APIs

Mapping start-up Socialight opens API

For something so focused on navigation and geography, it's a bit ironic that location-based social networks have to work their way through such a jungle: carrier partnerships, handset compatibility, creepy privacy concerns, and what-have-you. But one small New York start-up, Socialight, says it's found a route: developers, developers, developers.

Socialight, which focuses on user-created city maps and whose founders insist that location-based mobile services can have functions other than stalking your friends, announced Wednesday that it has opened its application program interface (API). This will let developers mesh Socialight into applications for mobile platforms like Apple's iPhone, … Read more

Adventures in music analysis

Founded to two MIT Media Lab alums, The Echo Nest is focused on what it calls "music intelligence." The company is developing software technology that can analyze the sounds within music files, text within online articles and blog postings about music, and other online data (such as songs being downloaded in a particular week). It will then license this technology to developers--commercial and non-commercial--to help them create a whole new class of music software and Web applications.

It's possible to imagine hundreds of possibilities. A music company could build an application to identify current trends in order … Read more

Web analytics and Twitter: An incomplete story

Hitwise released research this week reporting that Twitter had a nice relative growth spurt this year. The key word is relative. The site grew from a market share of a whopping 0.0005 percent (U.S. Internet visits to Twitter.com) to 0.0016 percent in April. That places the Twitter.com site at number 439 on the list of social networks. I'll bet if you try to name the 438 social nets above Twitter you'll run out of gas well before you hit 50.

You've got to start somewhere, though, so I don't quite understand … Read more

Google map directions get Street View

Google has built its Street View into Google Maps' ability to provide driving directions, the company said Tuesday.

With the feature, a small camera icon appears next to the intersections in the turn-by-turn directions. Clicking on the icon brings up a view of the intersection so people can see the area in question.

Google Street View is available in 44 areas of the United States, and there are strong signs Google is bringing Street View to Europe. Street View is available through the Google Maps programming interface so that those using Google Maps can add Street View abilities to their … Read more

Viewzi launching visual search platform [invites]

I have written unkindly in the past about Redzee, a search engine with a too-cute-by half search results page. But I like the new visual search experiment Viewzi, which brings more variations to search interfaces.

Viewzi gives you different options to visualize search results. There is one that's very much like Redzee (and Apple Cover Flow). Its design is a little less frenetic, though, so it's easier to get a picture of your search results. In a way, Viewzi validates the Redzee concept by making visual search usable.

My favorite Viewzi view is the 4 Sources View, which … Read more

How I got burned by Twitter's API, why it matters, and how to fix it

Last week I discovered I was using Twitter too much. After an hour online with Twhirl, I got this message in the app: "Limit exceeded, paused 5 min." The error condition cleared up shortly, but the next morning, after just a few minutes, it came back and did not resolve. I had to go back to accessing Twitter via the Twitter.com site, where I still had access.

I had been bitten by a deficiency in Twitter's API (application programming interface), which allows alternate interfaces like Twhirl to work at all. The problem, it turns out, is temporarily fixable for end users, but Twitter is going to need to recode its API if it wants to make the Twitter platform for third-party apps and services more robust. And other Web 2.0 architects would do well to study this issue so they don't fall into the same hole.

I was schooled on the ins and outs of the Twitter API in part by my followers on Twitter, but also by Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, a company that offers API services to Web 2.0 companies. Here's the lowdown:

The Twitter service limits the number of updates a user can get from it to 70 per hour. There's no limit if you're using Twitter.com, but if you want to use Twhirl or Friendfeed or Flock to read your Twitter account, the Twitter service keeps track of how many requests you're sending it and cuts you off if you exceed the limit.

The problem is that all the Twitter apps you use count to your total. It's cumulative. Once an app, or more importantly, a Web service, has your Twitter log-in credentials, it can keep requesting Twitter updates on your behalf even you aren't using the service anymore. And that's what happened to me: I use Twhirl heavily, but not that heavily. It's the other dozen or so services I've signed up to over the past few months that were pinging Twitter for me and using up my allotment of updates.

There's a temporary fix for people in my boat, and it's very simple: Change your Twitter password. That will cause all the previously-configured connections to Twitter to break, and they'll stop using up your API calls. Just reconfigure the apps you do want to use with your new password and you're back in business. Thanks to my Twitter friend Scott Mahan for this tip. But this is a hack, and an inelegant one.

… Read more

Photobucket shares interface, matches Flickr

Photobucket, is making a significant change aimed to weave the widely used photo-sharing site more tightly into the Web 2.0 fabric.

The company is releasing an application programming interface (API) for its site, said Chief Executive Alex Welch. That means that ordinary developers will be able to build more sophisticated services around the Photobucket services and content.

Photobucket already made its API available to commercial partners, but now ordinary coders will be able to get access by signing up on the Web site, Welch said. The company is announcing the news in conjunction with the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. … Read more

OpenSocial apps now available to Orkut users in India

And now, the latest in social network developer platform announcements: Orkut, the community site owned by Google, has rolled out a directory of applications to its users in India and will continue to expand geographically over the next few weeks.

India, along with Brazil, is one of Orkut's main hubs of popularity; in Brazil, it faces many of the same issues that massive social networks like Facebook and MySpace do in the U.S. Despite having been developer in-house in Google's Mountain View, Calif.-based headquarters, the site has never really taken off stateside. Meanwhile, rival MySpace is currently launching an India-centric portal … Read more

Google, lock-in, and evil

The last week of news surrounding Google doesn't paint a picture of a lovey-dovey company that just wants to help you search. The backdrop for all of the news is the emergence of "cloud platforms" upon which developers can build. It used to be that developers would write for Windows or Linux: Now they're writing applications to run in the cloud of their choice (Google, Bungee Labs, Salesforce, or open-source Coghead)

The problem with this approach, as Tim O'Reilly points out with reference to Google, is it paves the way to lock-in that the "offline" world could only dream of inflicting:

I've been warning for some time that the first phase of Web 2.0 is the acquisition of critical mass via network effects, but that once companies achieve that critical mass, they will be tempted to consolidate their position, leading ultimately to a replay of the personal computer industry's sad decline from an open, energetic marketplace to a controlled economy.

Enter Google's soft disavowal of its "Don't do evil" motto. As Techcrunch suggests, Google likely doesn't like being held to this (somewhat subjective) standard anymore, now that not doing evil becomes ever more difficult at its size and scale.

So what is Google to do? How can Google preserve the impressive heft of its momentum without strangling its potential supporters?… Read more