President Obama tweets to victory. Hackathon challenges gender stereotypes. Plus Facebook gives 90 day notice for impending API changes such as ending custom actions for content consumption, Pocket service for reading it later launches a new SDK, and 5 new APIs.
President Obama Out-Tweets Romney--and Everyone Else
Forget the Electoral College. Future elections will be decided by... tweet count. The president made social media history on Tuesday, according to Matt Foulger of HootSource, which covers Hootsuite. Both presidential candidates were prone to being more "green" emotionally, showing more gratitude, elation and other positive emotions than anger or sadness.
Throughout Tuesday, the Barack Obama chart was very green, with a high proportion of his positive Twitter mentions marked “Enjoyment/Elation”. Clearly, his supporters were expecting a victory. In the mentions category, @BarackObama pulled away from @MittRomney as hundreds of thousands of tweets flooded Twitter. After major news organizations called the election for the president last night, his campaign posted an image of Barack and Michelle Obama in a loving embrace, accompanied by the message, “Four more years.” The image has set two social media records already, receiving more Twitter retweets (700,000) and Facebook likes (3.5 million) than any other post in history.
Could this signal a new divide, replacing blue states/red states with Twitter states/Facebook states?
Hackathon Challenge: Who Says Coding is a Guy Thing?
ESPNW (“ESPN’s online destination for women”) will hold a Hack Day at Stanford University, November 9 and 10.
As Jennifer Abel of The Daily Dot notes, the real beneficiaries of smashing the stereotypes aren't only women but software companies seeking to hire the best and the brightest.
The judges include Facebook software engineer Sophia Chung (who has written for the Huffington Post about the stereotypes she faces every day, as a woman in her profession); Sara Haider, software engineer at Twitter for Android; Danielle Tiedt, a former Bing executive who is now Chief Marketing Officer at YouTube; and Rob King, ESPNs senior vice-president for digital media, with additional judges possibly to be added.
Admission is free. Teams will work on creating APIs for Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, among others. Prizes are given to the winner in each category.
API News You Shouldn't Miss
- SOA Software’s API Management Platform And How It Compares To Its Sexy Counterparts
- Expion Chosen as Google+ Pages API Partner
- Rumor: WeChat Tests CRM API for Public Accounts
- Hackathon and More Coming to AT&T Developer Summit 2013
- Facebook Gives 90 Days Notice for a Bunch of API Changes
- Social Media's Role in the 2012 US Election: Obama Breaks Twitter Records
- Google Maps Highlights Epungo, Brazilian Real Estate Site
- SumUp brings API to its mobile payment service
- ESPN hackathon to demolish gender stereotypes, build cool apps
- Read it later service Pocket launches a new SDK to grow its community of 10,000 developers - The Next Web
- Axway Announces Intent to Acquire Vordel
- KiteDesk: Your Cloud Services Should Play Nice Together (the APIs help)
- Upside Learning Adopts Tin Can API in its Proprietary Courseware Framework
- SOA Software Launches Free API Management and Developer Community Platform
- No API, No Comment: Computer Weekly on the importance of APIs
- Turn any Database into an Online Resource with Assetcloud Powered by /db
5 New APIs
Today we had 5 new APIs added to our API directory including an online payment service, a interoperable standards-based travel booking service, another online payment service, a suite of bioinformatics services and a german online personal training service. Below is more details on each of these new APIs.
Beanstream API: Beanstream provides secure, flexible payment processing tools capable of handling credit cards, INTERAC Online, Visa Debit, Automated Clearing House (ACH), direct debit or direct payment transactions, mail or telephone orders, and other Card-Not-Present (CNP) environments. Beanstream is a bank-neutral system that is coupled with a comprehensive back-office system. Beanstream's payment functions can be accessed programmatically via SOAP API.
CAVAL API: CAVAL is an initiative for developing open standards for data interoperability in the travel and tourism industry. The CAVAL specifications consist of a set of XML schemas and WSDL endpoints along with guidelines for deploying RESTful services.
Services that CAVAL has already developed using its specifications include the commons booking, hotel booking, transfer booking, destination activity booking, and channel manager services. These services are all accessible using SOAP calls issued in XML format.
Chase Paymentech API: Chase Paymentech is an online payment system that provides credit card processing and online merchant services. They specialize in Card-Not-Present (CNP) payments for businesses of all sizes. For companies that sell abroad, they offer customized international processing solutions and guidance on accepting credit card payments overseas. For small or growing merchants, they can provide assistance with the payment process and help plan for expansion.
The Chase Paymentech payment system is programmatically accessible using SOAP calls, which facilitate its integration with users' software and online stores.
IBIVU API: IBIVU refers to the Centre for Integrative Bioinformatics at Vrije Universiteit. They offer a suite of online services for processing bioinformatics data. These services include multiple sequence analysis, pairwise sequence alignment, array data analysis, protein secondary structure prediction, protein analysis, and metabolic flux estimation. They also provide services for working with phylogenies, RNA, databases, and matrices. These services are accessible using either web consoles or SOAP-based APIs.
ProFit API: ProFit is an online personal training service. Users may design and follow their own training plan and track their process on the ProFit website. Data is recorded for each user so that they can review it whenever they wish. ProFit's functions can be accessed programmatically using a SOAP API. The ProFit website is provided solely in German.
