Mandrill, a transactional email API like Amazon SES

Amazon SES is awesome, said MailChimp 1 year ago.

Developers do need transactional email API (1-to-1 email, as compared to MailChimp's 1-to-many service) for sending bills, receipts, etc. And so MailChimp integrated Amazon SES into their service, providing many of the features that MailChimp already provides.

Then 1 year later.. Mailchimp has a Mandrill :)

Mandrill is not based on Amazon SES. It is quite obviously a rival, as they deprecate MailChimp STS that integrates Amazon SES.

There are also other transactional email API providers like MailGun, Sendgrid, ...

Face.com, faced-off!

Face.com provides a face recognition API.

It's biggest customer is Facebook. And recently, Facebook acquired the company, and killed off it's API!

It's a rather sad consequences from a good acquisition. It's unhealthy too, since that makes developer think:

Is this API going to last forever, and never get dropped no matter what?

Don't let open API be a trap.

Email in a RESTful API

There are many Email providers that provide a restful web API. The cost is usually starting from $0.10 per thousand emails.

Mailgun, Sendgrid, Amazon AWS, ...

Compare them!

Curl it easily using Mailgun

curl --user api:key https://api.mailgun.net/v2/farfaraway.uk/messages \     
     -F from='Shrek <cuteogre@farfaraway.uk>' \
     -F to='Fiona <princess@farfaraway.uk>' \
     -F subject='Status update' \
     -F text='The cat is off the hook'

Yahoo! Search API - BOSS

Google, the king of search, used to provide a cool web search API. But that has been deprecated.

An alternative to Google Search API is Yahoo! Check out BOSS. You read it correctly, boss.

It is a paid API at $0.80 per 1,000 queries. Kind of expensive.