API

PayPal, eBay's well established but aging mechanism for online payments, is trying to rebuild itself for a new generation of online commerce possibilities.

At an event for press and developers on Thursday, PayPal and its partners described several new programming interfaces that are part of the company's upcoming Adaptive Payments Service and showed what developers can do with them.

For example, Microsoft will use the interface to enable payments within its forthcoming Azure cloud-computing service. And LiveOps' on-demand outsourcing service will use it to automatically handle fluctuating payment amounts and changes to who's being paid. Finally, the … Read more

Is Twitter getting possessive of its own name? Maybe.

A developer building an application using Twitter's API was told via e-mail that Twitter took issue with the user interface of his application, allegedly very similar to Twitter's own, as well as his use of the word "tweet" in the application's name.

The developer forwarded the e-mail to TechCrunch: "Twitter, Inc., is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own."

Uh-oh. If Twitter is staking a claim to the word "tweet," … Read more

Personal bookmarking service Read It Later has some nice new features this week for both users and developers.

On the user side, there's now an updated version of its reading application for the iPhone, which lets users access their saved reading list even when they're not near a data connection. The new version supports both password-protected sites and articles that are spread out over multiple pages. Once you've plugged in your password to a site that needs it, the app stores the password so you don't have to enter it each time the app needs to … Read more

On Tuesday Digg announced big changes to its API that should make third-party developers happy--and maybe even rich.

The most major one being that the company has let up on its use for commercial applications, meaning that developers will be able to create services that take advantage of Digg's content and community without first having to ask for permission from the company. This includes pulling in content from the service and either charging to do so, or including on-page advertisements--two things which kept application developers from making a profit, or even charging for their creations.

The updated application programming … Read more

Of the formative figures in open source, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Eric Raymond loom large. Arguably, however, few have had as much of a disruptive force as Tim O'Reilly, who has helped to create the open-source market and has spent the last six years reshaping it with his seminal "Open Source Paradigm Shift" and other articles.

In an engaging and informative recent TWiT podcast, O'Reilly revisits the theme. It doesn't break new ground (for O'Reilly), but does highlight, and render somewhat meaningless, the fissures currently running through the open-source community.

Host Randal Schwartz … Read more

After watching other photo hosts create simple tools for Twitter users to post pictures, Flickr has finally wised up and pushed out its own solution. By divining the popular photo service with access to your Twitter stream, you can now post individual shots there right from Flickr, complete with a fancy Flic.kr shortened URL.

Instead of adding a new button to do this, Flickr users simply set up Twitter as if they were adding another blog to post photos to. Clicking the "blog this" button takes you to a page where you can type in the remaining … Read more

Amazon.com's legal team is "investigating" open-sourcing their various Web services API's including those for EC2, and S3, Amazon's main cloud computing interfaces, according to Enomaly founder Reuven Cohen.

Amazon's APIs are already the de-facto standard used by thousands of Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers and arguably the best designed method of interaction for various cloud services. By releasing the APIs as open source (creative commons, or no-sue covenant or whatever), Amazon cements its way of doing things into the greater marketplace, while opening up an even broader ecosystem of applications to interact with … Read more

Open source has proved to be phenomenally successful, and continues to grow. As open source grows beyond its roots in software infrastructure like operating systems and Web servers, however, it is finding that the types of community it attracts is increasingly corporate.

Even in the geeky application server layer, Marc Fleury notes that JBoss' "community meant users, partners, consultants," not the freedom-loving developers we often associate with open source. This is because our simplistic conception of community has likely always been wrong, as Michael Dehaan suggests.

Open source has long been more about users than developers for the … Read more

Social music start-up iLike has come a long way from its early days as the way to "dedicate a song" to your friends on Facebook.

On Wednesday, the Seattle-based company plans to unveil some fresh new features for the set of tools it offers to artists who want to connect with current and potential fans. It's hooked up the application program interfaces (APIs) of Twitter, YouTube, and MySpace to allow for more extensive content syndication from artists' iLike pages, and has released an iPhone app-creation product to boost their mobile presences.

"Marketing and communication are the … Read more