Get ready for a whole bunch of geeked out, presentation notes for the next few days.

Why? Because, I’m at webvisions, of course!

For those playing along at home, I tend to upload as I go. So if you see a half finished post – it means that I am still in the middle of writing it. Wait a few minutes and then refresh to see more. First up…

How to Mix n’ Match Web APIs

Tom Hughes-Croucher

Side note – Tom is wearing my favorite woot t-shirt: http://shirt.woot.com/friends.aspx?k=9649

“your product is the data, a website is just one view of that”

For many sites, 40% of the traffic is through the API. Twitter could easily be 60% or more.

SOAP and web services originally failed because the data was comparable to installable programs + the trouble of the internet. However, the social network data is live, huge and can not be downloaded. Welcome to the rise of the API.

YQL – simple, SQL interface for APIs built by Yahoo:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/ (“ultimate glue for APIs – nice!)

Works for search, flickr and other services. For instance, try: select * from flickr.photos.info where photo_id= ‘4169914998’

This is a much nicer interface then what I had to do to drag in the images for metrofiets. com

YQL + Magic + Maps

Resource files at: http://github.com/sh1mmer/mixnmatch

Examples:

Free WiFi in Washingtion DC
select * from search.web where query = ‘”free wifi” “washington dc”‘

Awesome Cats on Flickr
select * from flickr.photos.search where tags=”awesome” and text=”kittens”

Weather at SFO (requires a sub select!)
select * from weather.forecast where location in (select postal from geo.places where text=”sfo”)

Many of the APIs (like nytimes) which normaly require a key, do not through YQL.

Has a huge ammount of 3rd party APIs integrated:
select * from twitter.user.status where id=’nagmay’

… only halfway through and the laptop is starting to die :P