An early influential Google Maps mashup now gives users the chance to change mapping imagery. The GMaps Pedometer (our GMaps Pedometer mashup profile) has six different tile options, the most recent of which is OpenStreetMap, the free editable map of the world.
If the Queen of England used public transportation, she wouldn't have far to walk from her Buckingham Palace home. And finding her nearest stop is now very easy since Transport of London has implemented a Google Maps mashup of bus routes.
Once the mouthpiece and aggregator of the blogosphere, Technorati lost its luster long ago. And now it's lost its API, too. The developer page promises a new API but also makes one thing clear: the old one is gone.
The self-proclaimed movie freaks behind MovieClips now have a platform that could allow for some really fun mashups. Unfortunately, even the most basic documentation is hidden behind an application form and a promise that "access to the API is granted only to approved partners."
Picnik, the very popular browser based photo editing service that's been integrated into many other sites via their Picnik API, has just been acquired by Google.
The Twitter Streaming API has been successfully used by Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft, who have been given access to the full feed of all public tweets. Twitter has now enabled this "firehouse" of data for a number of other companies.
Given the increasing popularity of mobile devices such as the iPhone and Android devices (both of which include full browsers), it should come as no surprise that developers have begun to leverage the various APIs out there to provide mobile mashups that can be implemented without targeting a specific platform or SDK.
The writing has been on the virtual wall for some time, but it's official: mashup pioneer Platial (our Platial profile) is shutting down. Former CEO Di-Ann Eisnor cites server costs of $7,000 per month in an interview with GigaOm.
UK newspaper The Guardian is expanding its Open Platform (our Guardian API profile). The new API covers information about politicians and elections in the UK, with many details going back to 1992. It also contains limited older data, as far back as 1945.
As we noted in our last API roundup, we continue to see an increase in the rate at which new APIs are being added to our API directory. Five of these new APIs include an API for a service for point-of-sale (POS) entry from mobile and online, a photo and video uploading API, a mobile video sharing service API, a hosted SQL database web service, and a hosted service for Microsoft Silverlight apps.
