We've covered several apps that integrate with the social music platform Last.FM, and we've expressed our worries about what might happen to the site when it was bought by CBS. As it happens, though, Last.FM has only gotten better lately. And now that they've released a shiny new version of their public API, we're hoping for more development on the downloadable app front.
Here's the skinny on the new API features: there's now read/write authentication for desktop, web and mobile apps, which, besides being essential for any service that logs your music listening, sets the stage for -- dare we hope? -- a killer Last.fm app for iPhone. The API will also allow apps to access search functions and make playlists, which means easier access to Last.FM's growing library of free streaming tracks. Scrobble on, amigos.
One of the most valuable features of any good email or IM service is the contact list. Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and other companies that provide online communication tools also give you a place to store information about your friends, family, colleagues, and people who you met years ago and have completely forgotten about.
Yahoo! is making that much more useful by launching the Yahoo! Address Book API, which will let 3rd party developers create applications that can interact with your contact list. For example, you can use the API to develop an application that will scan your contact list to find other users who already belong to the social network you're signing up for, or a list of people you may want to invite. The API also supports contact synchronization, which could come in handy if you want to develop a tool that syncs online contact lists with Outlook or Thunderbird.
The API also provides the ability to create, modify, or delete contact information, which sounds a litle scary. But Yahoo! says write-acess is "available on a case by case basis," so developers will need to contact Yahoo! before creating a utility that has the ability to wipe out your address book.
Plaxo and LinkedIn have been using the API for a while, but Yahoo! is launching it publicly today.
One of the moves that has made YouTube successful is the ability to embed YouTube videos on any site. Now YouTube is going a few steps further and giving web developers tools that will let users upload and edit YouTube videos from any web page.
What that means is you can essentially build a web page that lets visitors upload videos of kittens and puppies doing cute things, send video responses to one another, edit their video metadata, and never ever have to click through to YouTube, even though all of the transcoding and file hosting is taking place on a Google server.
Web developers can also customize the look and feel of the YouTube video player using a new Javascript API.
Search interfaces that use more than one page are starting to look quaint and old-fashioned. Why open your results in another tab if you don't have to? The talented designers behind Compfight have come up with a lightweight Ajax search tool for a service we use every day: Flickr.
Compfight fits all the most important Flickr search options into its minimal design. You can switch between tags and all text, turn Creative Commons on or off, and decide whether clicking thumbnails will take you to the default photo page or show the original size. It takes some fiddling to do all of this at Flickr.com, but Compfight uses the Flickr API and makes everything easy.
Oh, and about those thumbnails: a blue line at the bottom lets you know that Flickr has an original photo, and you can mouse over it to see the photo's dimensions. It looks so good that you might be tempted to completely give up going to Flickr.com for your searches.
The API will enable trusted 3rd party sites to access your Google contact information without asking you to provide your login information. So next time Facebook, Plaxo, or another service wants to import your Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Talk contacts you might not have to give up your email password. Likewise, 3rd party software and web sites will be able to export contact lists to Google. And developers could write software that will keep your Google contacts synchronized with your desktop or mobile personal information manager.
In other words, if someone has some free time on their hands, they can write an application that will allow you to synchronize your Outlook and Google contacts. You know, like the application we were kind of hoping Google would release along with Google Calendar Sync yesterday.
As part of our continuing coverage from this huge day of presentations at Future of Web Apps 2008 in Miami, we're liveblogging Kevin Marks presentation on The Future of APIs.
Microsoft is promising to take steps to improve interoperability with competing technologies. This is hardly the first time Microsoft has made such promises, although in the past the company has usually waited until it received a few pokes from one regulatory agency or another.
Microsoft will make APIs and other information available for 6 "high-volume" products:
Windows Vista
Windows Server 2008
SQL Server 2008
Office 2007
Exchange Server 2007
Office SharePoint Server 2007
Developers will not need to pay royalties or any other fees to access these APIs and communication protocols. Microsoft will be publishing over 30,000 pages of documentation on MSDN that had previously only been available under a trade secret license.
From a more practical level, Microsoft will be designing new APIs for Office 2007 that will make it easier for users to choose between a variety of document formats. The company is also launching an "open source interoperability initiative" that should result in better communication between Microsoft products and open source alternatives like OpenOffice.org.
Lest you should think this latest push is entirely altruistic, Mary Jo Foley points out that ISO is scheduled to discuss the standarization of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format next week. If Microsoft doesn't get the ISO standard, the company could lose out on government contracts that require open standards.
We have to admit we haven't given much thought to blogging community site MyBlogLog over the last year or so. The service launched as a way for bloggers to get in touch with one another and find new sites they might be interested in. But Technorati and Google Blog Search are both much more useful for finding blogs covering topics you care about.
But that doesn't mean there's no value in MyBlogLog. The service offers a couple of web site tools including a free and subscription analytics package and a "recent visitors widget," that shows the profiles of other MyBlogLog members who have visited your page. And this week MyBlogLog rolled out an updated and much improved version of that widget.
Not only does the new widget have a slick Web 2.0 look and feel, but when you hover your mouse over the name or image of a recent visitor, you see link to their MyBlogLog profile and links to their web sites. This adds value for anyone who publishes the widget on their site, and also creates an incentive for bloggers and web publishers to sign up for a MyBlogLog account since there's a better chance that someone might see their profile on a random page and click through to their site.
To get the widget, just login to your MyBlogLog account and click the "Get Widgets" button to get the HTML embed code.
Brad Fitzpatrick, the developer responsible for Livejournal and OpenID is up to it again. This time, he let us know on the Google Code blog, that the API for Social Graph is now available.
Social Graph is an API that functions like a Pagerank for social relationships. The idea is that when you join a new social network you don't have to manually add previous relationships because it can populate your list based on your connections from other networks, your blog, or the web.
Social Graph works by indexing sites that use the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) open standards in order to gauge relationships between people.
On February 5, MySpace will open its system to developers so that they can begin building applications (similar to Facebook applications). MySpace intends to offer advertisement-revenue sharing to developers while avoiding the feed/request pollution that Facebook has.
MySpace will be supporting OpenSocial which is a collection of API's for developers to create applications that run on multiple social websites. The theory is that with OpenSocial a developer can make one application that interacts with different sites (like MySpace, imeem, Plaxo, etc.). So now instead of asking one group of contacts if they want to take your "how funny are you?" quiz, you can ask all of your contacts!
If you want to write apps for MySpace, you can pre-register on their developer site now.
Ever want to add a powerful image editing application to your web site, but didn't have the time or expertise to develop your own? No problem. Picnik, which recently announced a partnership with photo sharing powerhouse Flickr, has launched an API which should make it possible for pretty much anyone to integrate Picnik's online image editing application with their site.
Using the Picnik API, you can let visitors to your web page load, edit, and save images using the Picnik interface, all without leaving your site. You can also build web applications around Picnik. For example, Better or Worser is a site that challenges users to use Picnik tools to improve upon images uploaded by other users.
Have you ever had the need to quickly and dynamically generate charts for a web based application? Google can help.
The new Google Chart API is a tool that one can use to create charts and graphs that can be embedded in websites. Basically, you type a few commands into a URL string and Google will spit out a PNG image with a line chart, bar chart, pie chart, venn diagram, or scatter plot. You can customize colors, points, and sizes. The developers guide walks through everything you might want to accomplish with the API.
When complete, copy the charts URL, and wrap a set of images tags around it to embed it into websites.
For example, the chart you see on the right was generated by entering this URL in a browser.
If you are thinking about doing more than 50,000 queries per day, you might have issues, that's the limit Google places on users per day. Right click on our image in this post, and take a peek at the URL, thats the guts of the image.
About a month ago Meebo announced they had a new third party development platform. With it, developers can create multi user applications where users can connect to each other. Now the fun starts rolling out, starting with games.
With over 200 registered developers, Meebo has pushed out 20 multiplayer games and made them available for users to play through the online instant messaging platform. Some head to head challenging games include Backgammon, Checkers, Chess, Connect4, Sudoku wars and Texas Hold'em, making the online messaging location even more tempting to use and replace current standard IM's with.
Although gaming is just a start, the next round of Meebo platform categories include shopping, productivity, work applications, music and video.
Meebo, the web-based instant messaging service, has announced that they will be powering Channel Chat across Joost's internet video platform.
Joost provides over 15000 shows from 250 Channels. Meebo will allow anyone watching a show or channel to chat with other viewers, or to chat with people with the same viewing tastes.
Meebo has just announced a new platform for their messaging system. This allows for third party developers to create applications based on the growing chat service.
The Meebo development platform launched with a set of API's that developers can grab in order to create multi user applications that Meebo users can specifically use to connect with each other. The question users must answer before the build, "I want to ______ with you. Before development begins, Meebo requires applications to be registered complete with title of application, descriptions and author's names. Special instructions and a key will then be sent out to get connected to the database. When the build is complete using either the supplied Flash or JavaScript starter files, applications will be tested in a sandbox environment before they are released to Meebo users. Developers aren't left in the shadows, Meebo will be selling advertising on the applications, and will be splitting revenue 50/50.
The two year old company is moving into the big time fast with their communication platform. They have also announced some big partnerships that allow video/audio calls (TokBox), voice chat (Pudding Media), group calling (TalkShoe), and live TV show streaming (UStream).
We've covered several apps that integrate with the social music platform Last.FM, and we've expressed our worries about what might happen to the site when it was bought by CBS. As it happens, though, Last.FM has only gotten better lately. And now that they've released a shiny new version of their public API, we're hoping for more development on the downloadable app front. 
About a month ago 
