Observations on API and Mashup Management API and Mashup Blog

Flickr Photosets: Monitoring the Flickr API

Because Apigee is a tool used by people who build things on top of APIs, we get to see a lot of cool mashups and tools — Flickr Photosets is one of them, built using the Flickr and Facebook APIs proxied through Apigee.

It's easy to see why this app has so many fans. It's the fastest and most intuitive Flickr app we've seen on Facebook. You can also view and share your comments.  And it's an impressive example of how community can make an app better — with both open source code available for any facebook developer and a rich community discussion forum for users to suggest improvements.

Brad Dougherty, the app developer, uses Apigee to monitor usage, errors, and response time from the Flickr API. We appreciate Brad's great feedback such as making it easy to identify (and rate limit) different URLs by API method calls specified by parameters - we've heard that across a few users, and we are working on it. We asked Brad for his comments on working with Apigee and for what he's learned through this project.

Although my app hasn't had any downtime since I started using Apigee, it's a great way to monitor that calls to the Flickr API are actually working, something I haven't been able to see in the past. The biggest lesson I've learned from this app is that it can be very taxing to keep up with the changes in Facebook's API. It's a battle to keep adding new features when you keep having to change things to keep up-to-date with Facebook.

The Snow Report from the North Face: iPhone API monitoring

As a bunch of skiers, we were excited to see the this app's traffic taking off when our first early winter storm moved in.

The Snow Report from the North Face gives you the best ski conditions around the world, while making it easy to quickly focus on what's local through favorites. 

We love the  UI, feature set, and use of notifications in this app.  The Twitter integration is killer - is a great way to plug into what's really happening so you can doublecheck the official reports.

FactoryLabs - the app developers - use Apigee to monitor API performance and usage for snow conditions, weather, and other data.  They've had great feedback on Apigee - specifically, we'll eventually let you specify fields in the payload that help you ID the developers or consumers using your app. 

We'd love to hear what's on your wish list also on our feedback forum and in the meantime check out the app!

Turbocharged Twitter Followers : A killer tool using Yahoo Pipes and YQL

Who needs Twitter follower notifications clogging up their inbox? Why doesn't Twitter provide an RSS feed? And why isn't it easier to identify spam-followers?

Turn off those pesky emails and get your updates in RSS with Twitter Follower Notifications.

This tool uses Yahoo! Pipes to create an RSS feed that gives a ton more info about your new followers, like:  

-Their bio and location
-Their last five tweets
-Whether or not they follow you, too
-Whether their updates are private or public

Bonus: you could use this tool for any Twitter user, which could be useful for seeing whos following friends or other 'persons of interest'.

Walk through the code and see how amazing Yahoo Pipes is - instant mashups without the need for tools or a server, all in a beautiful UI that makes it easy to share, clone and build on other ideas.   And YQL makes the web a huge database for your app. 

Twitter Follower Notifications was built by Marsh Gardiner (@earth2marsh), who uses Apigee to give him traffic stats and alerts to help him better understand how people use this tool. He's also been very active in the Apigee feedback forum, pushing us to make Apigee even better. Thanks Marsh, we're listening!

Social Mention: API monitoring for social sentiment and alerts

Warning: don't try Social Mention unless you have 20 minutes - it's addicting.

Social Mention is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. 

It analyzes content on terms like apigee (score to the left) or Sam Ramji (screenshot below) and gives you alerts, feeds data and a sentiment scorecard. 

Think Google Alerts but for social media.

Jon, who built Social Mention, uses Apigee to monitor their social media API.

We're working hard to get per developer quota enforcement in soon for Jon and the rest of Apigee users that have been asking for this feature on our feedback forum.

Check it out!

Birdwatching on Facebook: Eyeing API response and error rates for a social app

We spotted a great Facebook app in the wild.

Bird.im's Facebook app - apps.facebook.com/birdwatching - brings birdwatchers together to share and discuss their latest finds. 

This is a very well designed and full featured app - enabling sharing of bird photos, locations, discussions and connecting passionate enthusiasts with similar interests.   The Facebook platform at it's best.

The Birdwatching Facebook app provides an API for Facebook to consume when the user performs 'one-click' AJAX actions such as adding a bird, a country, or a photo for a spotting.  This streamlines entry creation by offering an alternative over a simple form and directly improves user engagement as users create and share more entries.   In the future, an iPhone app that enables entries from the field will also consume this API.

Hugo and the bird.im team (@birdim) use Apigee to measure API response rates and errors.  (see how Apigee calculates API response rates and API error rates in previous entries).

Thanks to Hugo for all the great feedback on our Apigee Feedback forum!