
Ask HN: Which company do you wish had a developer API? - rokhayakebe
There is an abundance of data that could be useful to developers, but that is not available yet. Which company do you wish had an API?
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sam_in_nyc
Not too many. If they don't I just use Dapper, and then Yahoo Pipes if needed.

Amazing "hack" about Yahoo Pipes... they block usage based on an IP accessing
a pipe. Yet, you can make that pipe access the "singleton" version of itself
many times. So let's say you want to pull up Delicious tags of 10,000 URLs
(something I did to generate very nice marketing data), you could access
Delicious yourself 10,000 times (and get blocked very soon) or you can access
a pipe (which accesses Delicious) 10,000 times... or you can access a pipe 100
times, each time sending it 100 URLs, and that pipe will just loop through and
do it (Yahoo will count 1 access against you rather than 100). Since there are
loads of pipes servers, and it's a semi-trusted source (in this case very
trusted, since Yahoo owns Delicious), not all the Yahoo pipes servers will get
blocked by Delicious. Actually, at the rate I was pinging them, some of them
did actually get blocked :)

Another interesting experiment: Make a Dapper App which contacts Yahoo Pipes
for an RSS. Make that Yahoo Pipe access the same Dapper App. Fun!

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sh1mmer
If you like Pipes you should play with YQL (<http://developer.yahoo.com/yql>)
it's much more like an API than Pipes given it's SQL-likeness.

While it's actually my job to promote stuff for Y! YQL is one of my all time
favourite things we have done and it really very much worth taking a look at.
Especially given we just released "open tables" so now you can map any service
to it, not just RSS, XML, CSV, etc feeds

Disclaimer: I work for the Yahoo! Developer Network

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sam_in_nyc
Yahoo! continually comes up with some amazing stuff. XPATH selection of a URL
via a SQL like query (<http://tinyurl.com/c5jrot>)... so awesome! Tell your
coworkers that they've impressed me.

And now, I test querying the page for itself. If your servers crash, it was
all me.

~~~
sam_in_nyc
This has proven to be impossible

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natrius
Most gyms make you swipe a card to get in, so they have a pretty good idea of
how many people are in the gym at a given time. If they anonymized that data
and made it public, I could go when I know it's not going to be crowded.

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slavingia
Wouldn't others go at the same time because they realize it's not crowded,
hence making it crowded. Catch-22.

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petercooper
I doubt few people would be so anal to hook up to the gym's API and analyze
the data to figure that out. In that sense, someone who does spend the time to
do that will reap the reward for their ingenuity :)

(That said, when it comes to gyms it's pretty easy to figure out anyway.
People don't tend to generally go during or immediately after mealtimes, there
are fewer women during school-run times, etc.)

~~~
ks
They would not have to use the API directly. Someone would make a website or
facebook/iPhone application.

~~~
petercooper
True, but I still think the percentage of average gym users who would go to
those lengths would still be pretty small (though larger than those who'd use
the API ;-)). Normal people rarely care about this level of efficiency (which
I find sad, but hey).

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lux
Most public services ought to have them. Not just APIs, but even simple stuff
like an RSS or ical export for garbage/recycling days so I can throw it in my
calendar. It's about usable data formats too.

Great question, by the way :)

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aneesh
My doctor. Or my hospital. Or pretty much anyone in healthcare.

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TomOfTTB
Heh...Good Luck with that.

I work in a facility that provides mental health care to clients. I am in
charge of the computers and all the technology. Unfortunately, our primary
customer is the county government and they simply will not budge on anything.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I recently made a very simple
proposal which was that we assign clients a confidential number (given to them
in person) and have them generate their own password. They could then view
their records online using that number and password. But...and this was the
important part... no identifying information (such as name, SSN, etc...) would
ever be transmitted over the web. None.

The number would be transmitted to us, matched up internally, and then
treatment data would be sent back without any identifying pieces of info. No
name, SSN, etc... would ever leave our firewall. In addition we’d still use
secure connections through SSL, valid certificates, etc...

As you can probably guess I was shot down cold by the county. Transmitting
data over the internet to private clients is not secure under any
circumstances according to HIPAA (so they said, I don’t agree).

These kinds of policies are why every medical professional fears transmitting
data in any way. I mean, if the government says it’s insecure than you’re just
opening yourself up for a lawsuit if you ever try to give access.

Privacy is important and I’m not against err-ing on the side of caution to a
certain extent. But when fear of lawyers and fear of the Government over power
common sense it’s a tragedy and that is exactly where we are now.

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jgilliam
Screw privacy, I'd rather the whole world know what's wrong with me... maybe
they can fix it! Make it searchable and put my email address at the bottom.

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wyday
> maybe they can fix it!

Millions of newbie programmers have this exact thought. This is why you see
countless forum posts with chunks of code and a note like "Something's wrong,
can you guys fix it?"

No programmer with experience is going to waste their time. Similarly, no
doctor is going to waste time doing pro bono work to fix your medical
problems.

~~~
smokey_the_bear
I find people on forums are usually amazingly helpful and giving of time.

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gnaritas
Google analytics, it'd be really nice to have access to all that data.

~~~
davecardwell
There is their “Data Export API” currently in private beta. See the bottom of
this post:

[http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-enterprise-
class-...](http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-enterprise-class-
features-added-to.html)

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noblethrasher
Academic Application Suites like Blackboard and the University IT system - but
that's mostly for allowing better interoperability between organizations on
campus.

My wireless telephone service provider. I would especially like to be able to
query and download my voicemails.

Better ODB (On-Board Diagnostics) API. Every new car should include a
webserver and either an ethernet or wireless NIC (and an easy way for the
owner to explicitly enable/disable it).

Actually, every high end household item should have an API (which I suppose is
what Java was initially going to do).

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pietro
Rail, bus and airline companies. It would be useful to query not only the
timetable, but also any delays or changes, and of course booking via an API
would be awesome.

~~~
herval
not to mention geolocation, right? :-)

~~~
pietro
Sure. I want to call the APIs from my iPhone. :-)

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shalmanese
Hacker news doesn't have an API yet...

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andreyf
Elevator. I want my iPhone to tell it when I enter the building, and that I'm
going to the 6th floor. Ditto for when I'm going back.

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vaksel
traffic lights system

~~~
rokhayakebe
I am hoping this would be "read-only".

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petercooper
eBuyer.com - they're like the NewEgg of the UK. They have some great bargains
from time to time but you always have to visit their site to dig around for
them.. they have no Twitter feed, no blog, no API for their products, no
affiliate program.. it sucks because otherwise they're the best place to buy
computer parts/gadgets/techie gear here.

A more general answer is.. ALL e-commerce sites. Preferably with a standardish
API so that you can do stuff like put together comparison engines easily
without scraping HTML.

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tptacek
My municipal government.

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freejoe76
My employer, The Denver Post. My bank. My library.

~~~
natrius
Wesabe has an API, so if it supports your bank, then you already have an
indirect API for it.

<https://www.wesabe.com/page/api/examples>

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awt
Craigslist

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Stubbs
The UK government. There's so much information held in their records that
would be great to get at through an API.

Can I include all the bodies funded by the government, like the Royal Mail
(for their postcode db), Ordnance Survey (for their map data) to name a
couple. They're funded by our taxes, so why not allow free access to it?

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timtrueman
Power grid data would be nice, maybe then devices could start knowing when it
best to power down or charge.

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mtrimpe
Albert Heijn, or any other supermarket.

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bemmu
Ad networks should have a standard way for me to query what my CPM was for
yesterday, so that I can make an intelligent decision about which ads to show
tomorrow. Of course that might not be wise for them to provide...

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al_
Gas stations, supermakets

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gibsonf1
I really wish gmail had an API!

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johns
They do. It's called IMAP

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arjunb
interface Energy { getUsage(); setPowerState(outletID, powerState); ... }

I wonder if we could create a developer community oriented around defining
interface standards we'd like to consume.

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herval
My Bank. Actually any bank outside USA at all!!

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psadauskas
Congress

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rokhayakebe
InfoUSA.

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mwerty
imdb

~~~
arjunb
<http://www.imdb.com/interfaces>

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ev0
Unfortunately these are by no means the modern web APIs as we know and very
limited in uses due to their nature. A RESTful API to the imdb online database
would be hugely popular.

~~~
arjunb
the netflix apis offer pretty rich catalog detail APIs that are RESTful:
<http://developer.netflix.com/>

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liangzan
dropbox

~~~
smanek
why? You have the files, which is pretty much the best API you could want,
isn't it?

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kubrick
Paypal could use one.

