Observations on API and Mashup Management

API and Mashup Blog

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!

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!