ReadWriteWeb

Foursquare's Push API, which the company first unveiled to developers in February, will be publicly released sometime this afternoon, according to a post on BetaBeat.

Select developers have had access to the API since the company's last hackathon and have been using it to build applications that take advantage of the Foursquare's push notifications. The API will go into a public beta just a few days before the company's global hackathon on Saturday.

What has dramatically accelerated the power of cloud-based apps and service platforms over the past two years is their embrace of Web services protocols. Using RESTful function calls with which developers are already familiar, they can request functionality from live, cloud-based servers that can deliver results in a form they can immediately put to use - HTML elements, or JSON or XML data.

We covered Apigee some months back, and it remains one of our favorite modeling tools. Think of a live Rolodex for cloud API functions. You can page through categories with your thumb until you find a template you need, then supply some parameters and try a call out until it works the way you want. Then you cut and paste the call into your app.

If you haven't read my colleague Scott Fulton's post on "The Steve Jobs Formula and Why It Works" go read it right now! It's a very insightful piece written by an expert who literally watched Apple grow up, and there are plenty of lessons for all entrepreneurs in the Steve Jobs formula he spells out. However, to be "fair and balanced" here at ReadWriteWeb I think it's also important to point out some things that as an entrepreneur you'd be well served to disregard. What follows are four factors of the Apple formula to ignore. I'd love to hear what you agree and disagree with in the comments below as well as other factors that should have been included.

Mozilla is continuing in its efforts to disrupt proprietary, single-vendor application ecosystems on mobile devices. This time around the Moz is taking up the task of providing a consistent API so developers can write HTML5 applications rather than native apps for iOS, Android, and other mobile devices and operating systems. Called WebAPI, the target is to provide "a basic HTML5 phone experience" within six months and submit the API to the W3C for standardization.

There's no better way to learn than by making mistakes. Just ask Kevin Montrose from Stack Exchange. Montrose is going a post-mortem on the first generation Stack Exchange API, with coverage of its history and mistakes made in its design.

Anyone who has had the task (or, perhaps more insanely, given himself the task) of measuring the relative performance of various Web browsers knows how impossible it is to convince everyone of the validity of his chosen metrics. (Guilty as charged.) Some folks settle for running a Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm in JavaScript; others will call up Google's V8 benchmark page which always seems to give tremendous numbers for Chrome; and still others prefer loading google.com 100 times, averaging the load times, and concluding there's not much to conclude.

Since last June, W3C has taken up the task of creating a uniform specification for all browser manufacturers to adopt. This specification includes a suite of JavaScript APIs that enable browsers to determine how much time certain fundamental tasks may consume - changing the active page, loading a page into memory, downloading any discrete amount of data from a server.

Today, Wordnik officially announced Swagger, a specification and framework for building interactive API documentation and sandboxes. The Swagger UI allows developers and non-developers to interact with an API and see how the API responds to different commands and parameters. It's based on the technology that powers Wordnik's own interactive API documentation and can work with both JSON and XML-based APIs.

You can find it in GitHub.

Last month, open government technologists at the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation released three new Roku applications that bring audio and video from the White House, Congress and Supreme Court to television. Roku is an Internet TV appliance.

"We know Americans want the kind of immediate access to government that the Internet can provide - they're connecting with Congress on Facebook, asking President Obama questions over Twitter and can now bring Washington right into their living room using our new Sunlight Roku apps," said Gabriela Schneider, Sunlight's communications director. "We hope to prove to all branches of the federal government that they should make their work available in open formats, because Americans are, indeed, interested in knowing and engaging more with their government."

Mashery recently open-sourced a new interactive API documentation system called Mashery I/O Docs. It's available from Github.

I/O Docs enables developers to experiment with API calls from within the documentation. You can see it in action at Posterous and Wordnik Alibris and Klout (correction: the Posterous and Wordnik APIs were the inspiration for I/O Docs, but don't use I/O Docs).

One tried and true technology is seeing some new activity this summer, with two distinct efforts underway to voice-enable websites from Twilio and Angel.com. Both companies are trying to streamline the experience and make it easier to build voice add-ons.