ReadWriteWeb

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've discussed the use of third party APIs when building an integrated online product, highlighting the disadvantages such a decision could entail. One topic on the flip side of that is the question of whether providing an open public API versus a closed private one is in your product's best interest. Massively viral services like Twitter have rapidly expanded their capabilities and brand awareness by releasing an open API for third party developers to build on, but for companies in fledgeling industries, like mobile augmented reality, the API decision isn't as clear.

One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers tell us that a whole new world of applications and features may become possible.

Twitter's Director of Platform Ryan Sarver followed up on earlier public announcements this weekend with an email to developers explaining plans to raise the limit on the number of times an application can request information from Twitter for a single user to 10 times what it is today (from 150 req/hr to 1500/hr), and to offer everyone the same kind of paid access to the full "fire hose" of user updates that Google and Bing enjoy. People who build cool Twitter apps say this is very big news.

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The holidays are underway and 'tis the season of flowing eggnog, overgenerous meals, and contemplation of both the year gone by and the year to come. Reflecting on 2009, it's obvious that there has been phenomenal growth in the business of APIs with recognized sites Best Buy, Netflix, Etsy, New York Times, CBS Interactive, PayPal, LinkedIn, and others keeping busy ramping up their API platforms to extend their businesses in new directions.

Earlier this week Myspace announced a partnership with Google to deliver real-time status updates to the search experience. As of today, the company is furthering its real-time efforts by announcing the public release of the real-time stream, status and mood commenting, open search and photo upload APIs.

In a move of ninja swiftness, MySpace has acquired and subsequently shuttered iMeem in its entirety, even trashing the streaming/sharing music startup's API, which had heretofore supplied much-needed resources to a small but vibrant ecosystem of apps.

The acquisition was announced just yesterday, and developers were given no warning that their creations would become useless digital paperweights overnight. Among the detrius of the deal is twt.fm, a popular Twitter music-sharing app created by web dev Lee Martin, who tipped us off to his plight today in a blog post.

UPDATE: Users are also reporting problems with blip.fm, a popular music-streaming site that integrated results from iMeem.

According to our sources at Citysearch, Twitter is opening a new Sign-Up API.

Citysearch wrote us to say that the API will "allow local businesses to integrate their existing Twitter presence or create a new account directly from the Citysearch business profile and tweet from their Citysearch profile page." How does this new API relate to Twitter's OAuth feature? What can a Sign-Up API do that OAuth doesn't? Also, how did Citysearch get wind of this development before a general announcement was made?

Later today, Digg will open up its rumored read/write API. Up until now, developers could only read data from Digg. With the new API, web and desktop apps will also be able to contribute data to Digg. This will allow developers to write desktop and web applications that enable users to, for example, interact with Digg without having to go to the site. Digg will use the OAuth protocol to authorize applications. According to Forbes' Taylor Buley, however, the writable API will not allow users to submit stories remotely.

One of the first social networking aggregators to take advantage of LinkedIn's brand-new API is Sobees, whose two client applications both now offer LinkedIn integration in addition to the other supported networks. A challenger to similar services like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowser, Sobees is a social networking aggregation tool originally launched as a desktop app back in 2008 with a web app version added earlier this year. Like its competitors, Sobees' clients use a columnar interface to display real-time updates from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

CompareMyDocs makes it easy to compare multiple revisions of a document and to compile a final version based on these revisions. The site, which launched today, can handle Word documents and rich-text files. You simply select up to seven documents and the service will display all the differences between these in a very well-designed interface. CompareMyDocs is available free of charge.

The Android team just released the first official video overview of the upcoming Android 2.0 release. The video, which is geared towards developers, shows off a number of interesting new features, including an improved accounts manager, better contact syncing, easier access to the Android Bluetooth API to connect devices and support for devices with different screen sizes. The demo also shows the smarter contacts application which now features a very smart new 'quick contacts' feature. The contacts application now highlights all the different ways to get in touch with a contact when you click on their avatar.

Google Website Optimizer, a powerful tool that allows website owners to split traffic and test the effectiveness and conversion rates for an array of variables, has traditionally required a lot of back-and-forth between any given site and the Website Optimizer interface.

With the release of a new API, announced today, Google is allowing site owners to conduct multivariate and A/B testing from their own platforms. Part of Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a free tool that "handles splitting a website's traffic, serving different variations and crunching the numbers to find statistical significance." For site owners, these minute variations can widen conversion funnels and lead to exponentially greater engagement and profit if changes are executed correctly.

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.

In 2008, Google acquisition JotSpot announced that it would "expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps." The idea was that JotSpot would power a system to help businesses set up their own collaboration, project management and customer extranets. After 3 years of sitting quietly in the Google arsenal, JotSpot has now reemerged in the form of a Google Sites Data API.

No one with any tact would ever tell you that you look fat to your face. But a sea of anonymous netizens will tell you in real-time on multiple channels. Kim Kardashian, Beyonce and Twilight's Stephenie Meyer all come up on real time search engines if you type in "looks fat". And each of these women would see these painful comments if they listened to the publicist who told them to "measure brand conversation". When we last covered UberVU, the company had just launched ContextVoice API - an API that helps developers create tools for conversation tracking. Today, the company added new search functionality to ContextVoice with a number of useful filtering options.

Semantic search engine Evri can now understand how the web feels with the launch of their new sentiment web API. While busy scouring the net for people, places, and things and determining the relationships between them, the search engine is now able to understand the feelings associated with these entities, too, be them positive or negative. Using the API, developers can build applications for things like market intelligence, market research, sports and entertainment, brand management, product reviews and more.

Yesterday, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Google's Blogger were targeted by a person or persons unknown, in a denial-of-service attack (DDOS) that attempted to silence the voice of one individual. The target in question was a Georgian blogger who goes by the name of "Cyxymu" online, according to recent reports from CNET. While Google withstood the attack, the other services suffered. LiveJournal and Twitter went down completely and Facebook struggled throughout the day.

As we now roll into day two of the "great social media outage of 2009," you may be surprised to learn that it's not over yet. Although Facebook and LJ have recovered, Twitter is still having issues. Not only was the site down once again early this morning, Twitter developers using the API are complaining that the company is sending mixed messages by reporting that they're "back up" - when in reality many Twitter applications are still unusable.

According to news posted this morning to API-tracking website ProgrammableWeb, the social news community at Digg.com may be on the verge of opening up. In a recent message shared on the Digg mailing list, developer Jeff Hodsdon announced that the forthcoming Digg API will allow people to "not only read data, but also contribute data, too." In other words, a Read/Write API.

The implications of this decision are huge. Whereas before Digg was the place to find and share interesting links from around the web, that role has, as of late, been taken on by microblogging site Twitter.com. To combat Twitter's threat, Digg has tried launching new features like the DiggBar and their own URL-shortening service, but nothing they've done so far could have as big an impact on their future as the new API.

The product that used to be a personal wifi hotspot in your pocket will now become an API-enabled connectivity hub with apps.

The MiFi portable multi-person wireless router that we first wrote about in December and joined a chorus of positive reviews for in June now allows outside developers to write network-leveraging applications for the battery powered device.

SocialToo founder Jesse Stay has alerted us (and the rest of his blog readers) to certain Twitter API changes that may be detrimental to many developers.

Stay's main beef with the changes is that no one was notified of these changes (to verify_credentials(), incidentally). Stay further reported that an email response from a Twitter rep stated that the company "assumed (apparently incorrectly) that people were only using this method occasionally."

Read It Later, a cross-platform browser extension for saving online articles for later reading, has just debuted their newly updated iPhone application. This latest version introduces a number of useful features for voracious mobile readers including support for articles spanning multiple pages, support for sites requiring logins (like WSJ or NYT), new sharing features, and a lot more.

But the bigger news from this company is the release of an API that will allow anyone to build their own Read It Later applications - and not just for mobile, but for any platform.