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Get Ready for a Twitter vs. Google Plus Fight for Developer Love

Like to hack on Twitter feeds, streams and APIs? Then there's good news for you this morning. Twitter has acquired a small startup company called Bagcheck, but the real score in the deal was bringing co-founder Sam Pullara onto the team. Pullara was previously the Chief Technologist at Yahoo where he lead many of the best programs at that beleaguered but technically awesome company.

Yahoo Pipes, Yahoo Query Language, Yahoo Search BOSS and other inspiring technologies that enabled hackers all around the web to roll out sophisticated mashups powered by Yahoo's backend were championed for years by Pullara. Not everyone liked him, but people who love to experiment with data have got to be excited about his coming to Twitter, the world's most promising stream of publicly available, semi-structured, real-time social data. Twitter's relationship with developers has been troubled at times, but Pullara's joining the team is the latest step the company has taken to make amends with its developer ecosystem.

Layar has had a busy week. The augmented reality software makers recently announced the inclusion of Skyhook Wireless' location SDK, a new local search feature called "Nearby" and a free embeddable AR viewer called "Layar Player" for iPhone apps. All the while, however, the company also showed off an experimental augmented reality technology called "sensor fusion" at Google Zeitgeist. The video below of the demo is pretty incredible, and could be beginning of a new generation of augmented reality.

If you haven't played with YQL before, put down that Hot Pocket and head over the Yahoo Developer Network. At the YQL console you'll find a collection of resources to quickly attack problems with cut- and-paste simplicity instead of having to digest several pages of API documentation. You'll also find examples with source code for putting your queries to work.

Below are five great YQL one-liners to get you thinking about the possibilities.

One year ago, Yahoo announced that it had signed a deal to replace its own search engine with Microsoft's Bing - but the big question for us was what that meant for all the incredible search-related programming infrastructure Yahoo makes available to outside developers. Today Yahoo began offering the beginning of an answer to that question.

In a post on the Yahoo Developer Network blog, VP Social Platforms at Yahoo Neal Sample broke the news.

What's worse, for marketers hoping to tap into a diverse and savvy audience of shoppers, diners, and other local consumers, the details on audience make-up are disappointing. According to Forrester, LBS users are 80% male and 70% are aged 19-35.

So should marketers stay away for now until these services mature? Absolutely not. And here's why.

Yahoo Meme, a rich-media microblog that originally started as a Portuguese-only web app and has since expanded to Spanish and English language versions, is often mistakenly called a Twitter clone.

However, in stark contrast to the 140-character wunder-app, Meme has proven in the months since its release to be a much better platform for multimedia sharing and cross-platform content curation. Now, the Tumblr/Twitter/Posterous hybrid is offering an API built on top of YQL, Yahoo!'s query language that we covered back in May, when we were impressed with its power, versatility, and uniqueness. The Yahoo team has already used the API to develop a version of Meme for smartphones.

Most of us have profiles on a wide variety of services these days. Thankfully, most of these profiles are available in machine-readable microformats like hCard or XFN (XHTML Friends Network). For developers, Google's Social Graph API makes discovering these profiles easier, though this is still a relatively complicated process. Now, however, Ident Engine, a new open-source JavaScript library that finds and aggregates user profiles and related activity streams, makes this process a lot easier.

Last October, Yahoo announced the Yahoo Query Language, a language similar to the popular database language SQL. Then, this February, Yahoo also announced its first major product that made use of YQL, the Open Data Tables, which allowed developers to create their own table definitions besides the ones already provided by Yahoo. As we reported in March, Yahoo then went ahead and extended YQL with YQL Execute, which gives developers even more flexibility and basically turns the web into a giant database that can be processed and mashed up with YQL. Today, Yahoo announced that it has completed its set of YQL verbs with three more functions (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) that now also allow developers to not just read and manipulate data, but also write data back to other services.

"I Tried YQL Execute and All I Got Was an Authenticated Javascript API Processing Layer in the Cloud"

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.