Outside.in is launching a new API that allows developers to tap the company’s database of local news and information to build location-aware applications. The basic idea is that your application captures a user’s location – either through manual input or via GPS – and Outside.in returns relevant content from within 1,000 feet of that spot.
There are clearly a lot of applications that could use this type of data; national news sites that want to offer local headlines, mobile apps that show news based on your GPS location, and travel information services are just a few ideas that come to mind. As a demo, Outside.in has launched Near.ly, an application that sends local news to your Twitter account (via direct message) based on the address you provide.
The Outside.in API is an example of how most web businesses should evolve. While it started out as a destination site for local content (an incredibly competitive market), Outside.in has turned itself into a platform, allowing content providers to feed content into the system, and now, with its API, allowing developers to build applications using the aggregate data. And as these inputs and outputs grow, the service becomes more valuable to everyone in the ecosystem, including end users.
More about how the Outside.in API works in the video below:
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File sharing service Drop.io has just launched a new API that allows developers to utilize most of the functions that the site offers in their own applications. This means that you can allow users of your app to utilize Drop.io’s storage – which is now handled completely through Amazon Web Services – and also utilize Drop.io’s various “input and output” functions that are the building blocks of what the company calls “Drops.”
If you’re not familiar with Drop.io, Drops are essentially private webpages where users can contribute digital files and also submit content via other methods like phone (MPs) or fax (documents). That content can then be shared through email, embeds, RSS, and other means. With the launch of an API, developers can pick and choose which inputs and outputs they’d like to use in their apps, and then utilize Drop.io for the storage of the files that are created by users of them. One of Drop.io’s developers explains this in additional detail in the video below:
To demonstrate, Drop.io has built a number of sample applications, the most obvious of which is uSend.io, essentially a simple clone of YouSendIt. You select a file from your harddrive, select the recipients, and send it out. A drop is created, and the recipients access it via the link sent to their email. Other simple demos include Collab.io for organizing meetings with Drops, and TwitterSlurp, which builds an archive of Tweets about a specific topic as a Drop.
You might be thinking this will essentially let anyone build a huge file sharing service on Drop.io’s dime, but there are a couple caveats. To download the files, you still need to go to Drop.io, and in turn, you’re limited to Drop.io’s existing restrictions (on free accounts) of 100MB of storage. So, you’ll have to upgrade to a Drop.io premium account if you want to build anything large scale. Nonetheless, Drop.io’s API looks like a fairly elegant solution for adding file sharing to your applications, and it’s automatic handling of inputs/outputs should be a big time saver for developers.
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SeeToo Doesn’t Need To
Anybody who has read The New York Times for an extended period of time knows that the paper cranks out a considerably large number of movie reviews. Tons of blockbusters, indie flicks, foreign titles, and a good share of DVD picks for both new and old productions to boot.
This is especially the case for Sunday editions and whatever moments occur around festivals and award ceremonies. And while the Times already offers a streamlined way to consume its movie-related content via RSS, it’s been far less easy to step far back in time for the 84 years the Times has issued reviews. Until now, anyway. This week the company debuted its very own Movie Reviews API.
More than 22,000 titles are said to be accessible through the API, and not only are recent articles and pieces done on classic pictures on hand, the methods for searching, pulling, and organizing such material are many. You can go by DVD release date, for example, or you can focus on particular actors, directors, reviewers names and other keywords.
According to Justin Sheckler, writing on the company’s Open blog, all facets are had through the Times Movies search feature. Furthermore, Sheckler notes that the API will be refined and extended to include more search parameters as well for things like publication dates and so forth. So if you want an experience akin to something that IMDB search or some other top-notch engine might give you, you’ll soon be able to make that happen.
Surely there are a good number of movie buffs in the Mashable audience, as there are most anyplace else where the world of media is frequently in focus. So I imagine this week’s release by the Times is something that will draw substantial interest. Of course, there are only so many things one can do with information provided via the engine. But if there’s anything that can whet fans’ palates for customized data collection, it is having the power to seek without stumbling upon limits. Evolutions seen in the broader world of Web search have proven as much. Now, if you want to get super particular about one film fetish or another, you can.
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Anybody who has read The New York Times for an extended period of time knows that the paper cranks out a considerably large number of movie reviews. Tons of blockbusters, indie flicks, foreign titles, and a good share of DVD picks for both new and old productions to boot.
This is especially the case for Sunday editions and whatever moments occur around festivals and award ceremonies. And while the Times already offers a streamlined way to consume its movie-related content via RSS, it’s been far less easy to step far back in time for the 84 years the Times has issued reviews. Until now, anyway. This week the company debuted its very own Movie Reviews API.
More than 22,000 titles are said to be accessible through the API, and not only are recent articles and pieces done on classic pictures on hand, the methods for searching, pulling, and organizing such material are many. You can go by DVD release date, for example, or you can focus on particular actors, directors, reviewers names and other keywords.
According to Justin Sheckler, writing on the company’s Open blog, all facets are had through the Times Movies search feature. Furthermore, Sheckler notes that the API will be refined and extended to include more search parameters as well for things like publication dates and so forth. So if you want an experience akin to something that IMDB search or some other top-notch engine might give you, you’ll soon be able to make that happen.
Surely there are a good number of movie buffs in the Mashable audience, as there are most anyplace else where the world of media is frequently in focus. So I imagine this week’s release by the Times is something that will draw substantial interest. Of course, there are only so many things one can do with information provided via the engine. But if there’s anything that can whet fans’ palates for customized data collection, it is having the power to seek without stumbling upon limits. Evolutions seen in the broader world of Web search have proven as much. Now, if you want to get super particular about one film fetish or another, you can.
---
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Anybody who has read The New York Times for an extended period of time knows that the paper cranks out a considerably large number of movie reviews. Tons of blockbusters, indie flicks, foreign titles, and a good share of DVD picks for both new and old productions to boot.
This is especially the case for Sunday editions and whatever moments occur around festivals and award ceremonies. And while the Times already offers a streamlined way to consume its movie-related content via RSS, it’s been far less easy to step far back in time for the 84 years the Times has issued reviews. Until now, anyway. This week the company debuted its very own Movie Reviews API.
More than 22,000 titles are said to be accessible through the API, and not only are recent articles and pieces done on classic pictures on hand, the methods for searching, pulling, and organizing such material are many. You can go by DVD release date, for example, or you can focus on particular actors, directors, reviewers names and other keywords.
According to Justin Sheckler, writing on the company’s Open blog, all facets are had through the Times Movies search feature. Furthermore, Sheckler notes that the API will be refined and extended to include more search parameters as well for things like publication dates and so forth. So if you want an experience akin to something that IMDB search or some other top-notch engine might give you, you’ll soon be able to make that happen.
Surely there are a good number of movie buffs in the Mashable audience, as there are most anyplace else where the world of media is frequently in focus. So I imagine this week’s release by the Times is something that will draw substantial interest. Of course, there are only so many things one can do with information provided via the engine. But if there’s anything that can whet fans’ palates for customized data collection, it is having the power to seek without stumbling upon limits. Evolutions seen in the broader world of Web search have proven as much. Now, if you want to get super particular about one film fetish or another, you can.
---
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Web traffic and user engagement analyst Nuconomy takes the private beta tag off its Nuconomy Studio platform today. The public launch makes available a system that measures numerous things related to digital media in addition to readings of page views and uniques.
Assets like comments, ratings, sharing, purchases, and video plays, with technologies like AJAX, Flash, and Silverlight now commonly involved, are all considered part of Nuconomy’s purview. All providing a more complete view of a website’s overall performance than has traditionally been the case.
Because the company, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, is able to conjure detailed observations of what it is that happens under the roof a certain dot-com or dot-org or whathaveyou, a user of Nuconomy Studio can essentially create a more effective and efficient development and management scheme. And Nuconomy’s ability to do so in a largely automated fashion makes the service that much more useful as a permanent watchful eye. A two-way API and plugins for WordPress, Movable Type, Community Sever, and dasBlog are facets of the Nuconomy collection that only serve to streamline operations further for more clients.
And clients Nuconomy does boast. Names like Microsoft, Six Apart, Federated Media, Revision3, and Mahalo are some to which the services caters what it calls “valuable insights.” All said, Nuconomy Studio’s job is to parse data in an intelligible way. If one considers the full extent of its feature set, it goes rather far in proving itself a formidable competitor in the analytics universe. It’s a package that has already received commendations and awards at conferences such as TWS08 and Under The Radar 2008.
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So long as you’ve got a Wi-Fi signal to grab onto and a Web browser with Google’s Gears engine on board, Google is enabling Web developers near and far the option to locate users all around the world and feed them information relevant to their respective places on the map.
It is doing this with an enhancement of its Gears Geolocation API, which was originally designed to provide location services for mobile phone users. Now the company includes users of PCs in the process.
Two weeks ago to the day we learned of Mozilla’s release of Geode, a service that provides location-management for users of the current publicly-available Firefox browser. The debut of Geode comes ahead of the planned launch of a version of Firefox that will natively support the W3C Geolocation specification. What today’s announcement by Google reveals is really just a broader layer of support for geolocation, encompassing multiple browsers across multiple platforms. The more, the merrier, so to speak.
As you might now expect, Charles Wiles, product manager within Google’s mobile development division preempts any privacy concerns voiced by users, saying that the Gears Geolocation API server “does not record user location.” Still, he notes that it is incumbent on users to only allow sites they trust to tap their coordinates. According to Wiles, accuracy of the API is “within 200m.”
Gears naturally is something that arrives built-in with Google Chrome downloads and the Android mobile operating system, and acts as a plug-in for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari users (soon Opera users as well). This of course greatly increases its potential for ubiquity. While most location-based services on the Web are focusing much of their efforts on the mobile realm, the sheer volume of laptops gives Google a really seamless way to dramatically increase use of its improved Geolocation API across all manner of sites, including those that might ordinarily not incorporate Wi-Fi “spotting.”
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Many people are waiting for the death of Yahoo. Regardless of the impending layoffs and restructuring, Yahoo is still fighting for the future.
The big question for Yahoo is what future does it have? Should they try to get into the social network scene? Well, they already failed once with Mash and have had lackluster results with their other social effort Yahoo 360. Or should they try to go bleeding edge, and instead of just integrating some semantic technologies, go “whole hog” and develop a semantic search engine?
Well, Yahoo has been developing its version of the future for several months. This week we received notice that the future according to Yahoo 1.0 is ready. Yahoo announced the universal profile and version 1.0 of Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS). The components of the “social suite” are:
Social Directory - the new user profile data and user connections.
Contacts/Address Book - the mapping of the user contacts and the inevitable hooks of the social strategy with email.
Updates - the implicit sharing of actions, which sounds more like the aggregation of FriendFeed and Facebook Live Feeds.
Presence - the sharing of simple status text, because no social platform seems to be complete without status text.
More importantly, you will notice that search is not explicitly included. This is because search is now just another part of their platform. BOSS and SearchMonkey are putting search into third party developers’ hands. Based on this, we can assume that Yahoo has admitted it has lost search unless people create tools on top of their search, or they start integrating more social and semantic services into their search.
So, why is all of this important? Yahoo is still one of the most highly visited websites. My Yahoo is still considered to have the largest user base for a personalized homepage. Yahoo Mail is still one of the largest Web mail installations. Yahoo Buzz has been known to drive a million visitors to a highlighted page. Now Yahoo is planning to hook all of this together.
CNET’s Dan Farber has a great nugget from the Yahoo plan:
Over time, properties such as Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Flickr and Yahoo Buzz, will be socially enabled beyond activity feeds, Stoneham said. He gave an example of requesting a review from a user’s connections while perusing a product page in Yahoo Shopping. When a review is posted it shows up in the user’s activity feed. In addition, miniprofiles are available to get information quickly about the reviewer.
If Yahoo can integrate all of their services together with their new profiles, they will instantly become one of the largest social networks, if not the largest social network. Obviously, Yahoo’s target is no longer search. Yahoo is going after Facebook and MySpace. The important thing to note is that the entire Y!OS is API ready. That means that developers will have access to a massive user base and the potential of having their widget in front of more people than a Facebook application can provide. To see how all of this is supposed to work, look at the image below:
As you can see, they are planning on having Mail, the Front Page, Search, Media and other partner sites integrated with the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP). By having a widget or application that can also use the Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP), a developer has a huge number of possibilities. The additional benefit of using these APIs is that you can have a social widget on your own site much like the initial plans for Google’s Friend Connect and Facebook Connect.
Yahoo may be having problems right now with their leadership, but the developers within Yahoo are still working. Yahoo is now going after third party developers in order to have them create applications on their platform in the easiest way possibly. It may seem like a desperate attempt at retaining relevance, but many businesses have been built this way. One other company built a business based on a platform by making it easy for developers to create applications, Microsoft. We all know how that story turned out. The future of Yahoo is as a platform. The future of Yahoo is social. The future of Yahoo is now in developers’ hands.
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When we talk about video content on the Web, it’s now customary to speak about control. Things like on-demand, skip forward, skip back, shuffle, etc., are pretty common. They’re expected, really.
So what BitGravity, a self-described content delivery network, is looking to do at the server side of media management, is give video producers more controls of their own, and all through its new Advanced Progressive API.
What kind of control? A few items include auto-bitrate adjustments, scene selection, and establishing start and stop clauses, just to name a few items.
BitGravity also talks about things like advertisement injection, virtual projections and so forth, all revolving around its engineering of an HD Flash- and H.264-based platform. An “Advanced Progressive” platform, at that. In short, this option allows the viewer to seek information hosted online much as one would when interacting with a physical media player, albeit without the need to complete a full download. As you might suspect, this gives the user a natural feeling experience without having to wait idle for a loader to reach the 100% mark. Less wait equals better time spent, for sure.
As an HD delivery service alone, BitGravity has provided a fairly impressive option to content owners. Its ability to make instant-play and live video available at such a high level has proven attractive for a number of clients already, including Revision3 and comedian Tom Green. So the release of the API today is bound to lure more names from the creative world.
Control, after all, is what nearly everyone within the media world desires. It allows producers to stay adaptive to market conditions, which in this day and age are no doubt fickle and fast to shift.
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Drop.io, the file hosting and sharing service of considerable renown in Web world, particularly among those who espouse the need to keep things simple and easy and cheap without excess baggage, is moving along with another upgrade to its feature set.
We previously noted the company’s release of a browser plugin intended for faster access to one’s drop(s). Now, according to Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, Drop.io has brought geography to its file management equation. So you upload. You tag with a location. Then you let others find it. Talk about putting a literal spin on concept of a digital drop box.
It may be too fantastical to think this can be manipulated into some sort of geo-caching mechanism for the entirely-Web-based set. A bit too easy a treasure hunt that would be, no? Some immensely inventive folks out there in Mashable land might think differently. If so, let us know. Meanwhile, location-based services are gaining considerable momentum as of late, particularly in the mobile arena, and Drop.io seems a fitting instrument to use to involve longitudinal and latitudinal details to better broadcast items to the public or to specific people.
The service taps Loki’s JavaScript API, developed by Skyhook Wireless, to detect one’s position on the map and affix one or more files accordingly. And hey, if photos are going to be geo-sensitive the world over, we might as well put some north-south-east-west on files pushed to the cloud. The non-copyrighted stuff, anyway.
In order to access the location feature, just click the ‘Edit Drop’ link at the top right portion of the drop window, and find the option for ‘Location’ in the Access Control menu on the following page.
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