With all the news from the event, one thing was clear: RIM desperately wants developers to build for Blackberry and is now actively enticing them with a slew of new offerings designed to win them over.

One of the biggest announcements made yesterday involved the launch of new APIs (application programming interfaces) for third-party developers. The APIs offered include a new advertising service, a payments service, location services, and the general availability of Blackberry's own Push service, which had never before been made available to outside developers. What this means is that developers now have the tools to build applications that rival those already available on many other smartphones today, most notably, the iPhone. In some cases, the Blackberry APIs even offer something the iPhone doesn't such as is the case with the payments service which allows you to pay for apps on your next mobile phone bill.

The location services include a geo-location API that will use cell tower triangulation as a backup for when GPS fails, making location-based applications more reliable. There are also services for determining your phone's location on a map and another that helps estimate travel time for driving directions. It's obvious to see how these types of services could help build new and useful mobile applications for the Blackberry.

Also revealed was the new Blackberry Advertising Service, an offering designed to help developers generate revenue from their mobile applications. Through partnerships with ad networks, developers can easily integrate mobile advertising within their apps and track the ad's effectiveness with an included analytics package. It's even possible for these ads to access the phone's core features. For example, you'll be able to initiate a phone call from an ad or add a calendar entry from an ad. That's an innovation that many other mobile handhelds are not yet offering. These types of interactions should have a clear appeal to the many business-minded corporate Blackberry users who are often more interested in getting things done than they are with playing mindless games.

That being said, the game-playing crowd isn't being ignored either. Also announced was support for OpenGL ES, a graphics API for 3D games. While this doesn't quite put the Blackberry on par with what's available for iPhone, it's a move that's designed to keep Blackberry at least somewhat competitive in the field of mobile gaming.

Other announcements included new support for mobile developers looking to build applications with the languages and tools they already know and use. Java developers will get a new GUI builder that lets them create mobile interfaces using a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor with drag-and-drop capabilities. Adobe developers will be able to use the company's Flash Platform technology and Adobe Creative Suite tools to build rich, mobile apps as well. This is another area where Apple falls short - Flash still doesn't work on the iPhone. Instead Flash developers have to use special Adobe software to convert apps written in Flash to a format that's iPhone-compatible. Also, designers can now use Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver to build both themes and widgets using the new Blackberry Theme Studio 5.0.

Apps, Apps, Apps!

In addition to the RIM-specific announcements, a number of companies also used the Developer Conference as the launching pad for new Blackberry applications and related announcements.

Ebay, for example, unveiled a brand-new mobile app that lets you search for items, view descriptions and photos, bid, watch items, and more. It will also tap into Blackberry's now open Push services API to deliver real-time alerts as to when you're outbid on an auction. Considering that the company has already generated $400 million this year using eBay's iPhone application, this new Blackberry app should be a big hit among mobile users when it launches next month.

The popular location-based social networking service called Loopt also revealed a major update for Blackberry which includes something the iPhone can't offer due to the nature of the device: it runs in the background to continually update your location in real-time. This is one of the iPhone's biggest flaws according to critics, since so many mobile applications take advantage of always-on connectivity to track your location for the benefit of specific mobile apps. In Loopt's case, the app knows where you are in order to show you nearby friends and local businesses which you can rate. It even offers mobile coupons for the retailers and restaurants in your vicinity.

Finally, Xobni, the Outlook email search plugin that discovers social connections in your inbox, revealed their new Blackberry application, too. As with the desktop software, Xobni for Blackberry will let you find contacts in your address book quickly using Xobni Rank technology which returns results ranked based on frequency and freshness of your communication. The application will be made available sometime early next year.

The Blackberry Developer Conference continues until Thursday, so stay tuned for even more news over the coming days.

Why is Google doing this? Because the more powerful web applications become, the more important Google's search, browser and nascent OS become. More relevant to developers than some grand anti-Microsoft conspiracy, though, is that some serious UI sweetness may be forthcoming.

The Closure Compiler will scrunch up your weighty javascript for super-efficient deployment, allowing you to do more in the user's browser with a much smaller code payload to deliver. The compiler is available in binary, as a web app and as an API. Google is also releasing a Firebug extension called Closure Inspector that will translate those compiled bits of code back into their original format.

The Closure Library is a collection of cross-browser, modular, "industrial strength" UI components from across the various Google properties. Rich text editor, DOM inspector, drag and drop ala Google Maps - you want it, you got it.

Also released are a number of high-efficiency Closure Templates.

Google's Amit Agarwal says that all of the above were originally built as "20% time" projects but then became fundamental parts of some of the most popular Google applications. Now these technologies can be used in building your apps, as well.

It will be interesting to see how these Google offerings stack up and get adopted compared to Yahoo's YUI library.

Said Osama Bedier, PayPal's VP of Product Development, "We'll do 70 billion in sales this year, but there's $30 trillion dollars being spent globally. We need to tap into this... You are the X factor."

Developers can access X.com's SDKs, technical docs and API support tools to produce integrated checkout solutions. Examples of some pre-existing products using the new Adaptive Payments API include:

• The Javastore's new drag-and-drop installation and frictionless payment system;
• Instant storefronts for Facebook via Payvment's social network shopping cart system; and
• Cut-and-paste shopping solutions embedded in mobile applications, including instant purchases via ShopSavvy's barcode-enabled comparative shopping Android application.

So far, one of the key points of this morning's proceedings has been mention of the "removal of pricing barriers." As a direct shot at Amazon, the company plans to offer what it describes as an "enhanced pricing structure," with a $0.50 flat fee per transaction. For more on today's PayPal developer event, check back here for details.

For Users: Flexible Queries

One of the most interesting aspects of this library is that it gives users a lot of flexibility when they structure their queries. Ident Engine will happily accept full URLs like http://www.twitter.com/rww or just simply 'twitter.com rww' or the Webfinger email structure ('rww@twitter.com').

Not a Developer? Try these Demos

While Ident Engine is mainly aimed at developers, the team has made a number of cool demos available on its server. The Combined Profile Demo, for example, looks at a user's profiles on multiple services and then builds an aggregate profile for the user, based on commonalities it finds in these profiles. The Lifestream demo goes a step further and discovers a user's profiles on a variety of services and pulls in the latest updates. The project's homepage also features a number of additional demos.

Glenn Jones also recently released a Firefox plugin, Identify (our review), which builds on the same premises and allows users to quickly bring up the aggregate profile of any user while looking at one of their regular social network profiles.

Sharing Flash Apps on Mobile Devices

On the mobile side, Adobe and Gigya will give users the ability to share content on a wide variety of phones, including Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. Users who want to install a sharable application on their mobile phones will simply receive an SMS message with a link to the application. The service will automatically detect the type of device and deliver the right version to the user. Developers can also give their users the ability to share iPhone versions of their applications - though obviously those have to be native iPhone applications, as the iPhone doesn't support Flash.

Developers will be able to track the success of their applications through and Adobe AIR app that will allow them to measure distribution and customer usage. In partnership with Gigya, Adobe will also give developers the ability to assure installs through paid promotions and to monetize apps through cross-promotions.

Coming Soon: Easier Integration with Social Networks

Adobe also announced that it will launch another Flash Platform Service later this year that will allow developers to easily connect Flash applications written on top of Adobe's platforms with a number of social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Developers won't have to worry about the idiosyncrasies of a service's API, but will be able to write their applications on top of Adobe's social platform instead.

Much like the original premise of Ning, Social Beans simplifies the creation of community websites.  However, since it is a portable format, a Social Beans site is not locked in to a single provider. In addition to the Grou.ps platform, the 0.1 version works with MediaWiki and WordPress. A Drupal plugin is also expected for October 2009. 

At this point, Social Beans is extremely experimental and while it's an interesting concept, the group's fate lies in 2 simple questions: Is it an easy enough template for non-technical users to adopt it? And perhaps more importantly, will developers build engines to run it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

One feature the team purposely left out of the editor for now is an in-page chat. Given how many users already us IM or IRC already, this wasn't a priority for the team, though this might come in a later version.

Try It

If you want to give Bespin's collaboration a quick spin, here are some instructions courtesy of Bespin developer Joe Walker:

• Sign up or login to Bespin.
• Press CTRL+J/CMD+J to open the command line.
• Type 'follow joewalker' to get someone to share files with. Joe shared a project called pubproj globally.
• Type 'project list'. You should see joewalker+pubproj in your list of projects.
  Type 'set collaborate on' to turn on shared editing.
• Open a shared file by typing 'open /joewalker+pubproj/example.txt'.
• You should then be in a collaborative editing session with the rest of the Internet.
• Click on the collaboration icon (2 people) in the top right hand corner to show you who's editing with you.

For more details about Bespin itself, have a look at our earlier coverage.

It's a major move being worked on with both the Activity Streams and Open Social communities - it could push the rest of the web, outside of Facebook, in a direction that supports radical app innovation through the creation of a level playing field of readable data. And it could make MySpace a lot better, too.

Keller told us today that MySpace is working on increasing the amount and sophistication of user activity updates on the site in a number of different ways. In case anyone is chuckling and thinking MySpace doesn't matter, we should remember that only ten sites on the web are visited more often than MySpace still today. MySpace may be on the decline, but it's still hugely important and these moves it's making could help it become even more so.

Adding "Write" Functionality

MySpaceID currently allows sites around the web to offer sign-in using MySpace account credentials. The sites can then pull in some amount of a user's data from MySpace and use it to personalize the experience they have on the new site - friends lists can be synced and taste information can be gleaned from a profile to customize recommendations, for example.

The next step will be to bring in user activities from these third-party sites and display them in your MySpace user activity feed, much like Facebook Connect allows. This gives other sites access to distribution inside MySpace. Developers of other sites will be able to offer users the option of publishing their activities on these other sites back onto their MySpace profiles and friends' activity feeds.

Here's how MySpace's plan is unlike what Facebook is doing. The updates will be marked up for the types of activities they represent with standardized microformat code, beginning with the events format hCal and soon to include the book, movie or other review format hReview. Those little bits of code that will be added could have big consequences.

Keller says the company acknowledges that this won't be a small task for third-party developers, so in the meantime she is working on automated methods of pulling user data in from other sites' Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and marking them up automatically, with the microformat code communicating what kind of updates they are (events, reviews, etc.)

Why This is Important

This kind of data normalization creates the level playing field of information that allows new applications to be written and scale up through accessing and processing large quantities of information that have effectively been translated into the same "language." You want to build an application that processes hCal events? That will be a lot more appealing when the MySpace ecosystem of connected sites is all speaking that language.

Keller says that MySpace and the community of people working on building a common Activity Streams specification for all sites have been working closely with the Open Social community, the Google-led cross-site application platform that competes with the Facebook App platform. Keller says MySpace's new activity feed functionality will be delivered from within but extend upon the Open Social framework the company uses to connect with other sites now.

There isn't any indication yet that MySpace will make these marked-up updates available in bulk to developers for analysis; they will likely remain authenticated and limited in visibility to friends who have given approval. That would be an even bigger boost for innovation, but the promotion of the standardized data format is a huge step nonetheless.

What's In It for MySpace?

So if this has a lot of potential to be good for the web - what's in it for MySpace? Two things, primarily.

First, as Facebook grows rapidly in both user numbers and integration with sites around the web through its similar product Facebook Connect, MySpace is no longer the center of the web for millions of people. This kind of product facilitates that kind of relationship, and offering outside developers write-access to MySpace will incentivize more of them to support ongoing user-connection with MySpace. The microformatted markup makes this a lot smarter than Facebook Connect, frankly.

There is a risk that all the smarts in the world won't interest people in MySpace's declining profile, but the site remains one of the most popular on the web and a viable competitor to Facebook. (Facebook said they may or may not comment on this move by MySpace; we're still waiting to see if they'd like to.)

The goal for the program that Keller shared with us was different. She says that the microformats markup will enable the company to make smarter decisions in highlighting friends' updates and offering users' recommendations.

Keller says that MySpace is working on and will soon deploy technology that closely monitors what kind of friend updates users show interest in. If I often click on your photos but never read your blog posts, or I am very interested in your book reviews but don't care about your events listings, then MySpace will feature those kinds of your updates in my friends' activity feeds more or less prominently. Knowing what kinds of activities are being brought in from other sites will help make that more possible. The same information will facilitate smarter recommendations of content you might like.

That's why Monica Keller says "We don't want to do anything without semantics, to be honest. We can't afford to show a user content on their home page that they aren't going to like."

Watch for these new technologies to be announced in the coming weeks. They could have a big impact not just on the future of MySpace, but on much of the rest of the web as well.

Assistive and Health-Related Technology: Created by Aramys Miranda, Hernan Pelassini and Dan Raju, iSign is a simple iPhone application created to help those with hearing challenges communicate via their iPhone. The group leverages the device's touch screen and employs modified American sign language to produce voice outputs. In this way, members can use the device to communicate to those with little or no knowledge of sign language. This application won the Hackathon award for "Best Accessibility Application". Meanwhile, Chief Medical Officer gives patients iPhone access to their Google Health files. Created over the weekend by Bess Ho, Myk Klemme, Jen McCabe and Chip Vanek, the application will allow users to gather their medical records and prescriptions in one place. This is particularly useful for medical emergencies. The group plans to release the application as an open source project upon completion.

Mobile Music Production: Nettwerk recording artist BT's Sonifi is by far one of the most sophisticated iPhone music applications available. The product is a cross between Indaba's flash-based audio sequencer and Yamaha's touch instrument, the Tenori-On. While the Tenori-On retails at $1000, the Sonifi iPhone application is available in the App Store for $4.99 and allows users to mix via the touch interface on the iPod touch or iPhone. Some of the unique features of this product include a touch interface with 4 channel arrangement mapping, reactive visuals, a collaborative group mixing mode and "Stutter Edit" - a feature that allows users to shake their device for audio feedback. In the past, electronic artists have experimented with a modified NIntendo Wii remote for an accelerometer-prompted dj experience, Sonifi is the first gesture-based iPhone mixer.

Baio is a thinker, a hacker of big social patterns and an admirer of the collective intelligence that emerges from groups of people acting independently on the web. We sat down with him this week and discussed some of his ideas about what makes good social software grow.

In addition to Upcoming, Baio is also well known for his quirky, smart writing and link sharing at Waxy.org. His best known works there include tracking piracy data for Oscar nominated films for the past six years, the first published interview with an Italian factory worker who mysteriously produced the most-viewed video of all 2008 on YouTube and a number of fascinating experiments with Amazon's Mechanical Turk system, including one titled The Faces of Mechanical Turk - he payed Turk workers a small sum to post their pictures with a sign saying why they participated.

After years of experience, observation and thought, here are a few pearls of wisdom Andy offered us about how to build compelling social software. You can also follow Baio on Twitter @waxpancake.

Build to Existing Social Connections

The company Baio has joined is called Kickstarter. It's a service that lets people fund small projects by collecting "all or nothing" pledges from people around web - if a project's financial goal is met by its deadline then the money is collected, but if the goal isn't met then no one's contribution is withdrawn. The site will open to the public at the end of August, but one principle that he's had underlined by his experience with beta testers and from his time at Upcoming is this: you can't just post a request for funds or an events listing up on the web and expect strangers to stumble upon it and give it support. In both cases, these sites provided infrastructure that allowed users to reach out through their own established networks and say "here's where we're processing your show of support."

It's like social middle-ware, these kinds of services are neither inherently viral nor really destination sites where people come to browse. They add value in ways that people can't easily produce themselves - RSVP lists, maps, etc in the case of Upcoming or time-delayed money processing in the case of Kickstarter - and thus give users an incentive to reach out and ask friends to visit their pages on the sites.

Social Goals Are Front and Back End Heavy

Kickstarter's early beta tests mirror what Baio saw at Upcoming when it comes to distribution of social input. It tends to come in the most at the very beginning and at the very end. At first, project initiators are enthusiastic and do a lot of promotion. Then, if they later get close to their goals then they do a final push to promote their project. That's especially true with Kickstarter, where 90% of a fund raising goal is as good as nothing at all - users will lose all the support they've gained unless they put out another push to pass 100%

Baio says that he's looked at the numbers and found that the two biggest factors in project success at Kickstarter appear to be offering rewards if the goal is met and sending out regular updates to supporters of a project.

The Kickstarter crew isn't creating content themselves, they are creating software for other people to create content. "One thing I found out over the last year," Baio told us, "is that writing doesn't scale. When you code, it takes on a life of its own. I ignored Upcoming for a year after my son was born and it kept growing. I did not write a line of code in a year and it got more popular."

That too seems intuitive, but building software in a way that makes it easy to offer rewards, prompts people to send out regular updates and helps them create good content for themselves on your site could be the difference between a good idea and a successful one. That's true for both the particular projects on Kickstarter and the site itself.

Games Are Good - But Make Sure Users' Goals Align With the Site's

Baio is a big fan of games. He likes iPhone games (his favorites include ZenBound, Eliss and Edge), he likes retro 8-bit style games and he likes the prospect of bringing game-like elements into non-gaming environments.

As a part of that thinking, Baio believes it's important to make sure that users' interests on a site align with the interests of the site itself. On Kickstarter, "success depends," he says, "on your ability to promote your work." And thus to promote the site as well.

The risk here is that a game-like system of rewards can change the way people behave in ways that aren't helpful. "Yahoo Answers, for example," Andy says, "got the point system totally wrong. They tuned it for traffic instead of for quality. People get points for offering any answer at all to questions, so you've got all these people just entering one word answers to loads of questions so they can climb the leader board."

Successful examples? Baio pointed to the UK Guardian's MP Expenses experiment, where readers are crowdsourcing analysis of hundreds of thousands of expense reports filed by members of Parliament and finding some pretty funny claims. That's similar to the Sunlight Foundation's Transparency Corps. (Check out that project's latest - a crowdsourced national directory of state-level elected officials on Twitter - cool!)

In systems like that, and especially in Baio's much-studied favorite Mechanical Turk, users "have full control over their choice of tasks. They turn work into a little bit of play."

Build to existing social connections, maintain engagement during the quiet spells in the middle of goal pursuit and make it like a game - but be careful how people play. That's some of Andy Baio's advice. You can begin to see it in action at Kickstarter.com. That site's full functionality will open to the public at the end of August.

Top photo by Jeremy Keith on Flickr.

The Read/Write Web

While the earlier incarnations of YQL were mainly meant to read data, with the addition of these three new SQL verbs, the focus has now shifted towards writing data back to the net as well. Developers can now use YQL to write and modify data on web services and applications.

To explain how useful this can be, the Yahoo team used a few different examples. A developer can now easily use YQL to update a Twitter account (even authentication with OAuth is possible), for example, or add a new comment to a blog post, or insert any data into a remote database. Basically, developers can now use YQL to write data back to any web site that uses forms for data entry and to any API, including authenticated APIs.

To try this, here is an example from Yahoo (you will have to log in to the YQL console):

Try creating a new tweet from the YQL console, follow this link <a href="https://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console?q=use%20%27http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yqlblog.net%2Fsamples%2Ftwitter.status.xml%27%3B%20insert%20into%20twitter.status%20(status%2Cusername%2Cpassword)%20values%20(%22Playing%20with%20INSERT%20UPDATE%20and%20DELETE%20in%20YQL%22%2C%20%22twitterusername%22%2C%22twitterpassword%22)">to run this</a>:

use 'http://www.yqlblog.net/samples/twitter.status.xml';

insert into twitter.status (status,username,password) values ("Playing with INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE in YQL", "twitterusername","twitterpassword")

Pullara and Trevor also stressed that because Yahoo runs YQL on five datacenters spread over three continents (three in the US, one in Europe, and another one in Asia), executing commands through YQL is generally very fast. Yahoo also set some relatively generous rate limits for the service. Developers who use the service and who identify themselves with an access key can make up to 100,000 calls per day, while anonymous users are restricted to 1000 calls per hour, which is still a pretty good number.

One interesting aspect of the directory is that Mozilla decided to eschew a standard, table-based layout for the directory in favor of an HTML 5 canvas based design that focuses on the products' logos. Because of this, the directory will only work on modern browsers like Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox, but Internet Explorer users will be locked out.

As of now, only a small number of tools are in the directory, but, keeping in style with the purpose of the directory, Mozilla is using a Google Spreadsheet that allows developers to submit their applications.

We have to say, however, that the layout of the directory can be rather confusing and given that all a user sees is a product's logo, it is rather hard to figure out what a tool really does. As Mozilla adds more products, it will only get harder to use, though thankfully, Mozilla does also offer a plainer version of the directory.

More to Come

In the long run, Mozilla also plans to roll out comments, more social features, and ranking tools (maybe similar to what Launchly does).

As is typical for Mozilla Labs products, Mozilla is releasing this early and encouraging feedback from the community.

With Appcelerator's new mobile offerings, web programmers can avoid the pitfalls of Objective-C or Java, and use basic Javascript, HTML, and CSS to build their apps.

Unlike competitor PhoneGap, Titanium claims it is better equipped to gain entry into the iPhone and Android app stores. The company believes its tools create applications that behave, look and feel identical to native iPhone applications. The idea is that Apple will be less likely to cast Titanium applications from the garden of appland after being made in the image of its predecessors.

To request access to Titanium's mobile beta fill out the form.

The service uses RESTful APIs and Open Source code libraries to handle "the tedious, annoying, difficult and troublesome parts of the development process" and offer outsourced scalability solutions.

Leading iPhone dev blog Mobile Orchard has covered complications in both the push notification feature and the store kit well. Having these tasks outsourced to a service like Urban Airship could make independent developers' lives a lot easier.

We love a good infrastructure play, but they can get complicated when it comes to a tightly controlled platform like Apple's. Last month we wrote about a mysterious and troubling trend of iPhone developers reporting rejection of their apps based on their use of the PhoneGap dev environment, a service that greatly democratizes mobile development in general. It's hard to say why but Apple appears unhappy with developers utilizing that 3rd party platform in delivery if not creation of apps.

Will Apple play nice with startups helping startups to develop on the fabulous platform that is the iPhone? We sure hope so. There's a long and rich history of web services amplifying the innovative work of developers on the web - having these kinds of services available for the iPhone as well sounds like a great way to take mobile to the next level. We'll be keeping an eye on Urban Airship.

There's a great amount of data available on the Web in APIs or even straight HTML. It's all there for the parsing - and parsed data from social media in particular is held to be a goldmine. But traditionally, it's the heavy lifting (the broad variety of programming languages used in APIs, the challenges presented by complicated authentications, the occasional need for massive pipes) that has made accessing and sorting data into useful applications a laborious process.

Yahoo!, chiefly to serve the needs of its own engineers, has been developing a sophisticated solution that is agnostic across all Internet platforms and that lowers both the burden of labor and the barriers to entry for social and other web application developers, many of whom are already singing the praises of the newly released YQL Execute.

"YQL Execute allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo's servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small."

In the slightly more technical language presented on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog, "The Execute element can contain arbitrary developer code that the YQL data engine runs during the processing of a YQL statement."

It also handles authentication for third party sites.

Is there anything like it currently on the market?

"Nothing... It's pretty awesome," said Cannon-Brooks.

Yahoo! Query Language

Although YQL looks a lot like SQL, it treats the info on the web as a virtual table that developers can manipulate in a standardized way, regardless of the API that data came from. Developers only had to know how to use YQL to quickly create simple mashups.

Open Data Tables

YQL was used to support a broad range of APIs, almost anything publicly available online, from FriendFeed and Google Reader to the Guardian newspaper. "No one has yet pointed out an API they can't figure out how to map," said Pullara.

However, some data could not be accessed without authentication, such as Google Calendar or Netflix. Those APIs were very often very sophisticated and even complicated for the end developer. For these APIs, Yahoo! rolled out YQL Execute on April 29.

YQL Execute

YQL Execute also allows developers to access multiple services and get a single result back. For example, an app developer could call up New York Times articles with specific tags AND Flickr photos with related tags; YQL Execute would return a combined result with both articles and related photographs. Another benefit for developers is the use of the massive Yahoo! infrastructure, as all the heavy lifting of data is done on Yahoo! servers.

And because of the speed, simplicity, and scope of these tools, implications now range much farther than simple mashups. With access to authenticated and private data, more sophisticated applications can be written quickly and easily.

The Dark Side

The above quotation is from Scott D. Reinhart, who has been eyeball-deep in application development longer than many "social media gurus" have been out of high school.

Right alongside the generally held social media dictum that a rich data stream is inherently bankable, there is the hotly debated issue of data ownership. Especially when data is made more valuable by having been parsed, organized, and compared, and most especially when someone creates a revenue stream from previously unmonetizable data, questions of ownership and copyright flare up around the social web.

"Public APIs allow you to easily develop using mature platforms," said Reinhart, "but they [large IT and social media companies] usually have a hidden intention. In this case they advocate putting your database layer onto their systems... So let's say I use the Yahoo! data layer, I use BizSpark to get my development tools, and I am making MySpace (Open Social) and Facebook apps using jQuery - who owns my code? Technically, they own everything. They can claim I just made a mashup.

"I would, as someone approaching these systems, stop drinking the Kool-Aid and read the terms of use. Check what it says about ownership."

Yahoo! Servers for YQL Developers

"If you create an open data table, there's no requirement to upload it to Yahoo! We do cache data that we pull from APIs and the web to make it faster, but we don't store that data. It passes through without being collected for permanent storage."

By contrast, with other services such as Google or Amazon Web Services, developers are required to upload their data, which is stored and executed on the company's systems. In using Yahoo! YQL, a developer's data has "a very transient experience and expires from the cache," said Pullara. "It's a convenience, not a requirement in any way."

The Price of Free

"We want to enable rather than discourage more useage ," said Pullara. "And while people don't want to pay, they do want to know they're a customer and have a relationship with Yahoo!"

Currently, Yahoo! has set certain limits on use of their infrastructure. App developers are limited to 100,000 calls per day, per IP address. If the application runs in a browser (hence, on many different IPs), it's a non-issue. Pullara said, "The limit targets those who would abuse the platform... people who might spin up DoS attacks. You have to have controls in place to make sure that doesn't happen."

Many developers are enthusiastic about the legitimate and value-adding implementations of the technologies. "The YQL improvements are just sex on legs," said Cannon-Brooks via Twitter. "The most exciting, least talked about 'tech of now' is YQL."