TaskRabbit gets fruitful, mulitplies with new open API

Local-labor locating service TaskRabbit is opening up its tools and network to developers with a new API (application programming interface), the company announced on its blog Friday. This will allow third-party developers to integrate TaskRabbit features directly into their own apps and web sites.

With TaskRabbit, you can hire someone local (called a “Rabbit”) to run errands or do small bits of random work for you, including grocery shopping, data entry, and transporting all kinds … Continue Reading

When the Google+ Platform is opening for developers and why it’s taking so long

The Google+ Platform is still a relatively small collection of read-only APIs, but Google is definitely preparing for a wide and varied set of features for developers.

At the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco Thursday, Google+ engineering director David Glazer (pictured) revealed that Google will roll out more enhancements to the social networking platform “when we’re delighted with how it’s working.”

It’s a vague answer to an important question, and it has a … Continue Reading

Path is grabbing names, numbers, and emails from users’ phones

A brief post from Arun Thampi, an iOS developer based in Singapore, has sparked an outcry among Path users. Thampi was poking around the Path API for a hackathon when he stumbled on request which sent his entire contact list including names, emails and phone numbers to Path.

"Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result – my address book was in Path’s hands," he wrote on his blog.

Influential or not, Klout now fields 7.5B API requests per month

The mine-is-bigger-than-yours need to measure our self-worth against others is alive and well on the web. For proof, look no further than controversial influence-scoring startup Klout, which is now processing 7.5 billion API calls per month.

Klout measures online influence by tracking a person’s reach across social sites and analyzing her Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ relationships to spit out a score between 1 and 100.

Klout scores, said CEO Joe Fernandez in a 2011 … Continue Reading

Just Kik it: New Kik API lets you share from any app across iOS, Android

Plenty of apps let you share items with friends via Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail, but it’s still difficult to instantly share content within apps — for example, a cool new restaurant on Yelp’s app — across mobile devices.

Kik, maker of a popular mobile messaging app, aims to change that with its new API, which allows developers to quickly implement mobile content sharing within their apps to any of Kik’s 6 million registered users.

The … Continue Reading

Apple job posts reveal Siri’s future: API, sleeker interface and more

It’s not every company that makes waves over new job postings, but Apple is not every company. Apple has two positions open for iOS engineers to work on the next generation of Siri, the voice-powered personal assistant for the iPhone 4S.

The new posts mention that the engineers will be working on a Siri API, which would allow applications to use the voice recognition functionality to carry out a variety of tasks.

The  contents of … Continue Reading

X.commerce names VCs on its Innovate conference panel (exclusive)

X.commerce, eBay’s developer arm, named the five venture capitalists today who will be involved in next week’s “VC Bait” panel at its Innovate conference.

The Innovate conference, as well as the VC Bait panel, are all about creating for the commerce sector. 50 contestants will pitch Andreessen-Horowitz general partner, Jeff Jordan, Matrix Partners general partner Dana Stalder, Felicis Ventures founder and managing director Aydin Senkut, First Round Capital managing partner Chris Fralic, and Webb Investment … Continue Reading

Google+ releases API focused on search

Google released a new application programming interface (API) for Google+ today. The API gives developers access to Google+’s search functions. The API remains public-focused and will only allow developers to access public posts as well as people.

Developers use APIs to access data within another program, such as social data, to improve their own third party applications.

Google launched its first set of APIs for Google+ mid-September and soon thereafter introduced the search feature in … Continue Reading

Google+ gets a new API just for Hangouts

Developers, are you ready to let your end users Hangout?

Google has just launched a developer preview of the new Google+ Hangouts API. The new API is just one component of the Google+ platform. It will allow developers to quickly build real-time applications and to create their own own experiences with and around Hangouts.

This means that you’ll be able to run your application — a polling app, an avatar-changing plug-in, a game, you name … Continue Reading

Google+ launches the first of its APIs

It has begun. Google released the first of its application programming interfaces (API) for its social network Google+ today, according to a Google blog post.

The API focuses only on publicly available data — the information users have purposefully included on their public Google+ pages. Developers can access users’ profiles and latest posts. Google is also providing code libraries for those who code in a different language such as Java, Python, Ruby or PHP. Developers … Continue Reading

Foursquare to release API for push notifications today

Location-based social network Foursquare is planning to release its API for push notifications to the public later today, reports BetaBeat.

The push notification API, which Foursquare first announced at its hackathon event in March, allows developers to build apps that will automatically send users short messages based on their location.

So for example, developers could create an app using the new API that sends you a notification to pick up your shirts when driving past … Continue Reading

Google+ API launching with “trusted testers” in days, general availability in weeks

Good news: A few “trusted” developers will be getting their hands on the Google+ API in the next few days, with wider availability coming in the next weeks, according to a leaked letter from Google Ventures.

Developers have been clamoring to get their hands on theAPI since the network’s launch a few months ago.

We asked Google about the letter, but the company declined to talk about a specific timeline. “We definitely plan to involve … Continue Reading

Football! Sportcaster turns Twitter into your gameday play-by-play

Football, the season for pigskins, tailgates and letters painted on stomachs, is among us  OneLouder, the maker of Tweetcaster, is gearing up for game time with a new free mobile app launched today. It’s called Sportcaster and isn’t based on stats from ESPN or commentary from John Madden. Instead, it’s based on Twitter’s API. Using a custom built back-end engine, the app pulls tweets from coaches, players, dedicated sports media and others to give fans … Continue Reading

Yammer unveils single sign-on and embeddable feeds with Yammer Connect

Enterprise social networking site Yammer today unveiled Yammer Connect, a new JavaScript application programming interface (API) that adds a single sign-on “Connect” button and embeddable streams to third-party enterprise software websites.

Yammer is working with a number of third-party enterprise software providers to add a connect button similar to Facebook’s that verifies an employee’s identity. The company wouldn’t disclose what companies it is working with right now but told VentureBeat that it already had a … Continue Reading

Flickr releases new real-time developer tools in time for Photo Hack Day

Just in time for the August 20-21 Photo Hack Day, Flickr has unleashed some new tools for providing real-time photo data to web apps.

That means you can soon look forward to apps that make more extensive — and immediate — use of what’s going on in your Flickr photo stream and those of your friends.

Back in June, the photo-sharing service allowed developers to access photos and favorites from a user’s contacts in their … Continue Reading

Exclusive: Twitpic founder launches Twitter competitor Heello

Twitpic founder Noah Everett today announced the launch of Heello, the startup he’s been brewing for exactly one year.

Yesterday, Twitter completed the rollout of its own official photo-sharing app, a move that spells danger for other photo-sharing services that use Twitter’s API.

Twitpic was on the top of that list, and now, Everett is swinging back at Twitter with his own microblogging competitor that includes photo-sharing capabilities out of the gate, with video-sharing and … Continue Reading

Could Google+ be the first prominent open social network?

Google+ has an incredible amount of buzz surrounding it at the moment. But one element the young network lacks is open standards compliance.

It’s not unique to Google+, as almost all social networks for that matter have this problem. But Google is in a unique position to advance the cause of open standards for social networking.

To put it plainly, open web standards help make the Web and its services run smoothly. Organizations like W3C … Continue Reading

Salsa Labs raises $5M for fundraising software

Salsa Labs, a web-based tool non-profits use for fundraising, isn’t having any problems raising cash of its own. On Monday it received a $5 million first round of funding.

Fundraisers are everywhere. Coworkers sell their children’s wrapping paper, the quintessential, “Will you pledge for every mile I run?” It seems there are so many causes, but fundraising remains a dinosaur – an old and huge problem.

“Organizing is a profession,” said Chris Lundberg, chief executive … Continue Reading

Aviary hopes to take over online photo editing with its Effects API

In one swift move, the online media editing suite Aviary may soon find itself at the heart of the photo app craze. The company today is announcing its Effects API, which will allow developers to easily integrate photo filters and editing utilities into their web and mobile photo apps.

Aviary has been pursuing online editing for some time with its own apps, but with the Effects API the company is making a bold move towards … Continue Reading

API downtime: Who's asleep at the wheel?

Many popular applications use the application programming interfaces (APIs) of other services, from your favorite Twitter client to Facebook apps. So downtime on the most popular APIs has a serious knock-on effect on other services and (up)time is money.

Performance monitoring company WatchMouse just published a study on the downtimes of the 50 most popular APIs including Google Maps, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Wikipedia.

WatchMouse tracked these APIs between February 16 and … Continue Reading