ReadWriteWeb

Famously thrilling and troubled web app platform Twitter announced today that it now has 1 million apps developed on top of its microblogging streams, social graph and API. The company says that at this time last year there were only 150,000 apps built on top of Twitter.

A 6X expansion of apps built on top of Twitter between the company's 4th and 5th birthdays is truly remarkable. It's even more remarkable because it's been widely alleged that the developer community is unhappy with Twitter's leadership and feels disinclined to invest in building more apps. Happy or not, this is a huge jump in activity and I think the claim deserves a little investigation. Many people have guessed that the numbers aren't very solid, but there are a number of explanations that if combined could add up to this big, big jump.

Earlier today we mentioned that Google is looking for developers interested in Google Plus, and talked a little about what we might be able to expect from the API once it comes. There are already some mentions by developers wanting to build importers or integrations between other social media, such as Buzz and Twitter.

What about you? Are you interested in developing on this platform? What do you want to build with it?

LinkedIn announced today its LinkedIn Groups API, available in JavaScript or REST flavors. The new API will enable developers to embed functionality from Groups into other applications.

As an example, Microsoft used the API to embed discussions from LinkedIn on the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 event website.

Google Plus doesn't have a public API yet, nor has it announced when one will be available. But if you want to find out about future developer opportunities, Google has a mailing list you can sign-up for to receive more information in the future.

Developers are already clamoring for an API, which is a good sign for Google Plus. Mohamed Mansour commented "Would be nice if there was a Google+ API. I would have made a Buzz to Google+ importer today."

In an attempt to make its Graph API more accessible Facebook today launched a new service called the Graph API Explorer. The Explorer helps you sign-up for an access token, experiment with Graph API commands and see the results and explore the results to help understand what the different responses mean.

Twitter has launched a YouTube channel just for its API developers. It's kicking off with a collection of videos from the Devnest event, with talks from The Guardian, Klout and Quora.

In an e-mail to the Twitter Development Talk mailing list, Twitter Developer Relations Manager Jason Costa promised more content will follow.

RunKeeper, a mobile application for tracking your exercise and online community for fitness buffs, opened its API to the public today. Dubbed the HealthGraph, it will provide access to the variety of health and fitness data stored in RunKeeper, such as exercise, sleep, weight and blood pressure. Developers will then be able to build new applications that build upon and make sense of this data.

You can find the API documentation here.

Atlassian, New Relic, OTRS, Pivotal Labs, Service Now, SugarCRM, and Zendesk have agreed to support a common JSON API specification for customer service applications called NetworkedHelpDesk.org.

The idea is to make it possible for all applications related to a customer's experience to talk to each other, from help desk to bug tracking to project management. "Where things start to fall through the cracks is when customer service has to cross organization boundaries," says Zendesk COO Zack Urlocker. "Either within the organization, like customer service to engineering, or outside of the organization like to a component vendor."

That joke about how your smartphone can "even make phone calls" is pretty cliche by now. But it raises the question: why hasn't anyone done anything to improve the state of voice calls on smart phones? After all, we're carrying around powerful computers in our pockets, but the technology involved in phone calls on smart phones hasn't evolved much.

One company trying to change that is Thrutu, an application that adds real-time features to Android calls. For example, using Thrutu you can send money with PayPal from within a call, share and view a photo or "doodle" on a shared screen. It adds a number of possibilities for collaboration using mobile phones.

Today, Thrutu announced that an API that will enable developers to build new features or integrate existing applications with its platform. You can request access here. Use the reference code RWW1 for priority access.

The "realist" view on Microsoft's future is that Windows and Microsoft Office licenses will continue to be the company's bread and butter, and that enterprise-focused cloud initiatives like Azure and Office 365 will supplement this growth. In this view Microsoft's struggles in mobile, the rapid growth of Apple and the proliferation of Linux aren't real threats to the company. After all, even though OSX and Linux are growing faster than Windows, Windows is still growing. And it's too early to write Microsoft out of the mobile game, before its partnership with Nokia comes to fruition and before it even releases its tablets. It's a reasonable view of where things are going.

Then there's the other vision, which we might call the Cassandra version.