While some modern browsers include built-in spell checkers, and some operating systems include built-in spelling and grammar checkers, there are people out there using operating systems and browsers that do not have these features.

If you're looking for some help with your writing and don't have access to Microsoft Word or a similarly-powered word processor, there is a solution available on the web called After the Deadline. The site (at the memorable URL polishmywriting.com) offers spelling and grammar help, and even writing style suggestions.

Although there's no doubt that Twitter is the current reigning social status update king of the hill, upstart FriendFeed is certainly a more than viable alternative. FriendFeed does everything Twitter can do and much, much more right out of the box, aggregating all of your feeds (including your Twitter stream) into a single unified online presence.

If you're already using FriendFeed, you might be interested in Feedstats, which shows you statistics about just what it is you get up to online, at least in terms of what you are funneling through the FriendFeed service. It also shows statistics about which other FriendFeed users you tend to interact with most, and which ones you are most compatible with, in terms of liking the same content.

Of course, all of these statistics are drawn from FriendFeed's openly available API, which means that you can snoop on your friends and see just what their habits are, as well. Or even better, check out a few A-list microbloggers to see just how much more social-networky than you they are.

At a time when a lot of newspapers are shutting down or finding themselves forced to come up with a smarter online strategy, the New York Times is evolving its web content with improvements like the Article Skimmer and an Article Search API. The API can be used to build interesting applications on top of the Times' huge database of articles and information. Taylor Barstow's NYT Explorer is one early example of an app built on Article Search.

When you search for a topic on NYT Explorer, it quickly delivers a list of the relevant articles, sorted by date. For example, a search for software turned up about 40,000 results. That's a lot of articles, but not to worry: NYT Explorer's sidebar has a bunch of quick ways to refine your results and get what you want. You can check a person, a specific column in the paper, a subject, or a location to narrow your results down. All of these categories are sorted by the number of times each item appears in your results. It's an efficient, unfussy way to browse through a mountain of news.

Since Twitter decided to take care of the frequent outages that used to plague its servers, I've actually started using it here and there. It's a nice service, and definitely has useful applications. You've only got to look as far as sites like NowPublic and Twubble to see how the API can be put to good use.

However, there are a mountain of applications feeding off it and they're not all contenders for Best in Show. These five definitely are, but only if it's a show dedicated to sucking at Twitter API use.

Twitemperature
Finally, a service that can tell you how hot or cold you are on Twitter. Does anyone actually need this? I suppose there are people that think Twitter is like a web 2.0 popularity contest, but can't you look at your follower total and figure this out yourself?

I'd also like to know how their script works. Their "hottest" tweeter has 55 followers. The crowd has spoken, and 55 < hot. Also, his level of hotness is referred to as "volcanic" and features a picture of a guy holding Tabasco - arguably one of the least-hot hot sauces you can buy.

And no, I'm not just bitter because I'm only a few degrees above freezing.

I have to confess that, until today, I was still converting latitude and longitude by Googling "convert GPS coordinates" and putting it into whatever came up first. That just changed when I found Tiny Geo-coder. It converts coordinate pairs to addresses, and vice versa. Not only that, but it has an API, so you can use it in other web projects that require coordinates.

One of the first real-world uses of Tiny Geo-coder can be seen on travel.perfectspace.com, where the authors are passing their check-ins on Brightkite through Tiny Geo-coder to generate a map of their location for display on the site. Another possibility that comes immediately to mind is converting the coordinates that the iPhone version Twitterrific generates into the name of the location for your Twitter profile. I'm sure clever people will come up with some even better ideas for this little app.

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.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

UPDATE: Some of our astute readers have recommended MobileScrobbler as the killer Last.FM app for iPod/iPhone. Thanks, Neil and Robotrock.

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.

[via Mashable]

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.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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.

[via JoshSpear]

Shortly after releasing a tool for synchronizing Google Calendar with Outlook yesterday, Google released another key in the synchronization puzzle: an API for accessing Google contacts.

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.

[Via Mashable]