Simon Willison’s Weblog

YQL opens up 3rd-party web service table definitions to developers. This really is astonishingly clever: you can create an XML file telling Yahoo!’s YQL service how to map an arbitrary API to YQL tables, then make SQL-style queries against it (including joins against other APIs). Another neat trick: doing a SQL “in” query causes API requests to be run in parallel and recombined before being returned to you. # 9th February 2009, 9:08 pm

Announcing the Article Search API. The most interesting API from the NYTimes yet—search against 2.8 million articles from 1981 until today using 35 searchable fields and get back detailed metadata as well as the first paragraph of the articles themselves. # 5th February 2009, 11:06 pm

Ghostly fingers of APIs. Phil Gyford has a lovely diagram of the sites that he updates manually and the surprisingly large number of other sites that they affect. # 30th October 2008, 5:08 pm

FriendFeed launch a real-time API. This is huge: JSONP plus long polling Comet, with “everything since X” tokens to ensure you don’t miss anything. This is the first open Comet API I’ve seen anywhere. Combine this with FriendFeed’s regular API (which allows arbitrary message posting) and you’ve got a really powerful tool for hackers who want to experiment with Comet without rigging up their own infrastructure. # 22nd October 2008, 2:18 pm

Page Inlink Analyzer (via) Here’s why I’m so keen on JSONP APIs—Eric Miraglia’s tool fires off dozens of cross-domain JSON requests to pull together information about inbound links to your site from Yahoo! Site Explorer and del.icio.us. I imagine it would have been uneconomic for him to provide the tool if it had to proxy every request through his own server. # 15th October 2008, 5:23 pm

Decorator to limit request rates to individual views. Neat piece of code for public facing web APIs written in Django. Update: some smart criticisms in the comments. # 24th September 2008, 1:13 pm

OAuth Playground (via) Neat OAuth API explorer from the Google Data APIs team. # 20th September 2008, 4:40 pm

Google’s undocumented favicon to png convertor (via) Showing the favicon of a domain next to a link is a really nice trick, but it’s slightly tricky to achieve as IE won’t display a .ico file if you link to it from an img element, so you need to convert the images server-side. This undocumented Google API does that for you, meaning it’s much easier to add favicons as a feature to your site. # 30th August 2008, 8:40 pm

Flickr Developer Blog: API Responses as Feeds (via) Flickr API calls that return a “standard photos response” (e.g. flickr.photos.search and flickr.favorites.getList) can now output eight different feed formats as well, including Atom, RSS flavours, geoatom, geordf and KML. Error codes are returned as X-FlickrErrCode HTTP headers. # 25th August 2008, 10:20 pm

Google Code Blog: Two new ways to location-enable your web apps. The Gears Geolocation API isn’t very exciting just yet as it only really works on windows mobile devices, but the new google.loader.ClientLocation Ajax API is great—it gives you the user’s location based on looking up their IP address, saving you from needing to install a IP-to-geo lookup database. # 22nd August 2008, 10:12 am

Show Us a Better Way. The UK Government’s Power of Information Taskforce are running a mashup competition (a.k.a. “ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated”) with a £20,000 prize fund and gigabytes of brand new data and APIs. This is a great opportunity for the software community to demonstrate how important this kind of open data really is. # 4th July 2008, 9:36 am

OAuth for Google Data APIs (via) Awesome. Now, how’s OAuth support shaping up over at Twitter (who are serious offenders when it comes to encouraging the password anti-pattern, despite Twitter engineers being key to the creation of the original OAuth spec)? # 27th June 2008, 7:49 am

Yahoo! Internet Location Platform. As an ex-Yahoo! this is really exciting—WhereOnEarth (a London company acquired by Yahoo! in 2005) provide the incredibly detailed geographical data used by Flickr, Upcoming and FireEagle—and now it’s available as an external API. # 12th May 2008, 9:02 pm

Google AJAX Search API: Flash and Server Side Access. Over a year after Google shot down their SOAP Search API, they’ve quietly released a JSON based one under the guise of supporting “Flash and other non JavaScript environments”. Comes with the strange requirement that an HTTP referer be sent with every request; the API key is optional. # 22nd April 2008, 7:16 pm

Introducing the Google Contacts Data API. Brilliant! (and about time)—now there’s no excuse for asking your users for their Gmail username and password so you can import contacts from their address book. Yahoo! and Microsoft need to catch up on this one fast. # 6th March 2008, 11:29 pm

flickr.places.findByLatLon. New API method for Flickr Places. If only Flickr could return a bounding box for each place... # 24th January 2008, 1:05 pm

Google Chart API (via) Really neat charting API from Google—simply encode your chart data and configuration options in to a URL and Google will serve up a nicely rendered PNG. No API key required. It’s like a documented version of the Google Groups rounded corners API. # 6th December 2007, 5:37 pm

OAuth Core 1.0. The final spec. Expect to see this crop up all over the place in the next few months. # 5th December 2007, 3:39 am

Google Announces the OpenSocial API. I doubt the similarity between this and Brad Fitzpatrick’s social graph paper are a coincidence—what IS impressive is that he only joined Google a couple of months ago. # 31st October 2007, 4:34 pm

New on Dopplr: The Past (with Pictures). Dopplr’s trip pages automatically display your Flickr/Facebook photos that were taken during the duration of the trip—simple and smart integration of third party sites. # 20th October 2007, 11:25 am

OAuth: Your valet key for the Web. OAuth is a really important new specification that aims to solve the “give this application permission to do X on my behalf” problem once and for all. # 21st September 2007, 11:34 pm

Facebook Query Language. The Facebook API now lets you run SQL-like queries. You can’t do joins but you can perform very simple subselects. # 25th February 2007, 12:06 pm

Beginning of the end for open web data APIs? Google just ditched their SOAP API in favour of a crippled Ajax widget. What are the implications for other free-as-in-beer APIs? # 20th December 2006, 12:44 am

Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use. An excellent collection. # 18th December 2006, 7:01 pm