Nowadays, web 2.0 has improved dynamically and interactively than its predecessor, Web 1.0, by allowing users to access content from a Web site and contribute to it. Web 2.0 users can keep up with a site’s latest content even without visiting the real Web page. It also helps developers to create entirely new innovative services that draw on data, information, or services from the Internet in a very easily and quickly way. A tool that could help in web 2.0 functionality is API.
What is the meaning of API?
An application programming interface (API) is a protocol intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other.
What is innovation in assembly or Mashup?
Web 2.0 platforms creation is depending on the APIs. This creation is called Mashup which is creating a new web application that recall its data and information from an external data sources, which what we can call assembled innovatively. The expert in the Web world O’reilly also defines Innovation in Assembly saying that
When commodity components are abundant, you can create value simply by assembling them in novel or effective ways.
Mashups are extremely common on the internet these days. As long as, web applications are effectively communicating with each other through the APIs, they extend their platforms or mashups. There are many examples of these web applications such as Twitter, Flicker, Google Maps and many more. In this post I’m going to present to you Yelp application and test how much it could mashup?
What is Yelp?
Yelp users can select or accesses any information they want in quick and convenient way, while Yelp have to take all filtered reviews and maps them by city. This function needs a plenty of hardware and software to provide the 86 million monthly visitors with Yelp services. Fortunately, Google had already made the hard work through Google Maps; Yelp just attached the data of Google Maps API on the top.
Here are some of Innovation in assembly best practices that Yelp had applied:
(1) Yelp offers APIs to its service by easily accessing Google Maps and adding reviews and sharing them on Facebook.
(2) Yelp is designed for remix ability by tagging the places on the map which make them uniquely addressable.
(3) Yelp apply API best practices by managing the reviews and filtering them, Providing genuine developer support and documentation, such as email, blog, F&Q and talk.
(4) Yelp built its business model on the successful Google Maps API.
(5) Yelp platform builds customers trust and loyalty by letting them share their opinion and thoughts about everything around them.
Finally, I hope that the perfect idea of API has been realized through the communication between Google Maps and Yelp reviews. However, we have to mention that there are some issues about the gaps in Yelp security.
If you want to read more about how Google Maps work you can chech these posts:
Innovation in Historic Assembly – by Matt Hargreaves
“Innovation in Assembly” Google maps – by Hussain Althawadi
and to read more about Yelp application you can check this post:
Innovation in Assembly – by Huimin Victor Zhang
Have you Find Yelp more than what you expected?
Tell us your thoughts?
Eman
Refereences:
http://91-592-722.wiki.uml.edu/file/view/understanding_web_20.pdf
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-mashups/index.html
Eman Alshehri 
Hi Eman,
Great post on yelp! As you mentioned, “(5) Yelp platform builds customers trust and loyalty by letting them share their opinion and thoughts about everything around them.”, do yelp integrate their opinions and thoughts if the customers/users were to provide valuable feedbacks about yelp, and do people do that?
Hi Ngjerfen,
Good question, yes, Yelp users can send feedback through contact Yelp section, and they can select which topic they want to send the feedback about from a slid list that have a range of common topics.
check it here ..
http://www.yelp.com.au/contact
Thanks
Thanks for the post, Eman, I thought it was great. It helped me understand how Yelp uses others API’s (eg Google Maps, Facebook) and offers their own (eg mobile). I wondered about your comment “Yelp built their successful business model on Google Maps”. How exposed do you think this makes them to changes by Google and what about other mapping applications in the future?
Thanks for dropping by, Bronwyn.
Great question, Google is a company that provides its maps API as a service to other application developers. There are agreements between Google and those developers, and that means if Google are making any changes it is going to notify its application developers about it. Therefore, those developers have to make their own changes to their applications if they need to.
Dear Eman
It has been rightly said that the patterns do complement one another very well, and it has been why Web 2.0 applications are becoming quite successful. There upcoming prospect about those applications have almost been limitless! This has been very exciting to see what will happen next.
Yelp has released the free REST as well as JSON dependent application programming interface in August 2007. Application programming interface gives the access to the business listing details, reviews, photos along with ratings and may also be used for adding the business information to the website, widget and mobile application. Application programming interface is used for integrating the business reviews in present Google Maps applications like the onZillow.com. Yelp has been the instance of the ubiquitous computing as one may access service from its individual computer and also its mobile smart phone.
sami
Thanks for the valuable information you added about yelp. Indeed, the innovation of Web 2.0 applications had made our lives more convenient.
Thanks for dropping by Sami.
i just wrote out a fairly long feedback but a php mistake
appeared and i lost it all!
What a pity!
anyway I’m here if you have any questions.
Thanks for reading my post.