ReadWriteWeb

Matt Asay compares APIs to open-source. The more open the code, the more difficult it can be to sell the software. The new generation of Web players like Facebook are taking a similar approach with their APIs. Facebook, for instance, is giving significant access to its platform in exchange for all the data from sites with the Facebook icons and gadgets on its Web pages.

But due to its openness, the question becomes how the revenue can well surpass the certain costs that come with serving the Facebook developer army.

A drawback to the Twitter API is its incompatibility with the cloud.

The API looks for one IP address when making a call. A rate limit is imposed so a busy Twitter app may be difficult to access during heavy load times. But the cloud is not one IP address. It's a network of thousands of IP adresses that are randomly called to a cloud environment.

Apigee and Heroku are launching a service today that will serve to alleviate the rate limit problem for Ruby on Rails developers. According to Sam Ramji of Sonoa Systems, Heroku developers will now have access to Apigee's carrier grade Twitter gateway. The gateway means that developers get quick access to Twitter with minimal latency issues. Apigee is a service provided by Sonoa Systems.

The OAuth 2.0 draft specification is out there. The efforts of the group working on the specification are paying off in the form of an IETF working group submission. One thing is clear, there is a natural tension in following the processes of IETF and the hyper-innovation cycle of web standards that are now powered by the growth of social media.

In this world, keeping up with all the work in the community itself is a feat in itself. As proven recently, even aligning the naming of standards in our small community (xAuth, XAuth) proves challenging enough. With that said, we'll share we what we've learned about this version and what work has been incorporated into it.

Nearly a full half-hour into the darkness this morning and we were beginning to wonder if it was time to break out the hurricane candles and board games - the world seemed to suddenly slow down and it had, dramatically. Twitter, you see, died on us this morning.

While we're used to seeing the intermittent Fail Whale, the outage this morning lasted a solid 24 minutes according to the company, affecting both the website and API.

For many people, Twitter offers a larger, more diverse stream of constantly flowing data than they've ever had to deal with before in their life. Depending on how many people you follow and how much they tweet, the information can become unmanageable. To that end, we have user lists, third-party clients, Twitter tools and search.

And today, it looks like Twitter has begun working on making this last option - search - more useful for its users by offering the ability to percolate popular search results to the top of the page.

What's the best way to leverage the most information out of 140 characters? Should you get to learning Mandarin so each character can be a word? Or start forming German-style pseudo-word hashtags to get the point across? Or perhaps, you could parse the natural language, encapsulate the tweet in meta data and go from there.

We've already seen additional information stacked onto our Tweets, as with the geo-location API released last November, but Cascaad's SuperTweet API does more than wrap your tweet in client-provided data like GPS coordinates.

Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company's new partners in receiving the "firehose" of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.

What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter's 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting - the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets - it provides an understanding of the world's conversations.

It's been just about a year now since Twitter started using OAuth as a solution for connecting with third-party applications, but to this day we still find situations where we are asked to enter our user name and password.

If your natural reflex when the weather gets rough is to tweet about it, that reflex can now help the National Weather Service do its job better thanks to a new Twitter storm reporting program.

The NWS has always solicited severe weather reports from the public. After all, no amount of technology can ever be a substitute for an accurate report of what's actually happening on the ground. Because of the new Twitter geolocation API and the increasing number of applications that support it (TweetDeck for iPhone is the latest to add geotagging support), it's become very simple for the public to submit severe weather reports and for the NWS to pinpoint where they happened.

TweetDeck's iPhone app just got a much-needed update. Version 1.3 brings a slew of new features that finally puts TweetDeck back on par with its competitors on the iPhone. The app now supports Twitter lists and Twitter's new geotagging API. The app also offers optional support for Twitter's new retweet style, and the TweetDeck team has made a number of smaller tweaks and fixes that make the app faster and more stable.