

The API Hub: Jeff Bezos-Backed Mashape Launches To The Public With 430 APIs - rigelstpierre
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/mashape-public-launch/

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firlefans
I found Mashape via google as I was looking for a simple way to monetize our
API (and get some exposure) about a year ago. We posted our Whois API
(<http://www.mashape.com/nametoolkit/name-toolkit>) on Mashape.

In the early days it was quiet but I liked the auto-generated clients. It's
really been picking up in the last few months and the hassle-free billing,
documentation is great. Augusto is great, he is still personally answering
mails when there are issues.

What could be improved on: Better stats for the admin interface, .NET support
(I'm aware this has been on their roadmap but customers have repeatedly asked
me for this), more payout options like bank transfer would be awesome too.

~~~
scottbruin
Not to rain on your parade, but to anyone looking to try this I just wasted 30
minutes getting setup and trying it to find out that Godaddy, for example,
returns next to no results through this service so it's no solution to WHOIS
woes.

~~~
firlefans
Firstly, yes our whois parser needs work, whois is a dirty protocol with lots
of inconsistency and we haven't spent enough time dealing with parsing ALL the
data out. Oddly enough it has already proved useful to some customers and some
fields are consistently parsed well. What's your use case and which fields are
you interested in that we failed to parse?

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sandfox
I think the open source equivalent to this is well worth a mention:
<http://apis.io/> It's not quite the same feature set but was never designed
to be and all the code is on github so you deploy your own if you so wished,
<https://github.com/apisio/apisio> (pull requests welcome)

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captn3m0
I spend a lot of time trying to convert the heckyesmarkdown.com service to an
API in mashape. It was time consuming and kept on returning me
incomprehensible errors. The documentation is unclear on _how the APIs are
supposed to be documented_.

For a purely REST API, this might work, but for something like free-to-find
services for which I need a quick-api solution to use, it just does not work.
The API documentation editor (seriously, stop calling it documentation and
call it specs instead) needs an advanced mode so I can use it better. Another
thing I found missing was user help text on the apis themselves.

This might take off to become something like programmableweb, but developers
won't rush to it with open-arms unless (a few) major api providers start using
this.

~~~
fosk
Hi, CTO of Mashape here. I'm sorry to hear you had a bad experience when
writing the docs, we'll definitely improve the workflow and make it easier to
understand.

In the meanwhile, I documented your API with my account, and I would be happy
to transfer it to yours if you like. Here it is:
<http://www.mashape.com/thefosk/heck-yes-markdown>

The documentation it is really a documentation, not all the fields are
mandatory by the system, except the endpoint URL, and the parameter's name (we
need them to auto-generate the client libraries). All the other fields are
optional and provided just for the sake of understandability when a third
party needs to consume your API.

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blastStu
Hey there, just adding my two pence here.

I'm Stuart, co-founder of chatterbox.co. We've been using Mashape from the
early days when they were back in beta, distributing our Sentiment Analysis
API (<http://www.mashape.com/chatterbox-co/sentiment-analysis-free>). For a
startup, getting to market as quickly as possible is great.. what you don't
want though is a half baked product. Mashape allowed us to focus on building
awesome sentiment analysis, so that we didn't have to bother about billing,
rate limiting, etc and all the DB infrastructure that runs behind it.
Certainly worth checking out, especially if all your stuff uses JSON anyway
(which it should!).

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joshmlewis
I was fortunate enough to spend a couple days with these guys when I was first
getting my feet wet a few months back. Although my chops weren't built enough
yet for what they needed, I enjoyed doing a little problem solving with them
and getting to see my first glimpse of startup life. They were super nice and
they really had a passion and dedication for Mashape. It's cool to seen them
finally launch.

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mike626
Craigslist isn't participating? That's surprising!

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mangoman
I think the idea of putting APIs into a store is a great way for smaller devs
to really get their products noticed, and even monetize their hard work
easier. And as a developer I totally see the need for this kind of product.
I'm tired of searching for an api on google/github/etc and not being totally
sure of its quality, and I would love to see if Mashape will grow and perhaps
allow people to review APIs, and host examples as well.

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3amOpsGuy
>> When you’re a marketplace, you always fight the chicken/egg problem and the
last thing you want to do is open up a marketplace when you don’t have enough
supply yet

What's are your views here?

This is a really interesting question for me. I keep putting off a side
project that I'd love to do because it suffers this exact problem.

I want to believe there's another way to handle this situation.

~~~
rigelstpierre
Seems the solution is to really market to the creators of quality and useful
API creators and build that with the promise of the users coming latter.

They app is really well designed and useful without the users there to the API
creator.

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kt9
I don't know how useful the clients in different languages are when all the
client code returns is a JSON object.

I would have thought that the whole point of a custom client would be that it
would expose objects and methods that had represented the request and response
data for the API.

If I have to interpret and parse the JSON myself then the client code they
provide isn't very useful IMHO.

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macca321
I don't think central API registries are the the long term future of APIs
(despite the fact that I bought apinest.com with half a mind to setting one up
:).

At some point we are going to move to self-describing APIs, documented at
source. Check out the <http://restfulobjects.org/> spec for ideas on how this
will work.

~~~
fosk
Which would be great. We strongly believe that self-describing hypermedia APIs
are the future, hopefully sooner or later we'll be able to focus more on the
experience (buying/tracking/monitoring/bug tracking) and less on supporting
thousands different formats/descriptions. Unfortunately it's still a super-
fragmented market.

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scribu
Standardizing APIs is a Good Thing. Unfortunately, standards alone don't seem
to be enough. (oAuth2 anyone?)

Therefore, offering a proxy that has enough benefits to developers to make
them switch to it's standard seems like a more realistic approach.

So, I truly hope Mashape takes off.

~~~
nl
Mashape doesn't standardise anything - it "just" provides API billing and
management tools.

Saying APIs should be standardized is very naive anyway - APIs often need to
offer specific platform-specific features.

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wpietri
It's a minor nit, but please get your main page to play nice. I opened the
Mashape page in a tab to look at later. When the fan sped up I went hunting,
and your page was eating 20% CPU.

~~~
sinzone
Thx for the tip. We're on it.

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eranation
Too much load on launch day? I get a "Oops, an error occured :S" screen

Edit: back now

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danso
Some of these APIs aren't very well developed...the Airbnb API, for example,
is just an unofficial one, and so far supports only a "Hello World" endpoint

<http://www.mashape.com/john-matt/airbnb>

~~~
rigelstpierre
You need to take any community driven site with a grain of salt, there will
always be API's that aren't great.

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nivertech
looks kinda like APIgee

~~~
rigelstpierre
Works in a similar nature except I don't think APIgee has Auto Documentation

