api

Twitter plans to launch a new platform that lets Web publishers display 'tweets' on their sites more broadly and easily than is possible today via the company's APIs (application programming interfaces).

Google introduced Maps Labs Friday, a cool new set of innovative add-ons to its popular map service that offers a multitude of new ways to explore places near and far. Google Maps Labs is an incubator to test features for the Google Maps service, in the same spirit as Gmail Labs. When you go to Google Maps, click on the green flask icon at the top, where eight new test features await.

In an aggressive move, MySpace will open its users' public activity stream data to external developers, so that third-party applications and Web sites are able to display these status updates and action notifications.

Google Inc. has a new API for Google Sites that should make it easier to add content and edit Web pages.

Interested in tracking the Twitterers in your city or even your neighborhood? Or maybe you want to track the tweets sent from an area where there's a major event or disaster?

The technical problems that affected the performance and availability of third-party Twitter applications in recent days have been fixed, the micro-blogging and social networking company said Monday evening.

Yahoo's high-profile and widely used search APIs (application programming interfaces) and search programs for external developers are up in the air after the company's decision to outsource its search engine services to Microsoft.

I just finished watching the PayPal Platform Preview, which was PayPal's official announcement of their new open development platform (it was previously leaked on TechCrunch). Officially called "PayPal X," the platform was presented by Osama Bedier (VP of platform and emerging technology) in broad, almost utopian terms, as something that would unleash waves of innovation transforming the way goods and services are delivered. Maybe.

Rackspace Tuesday released an API allowing developers greater access to the company's cloud computing platform, and said that customers will be able to move workloads back and forth between the Amazon and Rackspace clouds.

PayPal will soon open up its platform to third-party developers, allowing them to build applications with a range of money transfer options.

Google has released a new API for Google Maps designed to relieve developers of the burden of maintaining their own repositories for geographical data.

One big obstacle to SaaS vendors getting their applications adopted more widely is that so many of them don't offer open APIs. Offering APIs is crucial for vendors to get their applications supported by channel partners and for customers looking to integrate SaaS offerings with legacy applications, said participants on the panel for a lively but lightly attended session Tuesday at Interop in Las Vegas dubbed "Herding cats: Managing SaaS sprawl."

Facebook, Inc. Monday moved to virtually free the activity streams of its users.

Highlighting the rising popularity of real-time action notifications in social networks, Facebook will let external developers access the "activity stream" its members display on their profiles.