelines for Securing Open Source Software (EFF) -- advice from the team that audited some commonly-used open source libraries. Avoid giving the user options that could compromise security, in the form of modes, dialogs, preferences, or tweaks of any sort. As security expert Ian Grigg puts it, there is "only... The EC2 API as a Defacto Standard
By George ReeseAugust 9, 2011 The argument for EC2 as a defacto standard is, at some level, the same as it is for any defacto standard: through the EC2 API, you eliminate the need for others to learn some custom API and you can leverage the existing, sizable ecosystem. But there is no such thing as the EC2 API. EC2 is actually many different APIs and adopting the EC2 API as a standard ultimately implies supporting all of those APIs. Four short links: 27 July 2011
By Nat TorkingtonJuly 27, 2011 ContentFlow -- Javascript library to provide CoverFlow-like behaviour. Twilio Client SDK -- 1/4 cent/minute API-to-API calls, embeddable in browser apps. Postel's Principle Reconsidered (ACM) -- The Robustness Principle was formulated in an Internet of cooperators. The world has changed a lot since then. Everything, even services that you may think you control, is suspect. Excellent explanation of how interoperability... The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of REST APIs
By George ReeseJune 4, 2011 I've never seen a perfect REST API. But I have seen some of the most horrible mistakes repeated over and over again by people building heavily consumed APIs. Here's a list of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of REST API design. Four short links: 30 May 2011
By Nat TorkingtonMay 30, 2011 Chartify -- jQuery plugin to create Google charts from HTML tables. (via Rasmus Sellberg) Designing Incentives for Crowdsourcing Workers (Crowdflower) -- In a tough turn for the sociologists and psychologists, none of the purely social/psychological treatments had any significant effects at all. The gTLD Boondoggle -- ICANN promised back in 1998 that they would bring the world lots of... Four short links: 13 May 2011
By Nat TorkingtonMay 13, 2011 Mathematical Intimidation: Driven by the Data (PDF) -- excellent article from Notices of the American Mathematical Society about the flaws in "value-added modelling", the latest fad whereby data about students' results in different classes are analysed to identify the effect of each teacher. People recognize that tests are an imperfect measure of educational success, but when sophisticated mathematics is... A Proposal for Cloud State Notifications
By George ReeseApril 2, 2011 The cloud ecosystem needs a mechanism besides polling that enables monitoring, management, and automation tools to learn about changes in the state of cloud resources. This proposal attempts to define a simple protocol for notifying those tools through a push notifications system rather than polling. Four short links: 21 February 2011
By Nat TorkingtonFebruary 21, 2011 Amplify.js -- simplify all forms of data handling by providing a unified [Javascript] API for various data sources. Amplify's store component handles persistent client-side storage, using standards like localStorage and sessionStorage, but falling back on non-standard implementations for older browsers. Amplify's request adds some additional features to jQuery's ajax method while abstracting away the underlying data source. Artificial Empathy... Four short links: 15 February 2011
By Nat TorkingtonFebruary 15, 2011 White House Will Propose New Digital Copyright Laws (CNet) -- If the Internet were truly empowering citizenry and bringing us this new dawn of digital democracy, the people who run it would be able to stop the oppressive grind of the pro-copyright machinery. There's no detail about what the proposed law would include, except that it will be based... Four short links: 10 February 2011
By Nat TorkingtonFebruary 10, 2011 Instapaper's API -- Marco Arment wanted to prevent people building their own front-ends using the API and thus removing his (advertising) revenue source. He could offer a cripped API, but people scrape to work around that. He could tithe the apps people build on top of his API, but that's hard work to set up and run. His solution:... Four short links: 27 January 2011
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 27, 2011 Mozilla Home Dash -- love this experiment in rethinking the browser from Mozilla. They call it a "browse-based browser" as opposed to "search-based browser" (hello, Chrome). Made me realize that, with Chrome, Google's achieved a 0-click interface to search--you search without meaning to as you type in URLs, you see advertising results without ever having visited a web site.... Four short links: 26 January 2011
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 26, 2011 Find Communities -- algorithm for uncovering communities in networks of millions of nodes, for producing identifiable subgroups as in LinkedIn InMaps. (via Matt Biddulph's Delicious links) Seven Ways to Think Like The Web (Jon Udell) -- seven principles that will head off a lot of mistakes. They should be seared into the minds of anyone working in the web.... Four short links: 15 October 2010
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 15, 2010 Mechanical Turk Requester Activity: The Insignificance of the Long Tail -- For Wikipedia we have the 1% rule, where 1% of the contributors (this is 0.003% of the users) contribute two thirds of the content. In the Causes application on Facebook, there are 25 million users, but only 1% of them contribute a donation. [...] The lognormal distribution of... Four short links: 7 October 2010
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 7, 2010 How to Manage Employees When They Make Mistakes -- sound advice on how to deal with employees who failed to meet expectations. Yet again, good parenting can make you a good adult. It’s strange to me that in the technology sector we have such a reputation for yellers. Maybe it’s business in general and not just tech. [...] People... Four short links: 9 September 2010
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 9, 2010 CloudUSB -- a USB key containing your operating environment and your data + a protected folder so nobody can access you data, even if you lost the key + a backup program which keeps a copy of your data on an online disk, with double password protection. (via ferrouswheel on Twitter) FCC APIs -- for spectrum licenses, consumer broadband... Four short links: 3 June 2010
By Nat TorkingtonJune 3, 2010 How to Get Customers Who Love You Even When You Screw Up -- a fantastic reminder of the power of Kathy Sierra's "I Rock" moments. In that moment I understood Tom's motivation: Tom was a hero. (via Hacker News) Yahoo! Mail is Open for Development -- you can write apps that sit in Yahoo! Mail, using and extending the... Four short links: 30 March 2010
By Nat TorkingtonMarch 30, 2010 PublicACTA -- New Zealand is hosting the final round of ACTA negotiations, and InternetNZ and other concerned technology-aware citizens will also host a PublicACTA conference. The goal is to produce a statement from the citizens, one which can be given to the negotiators ahead of the final round. If you can't make it to NZ for April 10, the... Four short links: 18 January 2010
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 18, 2010 On How Google Wave Surprisingly Changed My Life -- mandated in his small company that non-critical emails be turned into waves instead. Saw: more resolutions to arguments, less rehash of old territory, conversation gained structure and could be referred to afterwards, remote employees able to participate even when timezones prevented real-time. I've been looking for the use case that... Four short links: 7 January 2010
By Nat TorkingtonJanuary 7, 2010 London Datastore to Launch -- the Mayor of London will launch a site full of London data. (via Ed Dumbill) Google Destroyed the Web -- It's hard to disagree with the basic contention that SEO aimed at Google's rankings has fucked the web. It's a vicious circle, too: the more fake content sites are created to game Google, the... Innovation from the Edges: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps
By James TurnerDecember 14, 2009 Two enduring tenets of Web 2.0 are "A platform beats an application every time" and "All the smart people don't work for you." Companies that take those bits of wisdom to heart find ways to engage developer communities to extend their products--and the result can be creative, surprising new applications that would never have been developed from within. Online payment giant PayPal recently announced the PayPal X APIs, a new group of developer APIs designed to enable new applications that can more tightly integrate with PayPal services. To encourage developers to create some awesome applications with the APIs, PayPal is offering prizes $100,000 and $50,000 (in cash plus waived transaction fees) for the best new applications. We caught up with PayPal's director for their Developer Network, Naveed Anwar, as he prepared to deliver a talk in Beijing, and he filled us in on what the new PayPal APIs bring to the table for application designers, and laid out the details of the challenge. Four short links: 26 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 26, 2009 Toiling in the Data Mines -- Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls "material exploration". Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that's a shame. Material explorations are something I've really only done since I've joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar - in that they were very, very different... Four short links: 2 October 2009
By Nat TorkingtonOctober 2, 2009 I'm Tired of Your Analogue Attitude -- hilarious animated clip about social media gurus, made using xtranormal. (via trib on twitter) Three Laws of Open Government Data -- 1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist; 2. If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage; 3. If a legal framework doesn’t... Four short links: 8 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 7, 2009 jQTouch -- jQuery library for mobile web app development. (via brian on Delicious) GData API to Google Book Search -- search full text, get back metadata, modify "my library" collections, etc. Open and Free Courses at the CMU Open Learning Initiative -- rather than just a lecture and handout dump, it has interactive exercises and questions to help you... Four short links: 2 September 2009
By Nat TorkingtonSeptember 1, 2009 The Programming Language With The Happiest Users (Dolores Labs) -- you'll be surprised. Age before beauty! Judge It Now -- fast market opinions on design decisions. Compare to Optimal Sort. Usability tools hitting the mainstream web, so the time to learn what works shrinks and progress is faster. BlockChalk API -- These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly... The Library of the Commons: Rise of the Infodex
By Mark SigalAugust 31, 2009 Somewhere between the realm of Personal and Shared media lies the realm of the Universal. The realm of the universal is the Library of the Commons, a global repository of user-generated and crowd-sourced media and information. Services that logically nest in the Library include: Amazon Reviews, Yelp, YouTube, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Flickr, Tweets...READ ON. Four short links: 13 August 2009
By Nat TorkingtonAugust 12, 2009 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... 1 to 50 of 62 Next Stay Connected
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