ReadWriteWeb

Today Microsoft announced that users of Google Health, scheduled to be shut down on Jan. 1, 2012, can send their data to Microsoft's competing HealthVault service. In the closing paragraph, Microsoft also pitches developers to migrate their Google Health projects to HealthVault.

Every week on ReadWriteMobile, we ask the community here a question related to mobile apps, mobile platforms, or development. You can see a round-up of some of the more popular recent poll Q&A's here.

This week, we thought we would focus on the topic of APIs. If you're building a mobile app, are you willing to pay to use an API? How do you decide? Let us know what you think in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

Of all the new features announced yesterday at WWDC as a part of iOS 5, one of the more interesting options now available to developers is access to iCloud. Much more than just a MobileMe replacement service, the new iCloud will store and sync music, photos, apps, calendars and documents to all your devices, including your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and even Mac and PC.

But the service isn't being limited to Apple's own products, as it turns out - developers can use iCloud with their own mobile applications, too.

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.

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.

Catch is often thought of as an Evernote competitor, thanks to the company's simple, note-taking applications for iOS and Android. But more recently, the company's APIs were found integrated into a high-profile mobile application: Google's official app for its I/O developer conference. In the Google I/O app, Catch was used to help attendees create and manage conference notes using the Catch service.

As it turns out, there are today over 40 apps using Catch's APIs, including those from the BBC and TED, plus recipes and horoscopes apps and others. And now, with Catch's newly launched annotations API and its support for structured data, Catch can enable different mobile apps to talk to each other.

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?

SOAP is dead. No it's not. SOAP is undead.

And the undead still inhabit the enterprise... in a big way.

I'm at Gluecon, the kind of event where passionate developers gather. These are people who for the most part never use SOAP. They work with REST - undoubtedly the king of all APIs.

Google made a number of API-related announcements at Google I/O earlier this month, including a new Books API, an API discovery service, and a more widely available Places API.

But as the list of Google's APIs continues to grow, there are some older APIs that are, in Google's own words, no longer "receiving the necessary love."

A content delivery network (CDN) is fine for distributing the data from a Web page but the advent of a new programming interface will help create a new method for pushing data to the edge of the network.

The first signs of this new network is coming from companies that are creating a new wave of API services for better distributing the billions of calls that are made daily to an increasing mass network of providers. The latest is a new API Delivery Network from Apigee, a provider of API products and services.

Apigee is providing a new way to distribute APIs from a central point to the edge of the network. It's like a CDN except not for content but for API calls.