With all the news from the event, one thing was clear: RIM desperately wants developers to build for Blackberry and is now actively enticing them with a slew of new offerings designed to win them over.

One of the biggest announcements made yesterday involved the launch of new APIs (application programming interfaces) for third-party developers. The APIs offered include a new advertising service, a payments service, location services, and the general availability of Blackberry's own Push service, which had never before been made available to outside developers. What this means is that developers now have the tools to build applications that rival those already available on many other smartphones today, most notably, the iPhone. In some cases, the Blackberry APIs even offer something the iPhone doesn't such as is the case with the payments service which allows you to pay for apps on your next mobile phone bill.

The location services include a geo-location API that will use cell tower triangulation as a backup for when GPS fails, making location-based applications more reliable. There are also services for determining your phone's location on a map and another that helps estimate travel time for driving directions. It's obvious to see how these types of services could help build new and useful mobile applications for the Blackberry.

Also revealed was the new Blackberry Advertising Service, an offering designed to help developers generate revenue from their mobile applications. Through partnerships with ad networks, developers can easily integrate mobile advertising within their apps and track the ad's effectiveness with an included analytics package. It's even possible for these ads to access the phone's core features. For example, you'll be able to initiate a phone call from an ad or add a calendar entry from an ad. That's an innovation that many other mobile handhelds are not yet offering. These types of interactions should have a clear appeal to the many business-minded corporate Blackberry users who are often more interested in getting things done than they are with playing mindless games.

That being said, the game-playing crowd isn't being ignored either. Also announced was support for OpenGL ES, a graphics API for 3D games. While this doesn't quite put the Blackberry on par with what's available for iPhone, it's a move that's designed to keep Blackberry at least somewhat competitive in the field of mobile gaming.

Other announcements included new support for mobile developers looking to build applications with the languages and tools they already know and use. Java developers will get a new GUI builder that lets them create mobile interfaces using a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor with drag-and-drop capabilities. Adobe developers will be able to use the company's Flash Platform technology and Adobe Creative Suite tools to build rich, mobile apps as well. This is another area where Apple falls short - Flash still doesn't work on the iPhone. Instead Flash developers have to use special Adobe software to convert apps written in Flash to a format that's iPhone-compatible. Also, designers can now use Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver to build both themes and widgets using the new Blackberry Theme Studio 5.0.

Apps, Apps, Apps!

In addition to the RIM-specific announcements, a number of companies also used the Developer Conference as the launching pad for new Blackberry applications and related announcements.

Ebay, for example, unveiled a brand-new mobile app that lets you search for items, view descriptions and photos, bid, watch items, and more. It will also tap into Blackberry's now open Push services API to deliver real-time alerts as to when you're outbid on an auction. Considering that the company has already generated $400 million this year using eBay's iPhone application, this new Blackberry app should be a big hit among mobile users when it launches next month.

The popular location-based social networking service called Loopt also revealed a major update for Blackberry which includes something the iPhone can't offer due to the nature of the device: it runs in the background to continually update your location in real-time. This is one of the iPhone's biggest flaws according to critics, since so many mobile applications take advantage of always-on connectivity to track your location for the benefit of specific mobile apps. In Loopt's case, the app knows where you are in order to show you nearby friends and local businesses which you can rate. It even offers mobile coupons for the retailers and restaurants in your vicinity.

Finally, Xobni, the Outlook email search plugin that discovers social connections in your inbox, revealed their new Blackberry application, too. As with the desktop software, Xobni for Blackberry will let you find contacts in your address book quickly using Xobni Rank technology which returns results ranked based on frequency and freshness of your communication. The application will be made available sometime early next year.

The Blackberry Developer Conference continues until Thursday, so stay tuned for even more news over the coming days.

The company says its API "represents the emergence of an open AR development platform which could further drive the adoption of Wikitude as a potential standard for developers who want to create their own mobile AR experience." Get ready to see Augmented Reality come to far more mobile applications and for Wikitude's competitors to respond.

Wikitude says it worked with more than 100 developers from 25 countries in building its API. Both commercial and non-commercial API keys are available to remove the watermark placed over non-keyed implementations. The API allows developers to customize the actions that occur when info-balloon overlays are clicked on and change the menu options for the AR browser.

Will competitors like Layar, AcrossAir, Tochnidot, RobotVision and others release APIs soon as well? They have to be working on it, but Wikitude appears to have the most open disposition, one of the broadest developer communities and thus may be the best suited to become the AR platform of choice.

There are enough players in the AR field already that the competition will likely come down to two things: usability of interfaces and developer-friendliness. May the games begin!

The idea is that developers can build mini-applications that can allow real-time user interaction through the instant messaging foundation of Google Talk IM. Lettvin showed off an example of a chess game that was not only discussed over IM but played through an interface with IM-like communication infrastructure running underneath it. That's pretty hot.

University of Amsterdam student, Sander Dijkhuis, already built a collaborative text editing gadget using one of the APIs and we expect to see more interesting examples emerge shortly. Just picture ease of development plus real-time communication across different installs of little applications. There are lots of things that APIs like that could make possible.

While we're sure that developers engaged in Google social networks will enjoy these APIs (though Flash is out of the picture, it's just Javascript) we would love to see them available outside their current confines.

Google already gave a number of developers a preview of the API and you can see the fruits of their labor here. These tools, for example, include integration with content management systems and other analytics suites. One easy to install example for an app that uses the Google Analytics API is Polaris, an Adobe AIR widget from Desktop Reporting that displays basic information about your site.

Of course, Google Analytics, even with this API, does not give you real-time information about the traffic on your site. For that, you will still have to resort to other tools like Woopra, which uses a desktop application as it default interface, and which also offers an API.

Make no mistake about it, the vast majority of people on the web still have no idea that they can save their bookmarks outside their browsers. Yahoo has done a terrible job leveraging and growing this incredible database of user-categorized links of interest. Now the company is giving developers an opportunity to do so. Why is this important? Read on for some examples of what's now possible thanks to BOSS/Delicious integration.

BOSS is a technology that allows any website to use the Yahoo index and search processing power to build a topic-specific search engine on their own site. What could BOSS plus Delicious look like?

Some query types we can imagine being made possible by this integration are:

* I do a news search for a topic like the Textron buy-out or golfer Ross Fisher (two hot search terms today) and BOSS + Delicious shows me which URLs in my list of search results have been tagged "analysis" the most, or "biography."

* Search an index of food blogs for recipes and tell me which of them have been bookmarked the most and have been tagged "Mediterranean" and "vegetarian." The words Mediterranean and vegetarian may not appear anywhere in the text of the recipe, but human readers can recognize the recipe as fitting into both those categories and tag it as such when bookmarking it.

* Look up the links that my blog commenters post along with their comments and show me the top tags that other people have used to categorize those links. Perhaps, more marketers than engineers commented on my last blog post. I'd like to know that. Perhaps, I've had an influx of teachers, preachers or veterinarians commenting on my blog lately. Who wouldn't want to see that kind of data?

These are just a few examples of the kinds of data that we can imagine BOSS + Delicious offering up. We're sure readers can noodle just a bit on permutations of URL, times bookmarked, and top tags in order to come up with all kinds of other scenarios. Any time you've got millions of people saying "this link is important to me and these are the words I'd use to describe it" then that's really valuable information to be able to access programmatically.

Now imagine what could happen if Yahoo helped more people discover social bookmarking and opened up even more access to that data. It's absolutely tragic that this hasn't happened yet, but perhaps a little BOSS action is the beginning. If knowledge and information are value, then Yahoo has taken a small pipe connected to a potentially huge reservoir of black gold and let it just run down the drain, unused for the last three years. Yahoo adopted a baby with the potential to grow into an incredible adult and then forgot to feed and care for it for three years. It's quite upsetting.

It would be great if Delicious saw continued development in directions that supported this data-centric approach of leveraging crowdsourced attention signals. We're not sure how much hope for that is warranted though, given that so little progress has been made in that direction so far.

Disclosures: The author is a member of a Yahoo! Product Advisory Council and has multiple consulting clients in or around the social bookmarking sector.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

we're seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API (with more to come). Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that everyone can benefit from.

Why is This Important?

The social web works best when it's truly social. New applications that use social sharing can be much more useful when new users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. That's much better than starting cold.

These types of standardized approaches to passing that data are secure (that's good) and allow developers to write code once to use all the supporting sources of data. You've heard the old illustration about railroads? When all the railroads in the US accepted a standard size of rail, all the trains were able to travel much farther than ever before. That's where we're headed with all this information on the web. When we give it standard methods of transport, it can go further and do more than ever before.

That's a pretty big deal and it's fantastic that Google has moved to support the Portable Contacts standard. Hopefully sometime soon everyone will and then we'll wonder what took the web so long to enable social interoperability.

Seeqpod searches MP3 files uploaded independently all around the web; it's a great way to explore music and build playlists, and so far it's been a good way to pipe music into a wide variety of other websites. Starting next week, developers will be required to pay $3 for every 1000 search queries performed on their sites powered by Seeqpod. They will also have the option to put up $5k to license the Seeqpod crawler and index.

We've contacted the company for comment but haven't heard back yet. Developers say that the company changed its API this morning and they are having trouble accessing the service. Semantic social search company HeadUp has published a solution to that problem.

We're surprised that there has been no discussion of a free level of service. According to a credible-looking internal email passed along to us: "Starting April 1 SeeqPod will begin charging all API partners $0.003/query ($3 for 1000 queries) -- payable via credit card or Paypal." There's a chance that this is an April Fools joke, but it wouldn't be a very funny one.

Looking over the ProgrammableWeb list of APIs tagged music, it appears the most likely candidate to replace Seeqpod as a free music API is Imeem. That company's TOS says it reserves the right to start charging for access to its data as well. Imeem doesn't appear to be as wide open as Seeqpod has been, either.

Some developers pull audio in from music videos on YouTube, but that doesn't seem like a sustainable solution. That's what our favorite music search site, Songza, does: Imeem plus YouTube with ads on screen. It may have been too good to be true: any song uploaded anywhere by anyone, for free, forever!

On some level the disruption can be blamed on the major labels' fear of free music on the web and the belief that by making content easier to discover online Seeqpod is facilitating theft of intellectual property. (Imagine if search engines had to verify the legal status of everything they pointed searchers to!) Ultimately, though, if what Seeqpod is doing were easy then we expect lots of people would be doing it. It's inevitable that the company is seeking to make some money.

We're concerned about this making it more difficult for late-night coders around the world to bust out a shocking new interface for listening to music, but we presume that innovation will live on - even if inconvenienced. We hope it works out for both Seeqpod and the developers who require free access to music in order to do what they do.

We're talking about an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences, including the Human Genome, huge amounts of chemistry data, machine readable encyclopedic entries about millions of different topics and an entire dump of Wikipedia. US Census data, data from the US Department of Transportation and more. It's all accessible by web applications in no time at all. What do you think this is going to change?

This includes data from:

• The Bureau of Transportation Statistics.


• DBPedia Knowledge Base - which "currently describes more than 2.6 million things including 213,000 people, 328,000 places, 57,000 music albums, 36,000 films, and 20,000 companies." All in handy semantic markup.


• The Freebase Data Dump - the giant collaboratively build semantic database on a wide variety of topics, data that high profile startup Metaweb has spent millions of dollars assembling.


• The entire English section of Wikipedia, dumped into a machine readable format.


• A number of large genetic and scientific databases.

We counted all the databases up and it passed 1 TB of available data. The company says that accessing this data is "trivial" for developers.

What are developers going to do with this data? We can't wait to find out. The prospect of mashing up, cross referencing and user interfacing with this amount of data is nearly unfathomable. Really. This data will be leveraged by all kinds of different web applications, for a long time.

You've read, or can imagine, the impact that the first Public Libraries had on human culture. Now imagine the opening up of not just this, but other libraries of data, so huge that economies of scale blast the project off beyond any analogy that could be drawn with our everyday experience or historical memories. It won't just be Amazon that offers up this kind of data - it will be relatively commonplace soon, we imagine.

It will be like a network of libraries - for robots. Robots that go to the library frequently, read very fast and make serious use of what they've learned.

Congratulations, Amazon, on passing 1 TB of public data made available. May all our robots of the future please live in peace.

This is a big deal. A strong press organ with open data is to the rest of the web what basic newspaper delivery was to otherwise remote communities in another period of history. It's a transformation moment towards interconnectedness and away from isolation. A quality API could throw the doors wide open to a future where "newspapers" are important again.

What does that mean? It means that sites around the web will be able to add dynamic links to New York Times articles, or excerpts from those articles, to pages on their own sites. The ability to enrich other content with high quality Times supplementary content is a powerful prospect.

The Times has opened a wide variety of APIs over the last year; they are making "the newspaper as platform" (as journalist Mathew Ingram put it today) a major part of the company's bid for the future. We discussed the significance of this strategy when the Times opened its first API in October. As we wrote then,

Reporting is no longer a scarce commodity. It's hard for these huge news organizations to do it faster, cheaper or even as well as a whole web of new media producers around the world. They may be among the top sources for original content still today, but considering the direction technology is moving in - that's not a safe bet for the future.

One thing that big media still does have a particularly good share of, though, is information processing resources and archival content. The Times' campaign contribution API is a good example of this. The newspaper is far better prepared to organize that raw information, and perhaps offer complimentary content, than any individual blogger or small news publisher.

We're excited to see how this API gets put to use and we look forward to seeing it develop all the more.

What could come next? We'd love to see some semantic parsing of all this content. As semantic web aficionado Tom Morris wrote today, "[These] Could be signs of something very good - imagine if the New York Times were to join the web of Linked Data, pointing from articles out to all sorts of distributed resources. The amount of information stored up inside an institution like the New York Times would be really interesting if it were linked together with other data on the Web. A search API isn't tremendously interesting, but it is interesting to see someone like the NYT do this, rather than just Web 2.0 sites and hosts of user-contributed material publishing this kind of data."

Or, as Tim Berners Lee reportedly told attendees of the TED conference today - the time has come for no "database hugging" - don't just make your own website. Especially when it comes to government data, we should all demand raw data now.

Full raw data, marked up semantic or linked data, there are a number of options. This is an informational currency that could mean as much to the world of the future as mere delivery of the paper press used to in an otherwise isolated world. We hope this effort will succeed and be another model for more of the same from other companies.

Disclosure: The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

Earlier this month, when Bit.ly originally launched their Firefox plugin, we were excited to see how it exposed data like clickthroughs, user profiles, and the expanded URL in a small pop-up window that would appear just by hovering your mouse over the various links on Twitter.

Now Bit.ly's plugin lets you hover over the "in reply to" links on Twitter to see the original message that started the Twitter conversation. This is extremely useful for anyone who uses the Twitter homepage to interact with the service instead of a desktop application.

Why Enhance Twitter.com?

Although when it comes to Twitter, we prefer using desktop software, like TweetDeck for example, we often don't have any other option but to use the Twitter homepage. Thanks to Twitter's hard API limits, heavy use of our desktop programs ends up leaving them stalled out once those limits are reached. That has us constantly switching back from our desktop programs to the homepage itself - a homepage whose simplicity is lacks many of the features we have come to rely on in our Twitter apps.

That's why it's important to keep your eye on developments like this and others that add additional functionality to the Twitter homepage itself. Besides Bit.ly's must-have browser plugin, we also recommend using the relatively new Power Twitter Firefox plugin which adds even more features to Twitter's interface including search, inline videos and photos, Facebook status updates, and more.

The combination of both plugins can turn Twitter.com into a homepage that's a worthy competitor to whatever desktop app you currently use - in fact, you may end up even preferring to use use the homepage as your primary Twitter "client!" If you want to try Bit.ly's new and improved browser plugin, you can download it from here: http://bit.ly/bitlyFirefox. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_improved_bitly_plugin_adds_functionality_to_twitter.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_improved_bitly_plugin_adds_functionality_to_twitter.php Products Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:51:24 -0800 Sarah Perez The Washington Post launched a new political database site today, lead by a top political blogger it snapped up this month from a leading new media site. Are these the types of steps that can help struggling newspapers thrive in the future? The Post could join the trailblazing efforts of organizations like the New York Times and the UK Guardian in making the newspaper of the future a database of public information, layered with analytic, visual and programmatic added value. That's what we have hopes for, but it's not clear yet that the Post knows what to do with its new site.

WhoRunsGov.com is the Post's new site where readers can learn background information about the new Obama administration, members of congress, prominent military officials and others who now "run government."

Old Media, New Guts?

WhoRunsGov is built on a Mindtouch Dekiwiki, the same sophisticated platform used by many other organizations to assemble data-centric application sites built largely on mashups. We've seen some awesome work done by IBM with a Dekiwiki for example, pulling in data using Dapper and mashing it up with maps APIs.

WhoRunsGov, on the other hand, looks mostly like a content site right now. A mix of political news and a would-be search engine magnet in the form of 240 pages about high profile political figures. The site is a moderated wiki, it includes blogs and it aggregates relevant news coverage from the Post and around the web. That's cool, but it sure could be cooler.

Earlier this month the Post hired political blogging star Greg Sargent away from Talking Points Memo to write the lead blog on WhoRunsGov. Sargent's posts should be good and popular, but we'd love to see them augmented with content based in a paradigm fresher than the old broadcast media. There's a lot of third party data that could be pulled in to WhoRunsGov and there's outbound APIs that could make it a much more valuable site, ultimately increasing its draw and traffic.

Five Projects Doing It Better

What would that look like? For some inspiring examples, check out Little Sis, described as "an involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited & maintained by people like you." If you remember the Flash visualization theyrule.net, Little Sis is of the same vein, but a living site.

Little Sis is getting a lot of love from the Sunlight Foundation and its grand slam site OpenCongress.

The UK Guardian is doing a lot of things in this direction, most notably their initiative Free Our Data, where they are agitating for release of public data for the purpose of mashups. That's pretty hot.

The New York Times has released multiple APIs and just announced a conference called Times Open, "for developers interested in working with NYTimes.com as a news and information platform." (Disclosure: the NYTimes is a syndication partner of this site.)

The coolest political tech initiative we've seen in a long time is Memeorandum Colors, a Greasemonkey script on top of some really innovative data mining to determine the political leanings of blogs participating in the hottest online discussions each day.

Compared to those kinds of initiatives, WhoRunsGov looks a bit boring so far. There's a lot of potential though, and we hope to see the Washington Post's new initiative develop with more impact than it had when it came out of the gate.

Along with Bit.ly's semantic analysis of destination pages, the data unearthed by this new plug-in holds a lot of promise. The plug-in also does some handy tricks on Twitter. It's not perfect yet, but it holds a lot of promise.

The clickthrough data is great to see, but it's not without some serious shortcomings. Bit.ly queries a long list of URL shortening services' APIs to get traffic data and some of them don't update very frequently. There's also a lot of phantom clicks showing up; the company believes they've found a 3rd party app that's partially loading the destination pages and inflating the numbers, but we'll see if they can do anything about it. For now this data is better for determining the relative popularity of a shortened link than it is for literal numbers.

Twitter users will like the extension because hovering over any username there makes the user's information pop-up. That works quite well and is very useful. It's a fast way to see who someone is talking to in a conversation on Twitter.

The moral of the story here is that in little things like URL shortening, there's a whole lot of valuable information and room for innovation. We're glad that Bit.ly is moving to take advantage of that and we look forward to seeing what still other people will do with the data once it's stockpiled and made available by Bit.ly for further development.

You can get the Bit.ly extension for Firefox here.

We're excited about it from a technology perspective, but media industry analyst and RWW Jobwire guest editor Sam Whitmore discusses the move in terms of what it means for the Times as a business as well over in the Jobwire Featured Hire of the Day (sponsored by VisualCV).

Group collaboration startup Pelotonics has turned Evernote into an easy way to load photos, voice messages, notes and other media into your project management system, including from a mobile device.

When we first reviewed Evernote, we said it didn't live up to its incredible promise. Despite our concerns, scores of other people love the powerful note taking system. Check out these usecase videos below to see what Pelotonics has done with it.

Does that look like something you might use? We suspect that for many people it may be. Here at ReadWriteWeb we try to use Basecamp as much as we can, though we regularly come back to simpler tools like email and IM. For organizations looking for more heavyweight web-based collaboration tools, this Pelotonics/Evernote combo might work great.

Now we're even more excited to see what else developers can do with the well-built Evernote API.

Disclosure: The author had a past consulting relationship with Pelotonics but has no ongoing financial interest in the company. We just wrote about this because it looks awesome.

The new MyAOL platform is an OpenSocial container based on the gadgets.*API, meaning developers shouldn't have to do much to get their widgets up and running on it. A fair number of MyAOL gadgets already have millions of users, so the new developer site seems like a real opportunity.

The new MyAOL platform enters the game at a complicated time. Widgets, little modules of content and functionality easily embedded into websites but built by 3rd parties, were supposed to be the future of the web, according to some advocates in recent years. The Facebook Platform was heralded as the widget Holy Land, but key site design decisions treated widgets poorly from the start and subsequent Facebook redesigns have banished them to near invisibility.

Defenders of the platform argue that the redesigned site just keeps really stupid apps from proliferating, making it all the more important to build widgets for actual utility. Scott Rafer, the genuinely brilliant if cynical co-founder of widget ad company Lookery, says the new Facebook is dead to him as a widget man. As a bulk-ad sales guy, Rafer's company deals in very large part with really stupid widget apps. So it goes. If your platform isn't supportive of stupid widgets, then your platform essentially doesn't support widgets at all.

MyAOL is Big

MyAOL is a good old fashioned startpage. An increasing number of AOL properties have recently started incorporating 3rd party content and moving towards a strategy of openness. AOL has a bad rap but is doing some innovative things.

The company's new platform gives third party developers access to a large group of users. How big is the AOL platform? 10 million people have installed the AOL Weather widget, 6 million have installed the Topix.net news app and there are 1 million AOL Pandora users. Those are very respectable numbers! In fact, they are much higher than almost all of the Facebook app numbers, though Facebook only exposes "active users."

The point is, it's a strange time for the much-hyped widget but the opening of the MyAOL platform represents a good opportunity. In Firefox on my Mac the site doesn't work very well, but it works well enough for millions of people. Widgets remain a promising paradigm, if only the host sites are truly comfortable promoting widget use for the long term, instead of burying 3rd party widgets and renewing their focus on in-house links.