During the Q&A portion of the earnings call, Zuckerberg was asked if they would ever charge for APIs. It’s an interesting question, and one that I’ve thought a lot about as I’ve watched Twitter change the way it works with developers. I figured that the answer would be a flat-out “No”, but it sounds like this is something that Facebook has thought about.
Zuckerberg said that the company… → Read More
Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers. Twiliocon is going on this week in San Francisco, it’s the second annual conference for the company that makes telephony easy for developers to integrate into their products. Today, the company running it, Twilio, announced that it is releasing beta support for the WebRTC standard for its client product. This means that Twilio stays on the cutting… → Read More
Google today launched two new APIs for Google Maps that are specifically geared toward tracking the location of vehicles, mobile resources and employees. By announcing these new APIs on its enterprise blog and by asking developers to go through its sales team to purchase access, the company is clearly signaling that these features aren’t so much meant for casual apps, though it’s easy to see how… → Read More
It’s been exactly one month since Twitter announced the 1.1 version of its APIs and the fact that some things were going to change for third-party developers. A lot of folks, including me, took that to mean that the stuff was about to hit the fan for anyone who has spent time building something cool on top of Twitter → Read More
Open source fear mongering is still a reality. But in today’s world, it is nuanced with the belief that an open enterprise means open APIs.
They are not the same and should not be confused. → Read More
Three weeks ago, we had announced that CrunchBase has partnered with Mashery to move the CrunchBase API to a managed solution. At the time, we simply cutover the API calls to their proxy servers. Over the past three weeks, we have been monitoring the API usage and were quite frankly blown away by the volume of calls to the API. The API numbers average nearly 100K calls per hour! Today, we are… → Read More
Google just launched a new free API that will make it easier for developers to add civic information like polling places, early vote locations, candidate data and election official information to their applications. Google says it hopes this new Google Civic Information API will “unleash the creativity of the Internet and help you build innovative products that push civic information to your… → Read More
So today, IFTTT sent out an email to users letting them know that they’d be dropping support for certain services due to Twitter’s API restrictions. That’s a correct statement, but the timing is very odd. → Read More
Here’s an email that IFTTT sent out today to users, and it’s not good news for Twitter fans. → Read More
Virtually all of Google’s APIs currently support OAuth 2.0, a framework for allowing third-party apps limited access to your data from other services, as their standard authentication mechanism. Starting today, Google is taking its OAuth 2.0 support a step further by bringing it to IMAP/SMTP and XMPP, the protocols that allow third-party access to Google services like Gmail and Google Talk. This… → Read More
One of the magical things about the Internet, and software in general, is that when you have a huge platform that is home to a large load of data, you can do cool things by opening it up a little bit. Genetic discovery company 23andMe has decided to open up an API to let developers build cool things on top of your genetic information.
It’s not as creepy as it sounds, because your data won’t be… → Read More
Calling all developers, YouTube has taken steps to join Stack Overflow and bring discussions about its API there. For those who are using the API, you know that Google Groups hasn’t really been cutting it as far as getting updated information, details, and responses.
It’s an interesting move for a Google-owned property to jump outside of its own house, but one that’s necessary to properly… → Read More
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman discussed the removal of Twitter’s feeds from its product, even though it was not their decision.
Hoffman says at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco that its product is better off without all of the noise that cross-posting from Twitter brought. When Michael Arrington pushed Hoffman on stage to call the move “bullshit”, Hoffman certainly didn’t disagree. Pushing… → Read More
Microsoft just announced a partnership Attachments.me that will make it easier for Gmail users to save attachments to Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage service. After you install Attchements.me’s Chrome or Firefox plugin, Gmail attachments will automatically be saved to SkyDrive. You can also create rules to just save certain files to SkyDrive (Microsoft’s example: “whenever John Doe sends me… → Read More
Last month, Twitter announced that some big changes were coming to its API. So developers and the Twitter ecosystem knew this was coming. But, today, the company officially unveiled the newest version of its API, v1.1, and updated its “Developer Rules of the Road” and display requirements.
One of the more notable changes we’ve seen so far, brought to our attention by Steve Streza’s tweet, is… → Read More
I am not one to argue with abundance. I am a big believer in the way we can create so much, all the time.
But I can’t stand an abundance of vendor one-upmanship and that’s just what I heard this morning at CloudOpen in a panel discussion about Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) v. Platform as a Service (PaaS). → Read More
Cambridge University Press just launched a new API that is meant to make it easy for developers to add data from a variety of the organization’s dictionaries to their own sites and mobile apps. With the launch of this API, Cambridge University Press is following in the footsteps of other well known dictionary publishers like Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as… → Read More
As many of you know, TechCrunch’s startup database, CrunchBase, makes a lot of its data freely available through an easy-to-use REST API, which launched about four years ago. The CrunchBase API has been open, free, and without rate limits, which probably explains its success. TechCrunch has made this data easily available so developers can create interesting apps, mashups, and analysis. → Read More
When Twitter published its latest thinking on how its API would evolve, and what developers it wanted to leave behind, it noted one of the areas it wanted to emphasize more was enterprise. Today we get more of a clue why: HootSuite, an enterprise-focused Twitter client that actually got a name-check in that blog post, is teaming up with Twitter to sell advertising on the social network.
A… → Read More
When I think of APIs, I tend to think of mostly end-user data being passed back and forth between consumer websites and various client apps. Automated uploading to Flickr, for example, or consuming Twitter data in some way. I don’t think of chemical patent searches. SureChem just announced an API for just that function, though, which goes to show that automation and ubiquitous computing is… → Read More
With Thursday’s Twitter API changes, App.net could not have gotten better news. Suddenly, Dalton Caldwell’s vision of a subscription-based Twitter clone seems quite clever.
Yet, when it comes to creating a competitor to such an ubiquitous service, App.net now has to face many challenges. Most of them will be very hard to overcome — even harder than reaching its $500,000 funding goal. → Read More
Apigee’s Sam Ramji pointed out to me today that Twitter did a first when communicating with developers yesterday about its new platform policies. For the first time in recent memory Twitter has used a graphic to actually illustrate what it sees as the acceptable and not so acceptable ways to use its API. The graphic is clear and to the point.
When you look at the graphic, one thing is for sure… → Read More
This is probably not the Google+ API you have been waiting for, but Google just announced the launch of version 1.2 of its Hangouts API, which comes with a number of significant new features for developers who are building products on top of Google’s group video chat service. In addition, Google also just launched private messages in Hangouts as an experimental feature. → Read More
Alcatel-Lucent is releasing a methodology for APIs that it is making available through Creative Commons. It is part of a new consulting practice the telecommunications company has established to help its service partners and enterprise customers develop, deploy and maintain APIs.
Alcatel-Lucent has made APIs a focal aspect of its business by offering them to carriers and other service… → Read More
Online payments startup WePay is today announcing lowered pricing and new API features, as it celebrates the one-year anniversary of its WePay Payments API. The company, which is backed by $19.2 million in venture funding, is actually a bit older than just one year, however. As you may remember, WePay first emerged from Y Combinator in 2009 as a simple tool to collecting group payments. The… → Read More
Well, look at this – only yesterday, API management platform Mashery announced its close of an additional $10 million in Series D funding, and today competitor Apigee is announcing a $20 million round led by new investor Focus Ventures. Also participating in the round were existing investors Bay Partners, Northwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Third Point Ventures. This API business? It’s… → Read More
Chute knows you’re tired of hearing about yet another photo-sharing or photo-syncing app. So, although it dwells in the photo sphere, thankfully Chute is taking a different approach. The recent Y Combinator grad set out to become the go-to service that app developers and content producers turn to for managing and enhancing photos in their app or on their website. You can think of Chute as a Twilio… → Read More
An API is a “must have” feature for many tech startus. Mailchimp CEO Ben Chestnut went so far as to write that the company’s API is “probably the best marketing we’ve ever done.” But for some companies an API is more than just marketing, it’s a core part of the business. As more business shifts online, non-technical business people will need to make strategic decisions about technology… → Read More
Plivo, a telephony startup from the current Y Combinator batch, is today launching its API platform for voice and SMS applications. Despite the sound of it, Plivo is not a direct competitor with developer-friendly Twilio, but is targeting larger businesses in need of scale.
The company’s founders, Venkatesh B and Michael Ricordeau (who go by Venky and Mike), met over GitHub two years ago… → Read More
Despite the fact that Google has been slowly launching more APIs for Google+, don’t expect the company to launch a full read/write API anytime soon. During a Google+ platform fireside chat at Google I/O today, Google+ VP Bradley Horowitz and other members of the Google+ team said that Google is still taking a very deliberate approach to Google+’s APIs. The company, Horowitz said, doesn’t want to… → Read More
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