ReadWriteWeb

APIs have become a critical part of the Web, especially if you're a developer. If you want to tap into some of the most useful sites out there, then an API is your best bet. But for businesses, managing a popular API can be a huge headache. For those consuming APIs, you really have very little way to monitor what's going on, and you depend on the provider to keep you informed.

But what if there was a simple service to monitor API requests and serve up good analytics? That service is Apigee, a freemium tool which puts data on API usage in your hands. Apigee was built by Sonoa Systems, a company that offers cloud services and API management for enterprises.

The Google developer conference has been chock-full of announcements, but one that we are particularly excited about is a "20% time" project from software engineer, Moishe Lettvin. The gadgets.realtime is a Javascript library on top of a collection of APIs based on Google Talk. Right now implementation is limited to Orkut and Google Gadgets, but we'd love to see the framework opened up to the web at large.

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.

Google Analytics, Google's tool for generating detailed visitor stats for web sites, just launched an API, which will finally allow developers to create desktop and online tools that can use and mash up data from Google Analytics with other data on the Internet. This API will also allow developers to create mobile interfaces for Google Analytics for Android or the iPhone, for example.

Yahoo bought popular social bookmarking service Delicous three and a half years ago and it's just now making moves to allow outsiders more access to the incredible data that's stored there. The company announced this morning that the Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) platform can now pull in Delicious bookmarking history and top tags for any URL that's been bookmarked two or more times.

Make no mistake about it, the vast majority of people on the web still have no idea that they can save their bookmarks outside their browsers. Yahoo has done a terrible job leveraging and growing this incredible database of user-categorized links of interest. Now the company is giving developers an opportunity to do so. Why is this important? Read on for some examples of what's now possible thanks to BOSS/Delicious integration.

Google has announced that the company now offers a secure way for third party websites to access any user's list of friends, with their permission, and based on a proposed new industry standard. No more giving away your GMail password and then having random services you want to try go into your account and scrape the information there.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

Popular but legally challenged MP3 search engine Seeqpod will soon start charging developers for access to its data, according to a source close to the company. A lot of interesting music discovery sites are about to go quiet, at least for a little while.

Seeqpod searches MP3 files uploaded independently all around the web; it's a great way to explore music and build playlists, and so far it's been a good way to pipe music into a wide variety of other websites. Starting next week, developers will be required to pay $3 for every 1000 search queries performed on their sites powered by Seeqpod. They will also have the option to put up $5k to license the Seeqpod crawler and index.

Business troubles at Yahoo! haven't changed the fact that the company has some of the most innovative Open Web advocates in the industry in its ranks, but today one of those innovative people has left. API wizard Kent Brewster told us last night that he's joining Netflix as the company's newest API developer and evangelist. He'll start there at the top of next month.

Brewster's title at Yahoo! was Technology Evangelist and Front-End Engineer, a position he took almost 5 years ago after an amazing 18 years at WebMD and its predecessors. Job changes like this are what we cover on our Jobwire site.

Amazon.com changed the retail world. In the process the company built up so much surplus computing power that it started a dirt cheap "computing in the cloud" business that changed the computing world. This week the company's newest project Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services began offering more than 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) of fascinating public data for developers to access on the fly through Amazon's cloud computing service.

We're talking about an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences, including the Human Genome, huge amounts of chemistry data, machine readable encyclopedic entries about millions of different topics and an entire dump of Wikipedia. US Census data, data from the US Department of Transportation and more. It's all accessible by web applications in no time at all. What do you think this is going to change?

What do you do when your industry is shifting under your feet? Taking the lead with radical steps is one strategy. The New York Times did just that this afternoon when it announced that it has released a new Application Programming Interface (API) offering every article the paper has written since 1981, 2.8 million articles. The API includes 28 searchable fields and updated content every hour.

This is a big deal. A strong press organ with open data is to the rest of the web what basic newspaper delivery was to otherwise remote communities in another period of history. It's a transformation moment towards interconnectedness and away from isolation. A quality API could throw the doors wide open to a future where "newspapers" are important again.

Our favorite URL-shortening service, Bit.ly, has just updated their already excellent Firefox plugin to include even more features than before. The latest update shows the context of a Twitter conversation when you hover over the "in reply to" links in Twitter. This way, you can see what people are talking about without having to click through to another page.