Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=955077

by shafqat • 17 years ago

68 153 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Are there APIs that you wish existed to help make your work easier? Help your startup? Or just allow you to build cool products?

shafqat6• 17 years ago

I'll start. Wish there was an API that:

1) Allowed me to find high quality, license free images easily.

2) Let me access LinkedIn data. I know LinkedIn has an API, but its not open.

mpk2• 17 years ago

Second that LinkedIn API request.

dkasper2• 17 years ago

On flickr there is an option to search for commercially usable images. To do it from the API you need "prior arrangement" though.

paloalto807• 17 years ago

Try Photos8 for public domain photos

fname• 17 years ago

Fantasy Football APIs, partuclarly Yahoo's.

mattdennewitz2• 17 years ago

fantasy anything would be nice

shafqat6• 17 years ago

Wow, I forgot about this - couldn't agree more. Have been waiting for this for a long time.

imp• 17 years ago

MyFantasyLeague.com has a read/write API: http://football.myfantasyleague.com/2009/export

lamnk• 17 years ago

IMDB's API

nanexcool• 17 years ago

Have you tried TMDb? http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1/

I've played with it and seems good enough.

harpastum• 17 years ago

TMDb is pretty decent (I use it to keep track of my personal movie collection [1]), but a lot of the data is missing/incomplete.

It's a whole lot better than nothing, but it's far from perfect.

[1] http://moviedb.samwarmuth.com

7a1c9427• 17 years ago

Freebase? It has data on most movies in IMDB. And an open API.

smhinsey• 17 years ago

I really want an API that provides info on TV shows. Ever since I heard about the Tommyverse[1] I've wanted to build an application that automatically maps it and lets you play around with the connections between shows, and while it's technically possible to do it with the data IMDB does make available, you can't easily make it public and it's a real hassle.

[1] http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html

mattdennewitz2• 17 years ago

mlb game data, within 24 hours of each game

ulf2• 17 years ago

i wrote a parser for NBA games, get the data straight from yahoo. Using Python and BeautifulSoup, piece of cake. I would think MLB could work the same.

moron4hire3• 17 years ago

Yeah, HTML scraping ESPN.com is not very hard. I did it for college basketball once in a strange sort of database that attempted to predict March Madness brackets. It worked really well for teams that had encountered each other during the season... except only 2 or 3 pairs of teams had ever played each other during the regular season. Works much better on NBA and NFL games, where there are far fewer teams, they see each other more often, and the rosters are a little more static.

shafqat6• 17 years ago

Care to share? Sounds awesome.

jonknee3• 17 years ago

Isn't that already done? You can even get raw Pitch F/X data.

http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2009/

Here's an example day's scoreboard in JSON:

http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2009/month_07/da...

pistoriusp• 17 years ago

An API that implements multiple tableview row editing in the iPhone SDK.

runinit• 17 years ago

Traktor Pro

btucker2• 17 years ago

A reverse lookup for finding all the shortened URLs associated with a given canonical URL.

shafqat6• 17 years ago

Interesting... what would be the application of this? Any ideas you can share?

btucker2• 17 years ago

Lots of possibilities, but think backtweets.com as an example of something which would be much easier to accomplish if such an API existed.

dlg• 17 years ago

- US & State Government tax information. The tax code is amazingly complex. It would be good if you could figure out the tax implications of various events. Better if they simplified the tax code to where this was possible. Moreover, data.gov so far is a disappointment. Maybe they'll improve it. But I'd love to dig in to purchasing and personnel costs for every branch of government.

- Good stock market historical tick data (and streaming data). Opentick tried for a time, but mostly you need to contact expensive services. This makes it hard to mess around.

- A good local event API. Lots of companies have tried, few have good results.

- LinkedIn: They've been promising an open contact book API since 2007, but have kept it closed. If they had an open API (that lets you actually store data/invite), it would mean a lot of sites would be building on them.

- My dream: The big scientific journals would require everyone publishing a paper to upload all relevant datasets to a central repository which could be queried.

- Anyone you have an account with (Financial firms, banks, vendors) would have a standard commerce API. Sure, today you can export stuff in Quicken, etc formats, but Mint had to do a big deal with Yodlee to get the data in a uniform, queryable way.

And, mad props to Microsoft for opening the Bing API with pretty good terms. Google used to have a search API and it had horrible terms. Then they decommissioned it. Who would have guessed that MS would be more developer-friendly than G?

camccann• 17 years ago

Who would have guessed that MS would be more developer-friendly than G?

Anyone who's done Microsoft-based development? MS is incredibly developer-friendly compared to many platform vendors. It's a point of business strategy for them (if memory serves me, that's what Ballmer's infamous "developers, developers, developers, developers" thing was about in context).

Just don't try and mix in any technology from one of MS's competitors and you'll be fine.

fauigerzigerk2• 17 years ago

True, they are developer friendly. .NET is a good platform. It's extensive and well documented. There is innovation in C# as well. But the purpose of all that goodness is to make you sell their licenses. Where Oracle has their salesforce, Microsoft has their developers to do the selling for them.

Unfortunately their licensing is from an era that has come and gone. Building software that uses things like Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint or Office means to limit your scale to what they call "Micro ISV". You provide that package to your client and 95% of your revenues go straight to Microsoft.

You can build on their stuff but you won't scale and you won't grow, not because their technology doesn't scale, but because their licensing doesn't scale.

jimbokun• 17 years ago

"My dream: The big scientific journals would require everyone publishing a paper to upload all relevant datasets to a central repository which could be queried."

I work on a site that's trying to do that for the learning sciences.

http://pslcdatashop.web.cmu.edu/

Most of the data so far is from various studies in the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, because the head of the PSLC can tell the researchers to put their data in there, but we'd like to convince others to share, too.

I also happen to be working on a web services API to this data at work right now.

nl3• 17 years ago

"Google used to have a search API and it had horrible terms. Then they decommissioned it"

It always surprises me when people say this. Apparently it's not widely known that Google do make their search API available: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje

(Before anyone says "that's just the AJAX API", please READ THE LINK, and scroll down to see the Java & PHP samples)

Tichy• 17 years ago

What quotas do they have, though? I remember people reporting to be blocked from Google for "looking like a bot". So I thought the search API will only work if the requests come from lots of different IP addresses, as would be the case for use in AJAX applications.

leif• 17 years ago

Tax information would be HUGE. I would also like to see an API for general government records.

For example, if we had voting records, we could finally stop hearing all this "but you voted on -----" "no I didn't go back and check the record" "no look you voted on ----- which is basically the same" "shut up I served in the war" "yay war" stuff every election. We could just look it up and say "hey look you did". The Times "Congress API" is on its way to this, but last I checked, all it had was the attendance records.

rscott• 17 years ago

Stubhub & movie tickets

systemtrigger• 17 years ago

My body, starting with my brain. Please provide clear documentation.

flannelcatering2• 17 years ago

The UI layer of an app is more or less a (primitive) API into the human mind.

Though, I think you're right. The documentation is quite poor.

barredo• 17 years ago

I would like:

  storeNewBrainMemory();

and

  saveBrainToDisk();

zephjc2• 17 years ago

brain.pickle()

steveklabnik• 17 years ago

I think brain.serialize()

would be pretty cool...

mpk2• 17 years ago

On a similar note, I remember reading a comment somewhere requesting a search interface for reality 'so I can find my damn keys when I lose them'.

dasil003• 17 years ago

If the index is broken then the brute force search is going to take too long.

sp332• 17 years ago

You're not the only one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578999

cloudkj• 17 years ago

Amen. I've always wanted a way to "diff" the different states that my body has been in.

Jim_Neath• 17 years ago

I need cmd + z for my brain.

hack_edu• 17 years ago

And fg

caffeine• 17 years ago

Also a GNU screen implementation would be nice. ^A-D during certain interminable lectures, particularly.

baran• 17 years ago

APIs into hospitals medical data.

Herring• 17 years ago

And schools: class registration

zyb09• 17 years ago

Subway. On the stations here they have displays, that show in how many minutes the next train will arrive (which is real-time data). Would be cool if they broadcast this information on the net, you could see if you need to hurry to the station or not.

yangyang• 17 years ago

I doubt there's an API, but you can see departure boards for most (London) tube stations online: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/livetravelnews/departureboards/tub...

They're actually more detailed than the boards in the stations as they show current train locations.

jonknee3• 17 years ago

Petition your local system to get on it. BART makes the data available which is pretty slick:

http://www.bart.gov/schedules/developers/index.aspx

decadentcactus2• 17 years ago

Same, but for ALL public transportation. The number of iphone apps/sms notifications that would pop up from it would be astounding.

msie2• 17 years ago

Free or low-cost tv schedule api. Currently one has to pay about $500 per market/region per month.

gsiener• 17 years ago

yellowbkpk• 17 years ago

Not exactly an API (just data), but it's cheap (USD20/year):

http://www.schedulesdirect.org/

msie2• 17 years ago

Too many restrictions on the use of the data:

http://www.schedulesdirect.org/sagreement

kbalsen2001• 17 years ago

Check out http://www.cruxle.com. It recommends movies and TV shows available on TV you might love to watch. We are planning to open our TV guide recommendations via XML-based API. Please send us an email at info@cruxle.com, if you would like to access our APIs.

flannelcatering2• 17 years ago

Sports statistics. NFL, MLB, NBA, etc.

shafqat6• 17 years ago

Realtime (i.e. in game stats) or just up to date player, team, league stats.

I think the leagues fight hard to disallow this although they have recently lost a couple high profile lawsuits.

trafficlight• 17 years ago

In 2007, MLB even tried to claim copyright on player's names and statistics.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/06/mlb-tries-to...

grumpycanuck3• 17 years ago

Again, the company I work for offers this kind of data but you have to pay for it. We have lots of clients who run fantasy baseball web sites and make use of our real-time stats feeds to update their games.

grumpycanuck3• 17 years ago

I work for a sports data integration company, so you can get this data easily. Oh, you mean for free? Yeah, that's not gonna happen any time soon. Someone has to pay people to collect those statistics and then make them available.

amandle• 17 years ago

A lot of people really enjoy keeping track of sports stats. Maybe some sort of a wiki would work well for this purpose?

philwelch• 17 years ago

You know how sportscasters always have some sort of weird statistic to pull out of their ass, like "Brett Favre has never lost a game, at home, with the temperature less than 34 degrees"? Is there some sort of API or query system so someone at the networks can throw this shit together out of the raw data in real time?

raghus2• 17 years ago

Real-estate API (open homes, home sales by zip etc)

tvon• 17 years ago

Funny, I came to say the same thing.

Definite business opportunity there, the two services I have found (in this case I'm looking for Texas data) both consider using an iframe "integration".

arjunb• 17 years ago

zillow has a pretty decent api

raghus2• 17 years ago

Zillow is a start but there is a ton of data that is tied behind MLS licensing and Realtor associations. That data should be free and public.

moron4hire3• 17 years ago

An semantic equivalent to an "#include" or "using" statement that looked for the library on a central repository instead the local disk, automatically managing caching and versioning.

wlievens• 17 years ago

maven?

dannyr• 17 years ago

Google Tasks

harper• 17 years ago

This guy reverse engineered the google tasks ajax calls and created a perl module interface for it:

http://github.com/nickspacek/Net-Google-Tasks/

Works decently. Could easily be replicated in any language.

tiffani• 17 years ago

Appliances: stove, oven, coffee maker, refrigerator. Various other household items: garage doors, locks, etc. This overly expensive, yet dumb, flat panel TV we just bought. Extending out to the driveway...my car. The energy meter on the side of the house (read-only access, obviously, just to keep the power co. happy). The most mundane stuff could use an API, if you ask me!

thorsview• 17 years ago

have you heard of http://www.pachube.com?

rwhitman• 17 years ago

A solid global small business geo data API.

Fortunately there are a few different startups working on this, and a rudimentary way to hack it with Google AJAX API but there's still nobody who can allow me to simply punch in name+city search and give me the address, geocode meta reliably for any city in the world and without cache restrictions.

Google has it all but needs to open this data up better.

ajaimk• 17 years ago

Hacker News API?

paloalto807• 17 years ago

I can't imagine what you would need other than HN's RSS feed. What did you have in mind that could extend Hacker News?

cstejerean• 17 years ago

comments for a given thread, score of posts and comments, and user information.

edd• 17 years ago

Notification of replies to comments you make.

biafra• 17 years ago

Writing a Hacker News Android Client?

I think I will start without an API anyway. Most of the things I need to do should be possible with the RSS "API".

qeorge• 17 years ago

Try this:

http://parselets.com/parselets/yc/14?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.y...

arnorhs• 17 years ago

I would love to be able to get my upvotes (stories/comments separate) in an RSS feed somehow...

Not at all an API, but since we're on the subject.

I like reddit's format, where you can add .rss to almost any url and it returns the same result as an RSS feed

petervandijck• 17 years ago

An API into the postal system of every country.

jot• 17 years ago

How about one of these:

http://l-mail.com http://postful.com http://earthclassmail.com http://postalmethods.com

paulsingh• 17 years ago

Can you elaborate?

I've been building a little side thing called snailpad (http://www.snailpad.com) and have a beta API running for some of the paying customers at this point.

rjurney2• 17 years ago

An open Linkedin API.

dshah• 17 years ago

Wish granted. I think LinkedIn released their API to the public this week.

rjurney2• 17 years ago

They did. Rock on!

radley• 17 years ago

Hulu, Clicker, Mixcloud, Comcast's "TV Everywhere", Spotify, Mog, iTunes store, Amazon VOD & mp3, etc.

nl3• 17 years ago

A OCR API. The Google Docs OCR API is a good start, but it's tied pretty closely to GDocs. I'd like to post an image and get back text.

dylanz• 17 years ago

Is that even possible at the moment? Most software I've tried just isn't ready for something like that (granted, I haven't tried any of the commercial products). Tesseract is pretty good, but definitely not perfect.

cema• 17 years ago

The general answer to the character recognition problem is negative (currently not possible). However, several important subproblems are solvable. For example, if you know that a particular image came from a printed text, or from handwriting, or a (printed) form, etc, there are some very good solvers. Not perfect (neither is a human, in case of handwriting or a poor fax), but good to very good.

For further googling, see terms ICR, OCR, character recognition.

As a user, I have had very good results with Finereader. Have not tried Tesseract. Parascript was good with online character recognition, but that market is small, and I have not looked at them for a while (disclaimer: I used to work in a previous incarnation of the company).

nl3• 17 years ago

"Not perfect" is good enough for me. There's a whole class of applications where being able to take a photo of some words and have at least a few of them understood would be useful. I'd like to be able to index against the words that can be understood, and present the original image as the search result.

ahlatimer• 17 years ago

Generally: I wish practically everything had an open API. It's incredible what people can build when they have decent access to an API.

Specifically:

TuneCore, as it would make my startup idea a whole lot easier.

School registrations. I really wish there was some standardized API for universities. That'd make it possible to plug in the classes you want to take along with when you want to take them and get back a personalized schedule. As it is now (at least for my school), you pretty much have to write down on paper the classes you want to take along with when they're available and do it all yourself. I'd prefer something like this be standardized so one could make one website that would serve all universities and their students.

siong1987• 17 years ago

+1 for school registrations. My school only provides READ access to the courses catalog but not WRITE access to actually register courses.

http://courses.illinois.edu/cis/2010/spring/schedule/index.h... http://courses.illinois.edu/cis/2010/spring/schedule/index.x...

I really wish that they will provide one in future.

pilate• 17 years ago

Banks. Online payment processing is a mess.

sunir• 17 years ago

Interestingly, since the failure of OFX, many many banks in North America prefer screen scraping because they can guarantee the web interface has accurate data since their actual customers use it. Conversely, these banks find supporting APIs to be highly fragile since no one is watching them.

I find that logic amazing, but considering how old the online banking software is and the high risk of changing it wholesale, I don't think they are in a position to fix it in the short term.

bigbang• 17 years ago

Craigslist

paloalto807• 17 years ago

Sorely needed. I can imagine pretty amazing mashups that revolved around your local community if Craigslist had an API. I'd imagine there would be a much bigger developer community than Twitter's because of the usefulness of their data and how important they are to local businesses

korch• 17 years ago

I've always wanted to break into CL's space due to their utter disregard for the garden of web APIs growing up around them. They could be doing so much more with their service for the community, and I don't mean going the big time corporate route obsessed with short-term revenue.

There have been many CL clones(kijiji), but none gained enough eyeballs to make an interoperating API work. I suspect these attempts failed because they didn't pay attention to the community and instead acted liked closed corporations right out the starting gate. I thought the CL killer would appear on Facebook, but that hasn't happened because of totally different dynamics in Facebook's ecosystem.

Actually, I'm surprised that I haven't seen someone one here posting a hacked up API wrapper around Craigslist as a mini-startup.

svjunkie• 17 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm an amateur in every sense of the word but eager to learn. A Craigslist API could make for some really cool mashups but many of those could probably also be created using the RSS feeds they provide. Do you see any substantial advantage to a distinct Craigslist API?

pyre5• 17 years ago

There was a mashup that did something with Craigslist and photos, but Craigslist shut them down. I think it allowed you to view the listing with the photos in it (rather than needing to click on each listing to see the photos).

schammy• 17 years ago

Local movie times. It's stupid this isn't available from someone. The only thing it's going to do is increase the number of people going to see a movie.

Maybe there's one now but 3 years ago there wasn't one and I had to build a scraper for Yahoo movies to build the product I wanted.

jodrellblank5• 17 years ago

There's one for the iPhone http://code.google.com/p/metasyntactic/wiki/NowPlaying

(From a Microsoft C# compiler/parser guy, no less).

sid0• 17 years ago

Meta's an ex-Microsoftie -- he's currently at Google.

zephjc2• 17 years ago

doWhatIMean("parse a bunch of names and sort")

This is from the same framework that has winTheGame() and doMyHomework()

danut• 17 years ago

Wolfram Alpha's api?

jodrellblank5• 17 years ago

and justMagicallyWork(), the call that papers over leaky abstractions, off-by-one errors, misunderstandings, logical errors in your thinking and just does whatever it is you were trying to do.

>>> data = urlopen('example.org/lovelydata/2009/') YetAnotherException: [...]

It needs some kind of web form cookie login non-standard authentication. Aaargh I can't spend any more time on this sub-project it was only supposed to take two minutes!

>>> import bigGuns Warning, Universe enters a fragile state. Tread carefully. >>> data = justMagicallyWork(urlopen('example.org/lovelydata/2009/')) Success. Cost: 12 Karma. >>> del bigGuns normality restored

Phew!

failrate2• 17 years ago

College class schedules (as well as registration schedules). Currently, even the best are buggy, slow and cumbersome. I have to take certain classes at different schools in order to fulfill my degree requirements and keep working full time. So, I often need to search for a single class across multiple institutions for the time that fits.

andreshb• 17 years ago

I had the same problem, worked over-time (startup life), and took classes at two institutions as a way around the bureaucracy for pre-reqs. I ended up automating the class look up process using selenium on Firefox. But then they called me in because my account was making requests every second, and were worried more students would try what I was doing and crash the system. (The DID tell me to keep checking for open spots, they never said to not use scripts)

This was the only way I could get the classes I needed to graduate on time

failrate2• 17 years ago

Ouch, polling every second? How often did the data actually change?

doubleyooexwhy• 17 years ago

I'd like an API that had a function similar to this:

     make_this_many_dollars_magically_appear_in_my_bank_account(1000000000);

md7• 17 years ago

Centralized Spam filter API with an access to Gmail spam filter, Yahoo Mail spam filter, etc. to report spam and check emails for spam.

pyre5• 17 years ago

Why centralized? Why not just make it decentralized with peering?

urlimg• 17 years ago

Image processing API? http://urlimg.com

EGF• 17 years ago

I would love to have a food nutrition info global read write api

eswat• 17 years ago

Health insurance

nir2• 17 years ago

Gmail.

But more than a specific API, it would be cool if websites simply provided an XML(/JSON/etc) version for every urls. Eg, http://news.ycombinator.com/item.xml?id=955077 would return the data in this page in XML format. This would be pretty simply to create (at least as read-only API), handle the situations where people resort to HTML scraping and effectively remove the need for API docs.

jodrellblank5• 17 years ago

GMail has APIs - POP3 and IMAP.

nir2• 17 years ago

There's also RSS, but all of these provide access to mail functionality, while Gmail is a lot more than that. The uses I have in mind are closer to Google Labs' "Unsend", or having web service-like access to moving stuff around in gmail, creating alternate UI etc.

aaronbrethorst• 17 years ago

Any and all data from the Federal Government. There cannot possibly be enough structured data coming from there.

thecombjelly2• 17 years ago

Pandora - Music Genome Project. I've been working on a media player, AuraMP, for a number of years and I've really wanted to plug into sites like Pandora.

dkasper2• 17 years ago

what about http://www.last.fm/api?

thecombjelly2• 17 years ago

Correct, they do have an open api but it just doesn't always seem to have the ability or content that Pandora has. I would like best to use as many of the major providers as possible.

morphir• 17 years ago

A concurrent REST api, written in scheme. That support a parallel/multicore environment. Which in turn compiles to C.

brianobush• 17 years ago

a real-world grep. this might be solved in my lifetime, since books, notes, etc are all moving to digital. sometimes i just wish i could grep for x and it would find x in all my books, notebooks, etc.

Poleris• 17 years ago

I'm actually working on this problem. It's remarkable the amount of content we actually generate and the number of services/mediums we generate them on. Simply fetching all the data and hosting it centrally is a large enough problem, let alone indexing all of it.

jimmybot• 17 years ago

Suggest/autocomplete. Well, it's not really enough to call it an API, since it's already just AJAX requests for JSON, but it'd be nice if the format was standardized and they all supported JSONP so that it can be cross-domain.

kilps• 17 years ago

Music. I'mm yet to find a good api which let's me query information about artists / songs etc.

And the good local events api someone mentioned would also be great.

alexkay• 17 years ago

> Music

http://musicbrainz.org/ is extremely good at this.

titusz• 17 years ago

check out http://developer.echonest.com/

DXL• 17 years ago

An API for a service that prints and snail mails documents cheaply and professionally in the Netherlands. That would let me build a cool online billing app.

xinsight• 17 years ago

iTunes Connect (Contains sales, payments, reviews, ratings for publishers with products in iTunes)

known• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Market_Access to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC

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