Perhaps nothing like this should be a surprise coming from a company that built the leading webmail product online and still calls it Beta five years later.

Who's worn the virtual cap and gown already? Twenty seven projects are listed as graduates, including the YouTube APIs, Maps APIs and (thank goodness) Contacts API. We've been wondering why more developers aren't using the Contacts API but instead keep asking us for our precious Google passwords. It's been out for a whole year now. Now there can be no excuse! The Contacts API is real, it's solid and Google is committed to supporting it.

Surprises among the 18 projects still deemed too green for prime time? Gears, Finance Data APIs, Social Graph API and the Feedburner APIs.

Google APIs are an incredible resource and today's announcement should further their adoption. We'll be monitoring the Code Labs page for the experimental availability of the inevitable Google Brain Implant API, but until that day comes we feel almost unconditionally excited about the code projects the Google teams are working on.

The API Playground will also become Google's official way to show Javascript samples.

The Playground runs on top of Google's App Engine, which is quickly becoming Google's preferred way of developing and releasing new products.

Ben Lisbakken, a Developer Programs engineer at Google, developed the API Playground as a "20% project." Google also made the source code for the API Playground available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Great for Learning

For students (or anybody who is trying to get his/her head around the basic concepts of using Google's APIs), this could be a great way to get some coding experience with almost immediate feedback and without having to learn the complexities of an IDE.

Yahoo's new Application Gallery

I remember speaking with ex-YPN chief Toni Schneider about this last year and I was impressed by his vision for a commercial platform for APIs. I'm expecting Yahoo to really the ante with Google and Microsoft in terms of mashup ecosystems. Don't count out AOL and eBay either. [...]

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Phil Pearson, XML expert Kimbro Staken and Movable Type consultant Chad Everett have been working on a Structured Blogging plugin for Wordpress and MT. This is to enable ordinary folks (like me) to publish "new microcontent types, support microformats and other standards like Media RSS". Phil's looking for feedback, so if you're technically inclined jump over to his blog and add your 2 cents.

Also I found a great resource via the 9rules homepage, an article at Fiftyfoureleven.com about how to use the Yahoo! API. As it states in the intro:

"Looking at Yahoo!s APIs, you can see a little of that "openess" that Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel referred to at 2005's Web 2.0 conference. From images to movies to maps and search, they offer a lot of data through their APIs."

Fiftyfoureleven.com also offers an ongoing API series. Great stuff and I'll be reading this very closely and experimenting when I get some free time (in about a week!). Also check out ProgrammableWeb's How to Make Your Own Web Mashup article. The beauty of mashups is that anyone can play, thanks to great resources like these and the backend work of folks like Phil Pearson.

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. According to the Wikipedia entry, JSON's simplicity has "resulted in its widespread use, especially as an alternative to XML in Ajax".

I had the pleasure of speaking to Toni recently and I know the Yahoo folks have lots of plans around APIs. As Yahooligan Matt McAlister recently wrote in reference to a Scott Gatz speech: "Kevin Burton asked about public APIs. Scott pointed him to developer.yahoo.net where the current APIs are posted and some community efforts to help facilitate more activity. He said, Yahoo! is still testing some concepts, and the company knows that this is incredibly important. And Scott said we can expect to see a lot more in that area. "

The idea is that developers can build mini-applications that can allow real-time user interaction through the instant messaging foundation of Google Talk IM. Lettvin showed off an example of a chess game that was not only discussed over IM but played through an interface with IM-like communication infrastructure running underneath it. That's pretty hot.

University of Amsterdam student, Sander Dijkhuis, already built a collaborative text editing gadget using one of the APIs and we expect to see more interesting examples emerge shortly. Just picture ease of development plus real-time communication across different installs of little applications. There are lots of things that APIs like that could make possible.

While we're sure that developers engaged in Google social networks will enjoy these APIs (though Flash is out of the picture, it's just Javascript) we would love to see them available outside their current confines.

The point of the site, John explains in the ProgrammableWeb blog, is to "create a home page for Web 2.0 developers." That's a very worthy aim and I'll be checking the site out regularly. [link via Josh Porter]

The press release is here. Details below as they emerge, see also Centernetworks, where Allen Stern is also live blogging the call. If you'd like to listen to a recording of the call, you can use your phone (!) to do so at (800) 945-2760 for the next 30 days.

A Microsoft VP whose name I missed is going over its past efforts on software interoperability, collaboration with major open source vendors and Identity. Today's announcement of principals is a big expansion on what they've done in the past. Lots of documentation will be published immediately. A document interoperability initiative will make sure that all user created documents are usable anywhere.

APIs and communications protocols will have free "trade secret licenses" made available now and in the future those licenses won't need to be used. Noncommercial API calls will be available without cost. Patent licenses for commercial implementations of APIs do still cost a fee. Commercial and noncommercial developers are of course being treated very differently. Open APIs, with a fee for commercial application, seems a fair way to move into the future, though I can't help but wonder if it will be cost prohibitive in this case for small startups.

There are far more mentions of legal pressure Microsoft is facing than there are of data portability. The company is saying that these steps are being taken on their own accord and I'm sure there's some truth to that. "In a more connected, services oriented world the biggest value add will be in what happens on the other side of the wire," says Microsoft's Brad Smith.

Viewer APIs

ThinkFree is also shortly going to open up its Viewer APIs, for Web Services companies to mashup Viewer into new web apps. APIs will also be made available to Web designers to integrate Viewer, meaning they can insert .doc, .xls, or .ppt files directly within a service - regardless of OS, installed apps, etc.

ThinkFree Docs set to launch

ThinkFree is also preparing to launch a new document exchange product called ThinkFree Docs, which the company describes as "Flickr for Office files". It will enable content creators to share, get feedback, read, and source office documents. This service will be launching in beta shortly - a demo of the site is up now, but it is undergoing a redesign as we speak.

While data portability is a hot topic of the day, there hasn't been a lot of tangible work done around the details yet. Idealware's guide could make implementation of these themes much more manageable. Readers may also be interested in this related discussion about data portability use cases over at the DataPortability.org public discussion.

Salesforce

Today, Salesforce.com also announced that it has created a number of tools that will make using the Visualization API easier for Salesforce's own customers and developers. These tools include code snippets and API harnesses and will allow Salesforce customers to create custom reporting and analysis applications for Salesforce's CRM solution or on top of Saleforce's newly announced Force.com platform.

Reporting in the Cloud

As Google points out, more and more companies are storing their data in the cloud, so being able to visualize this data and creating good reporting tools is becoming increasingly important. Creating these reports in the cloud as well seems like a logical step, and we expect that quite a few new applications will be created on top of the Visualization API.

Google already gave a number of developers a preview of the API and you can see the fruits of their labor here. These tools, for example, include integration with content management systems and other analytics suites. One easy to install example for an app that uses the Google Analytics API is Polaris, an Adobe AIR widget from Desktop Reporting that displays basic information about your site.

Of course, Google Analytics, even with this API, does not give you real-time information about the traffic on your site. For that, you will still have to resort to other tools like Woopra, which uses a desktop application as it default interface, and which also offers an API.

Zoho recently released a set of APIs that lets anyone write their own program to use Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet data [disclosure: Zoho is a sponsor of Read/WriteWeb]. As Matthew Ingram explained, it "means that other companies -- online storage providers such as Box.net, Carbonite or Mozy, for example -- can easily build support for Zoho's services into their own products."

Also Google recently announced their Google Spreadsheets API, as noted by John Musser. This API is part of the GData set of APIs that Google has already utilized in Google Calendar and Google Base. Here's how it's described:

"The Google Spreadsheets data API allows client applications to view and update Spreadsheets content in the form of a Google data API ("GData") feeds. Your client application can request a list of a user's spreadsheets, edit or delete content in an existing Spreadsheets worksheet, and query the content in an existing Spreadsheets worksheet."

These APIs from Zoho and Google enable other client applications to work with and store their data, which essentially blurs the line between desktop and web applications. As you know, one of the primary benefits of web-based office apps is that they enable easier collaboration on documents and files. Another benefit is that documents or files are always synced. So these APIs give users more choice about what application to use to work on their documents (i.e. it can be using the online host app, or on alternative desktop or online app), while at the same time enabling the collaboration and sync that users of web-based office software have become familiar with.

As well as the API, Zoho also released a plug-in for Microsoft Office and a widget that makes Zoho behave more like a desktop application. Zoli Erdos has a great post explaining more. All of these new features by Zoho are aimed at 'embracing' Microsoft Office, which makes it ultimately easier for MS Office users to try out a web-based offering like Zoho. R/WW readers will recall JotSpot CEO Joe Kraus and his embrace and extend theory of Web Office, in which he said that Jot Tracker's aim was to not only to embrace Excel's functionality - but extend it in a Web native way. This is essentially what Zoho is doing too.

Ironic that 'embrace and extend' is now being used against Microsoft in the Web Office space, when in the early days of the Web Microsoft used the same kind of strategy to defeat foes like Netscape and Sun in the consumer Web arena.