ReadWriteWeb

As we reported earlier this week, several Google APIs are being deprecated or shut-down, including the Translate API, Code Search API, and Google Wave API.

Do you use any of these APIs? Have you found alternatives yet?

Popular mobile app Instapaper isn't just a great way to catch up on reading when you're spending time offline. It's also a little bit of magic that blends the quiet of time disconnected with the buzz of the social web. It looks like that may become all the more true with the addition of a blogging tool to the Instapaper app, if a public conversation about the matter can be taken literally.

Instapaper stores stripped-down copies of articles you select from the web, but offline on your device so you can read without connectivity. With the latest version of the app launched a few months ago, you can designate an article for sharing out on Twitter or Facebook once you get back online later. Today WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg asked Instapaper founder Marco Arment to enable posting to a WordPress blog from inside Instapaper. "I'll make it happen," was Arment's response. Cool!

Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions. That's a potent idea and if implemented properly could future-proof a part of the web from authoritarian crack-downs, disruptions by disasters and more. It could also establish a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.

It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.

Kassi is a service that enables users to share items, rides, etc. within a community. It's similar to several other services, such as NeighborGoods, Share Some Sugar and Freecycle. But with so many sharing sites, it's hard to figure out where to turn. If I wanted to borrow a power drill in Portland, I'd need to search each of these sites individually.

In a blog post at Sharable Kassi co-founder Juho Makkonen, proposed a common API that would enable users to search multiple sharing sites at once.

Enterprise social networking company Yammer today announced a new API sandbox for developers working with its API. The sandbox provides developers with a walk through of the oAuth process of getting a testing a token for making HTTP calls.

Yammer has also launched community site for developers based on its own social networking software. Developers need only an e-mail address to join.

STREST is a new open source protocol and server from Wiredset, the company behind the real-time social media analytics service Trendrr. STREST is HTTP-compatible and is designed for real-time data streaming. Wiredset has released the protocol spec, a server implementation and drivers in Java, Python and JavaScript.

Wiredset created the protocol to deal with the challenges it faced when building the Trendr API. The team needed a way to offer extremely high-volume API calls with low latency, deliver the results in real-time at scale, and do so through a RESTful interface.

Today OpenTok, the Web-based group video from TokBox, announced new features for its API - notably the ability to use the OpenTok platform embed video chat into iOS and Android applications.

OpenTok also added the ability to embed an OpenTok video stream on any website using a simple HTML widget.

If you weren't one of the few who snagged tickets to Google I/O during in the 59 minutes before they sold out, you're in luck. Google will stream the event from www.google.com/io. Something tells me home viewers won't be finding a Nexus S phones under their chairs, but it's better than nothing. The livestream starts at 9:00 a.m. PST on May 10.

You can find a list of sessions here. Enterprise and cloud-related sessions will include "Taking Android to Work," "Android + App Engine: A Developer's Dream Combination," "Large-scale Data Analysis Using the App Engine Pipeline API," and "Storing your Data on Google's Cloud."

The Guardian is replacing its Java stack comprised of Spring, Apache Velocity and Hibernate to Scala, its Web Platform Development Team Lead Graham Tackley told InfoQ. The Content API is the first part of the paper's website being migrated to the new language.

The Guardian team began using Scala by writing integration tests for the Content API. "After about four weeks of writing just the tests in Scala, we got fed up of having to write the main code in Java, and decided to convert the whole lot to Scala," Tackley said.

It's been a few weeks now since Twitter asked developers to stop building new clients. Reaction from the developer community has been generally negative.

But has there been a backlash? Sure some developers have built a competing microblogging system, but are API developers quitting the platform?

What about you? Are you still still developing on the Twitter API?