APIs and Pipes

last week’s class was about APIs and Yahoo Pipes. with API’s in the class, we mainly focused on the Flickr API set. Some very interesting things can be done with both

Yahoo Pipes is a website that lets you build a single RSS feed from various sources, including google searches, Flickr, yahoo, and virtually any other website. I am yet to work out Pipes finer details, i can only manage simple amalgamating feeds together at the moment. I do plan on playing more with them, so stay tuned.

Application Programming Interfaces. or APIs. Handy little devils they are. They open up websites (and desktop applications – but that is out of our relm) so people can do things with thier content.

I came across a cool little web page called retrievr (it may have been in the NMP blogroll or somewhere, i can’t remember) which lets you draw a picture, and then searches Flickr for photos that it thinks look similar. I found this rather interesting. while the site itself is fairly simple, it has the fundimentals of many complex systems, such as an application a copyright holder may use for automatically searching images, and the web in general, for their images or films

Well, I’m off to work on my assignment, so stay tuned for the next installment.

Matt out.