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Items tagged google, apis

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Google APIs & Developer Products. Presented as a sort-of-periodic table. There’s quite a bit of stuff on here I didn’t know about. # 28th January 2011, 11:25 am

Closure Compiler Service (via) A hosted version of the Google Closure Compiler (JavaScript minifier) running on App Engine. It has both a user interface and a REST API, which means you can use it as part of an automated build process without needing to set up a local copy of the software. # 9th August 2010, 1:17 pm

Google Docs OCR. Whoa, the Google Docs API just got really interesting—you can upload an image to it (POST /feeds/default/private/full?ocr=true) and it will OCR the text and turn it in to a document. Since this is Google, I imagine they’ll also be using the processed documents to further improve their OCR technology. # 29th September 2009, 9:57 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

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

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

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

Figuring out OpenSocial

So it’s out, and lots of people are talking about it, but I’m still trying to work out exactly what it is. There seem to be two parts to it: a standardised set of GData APIs for accessing lists of friends and their activities (like the Facebook news feed) and a bunch of JavaScript APIs for enabling developers to write hostable widgets and “container sites” to embed those widgets.

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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

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