Facebook is partnering with cloud hosting service Heroku to
make Facebook application deployment more plug-and-play. The new service likely uses the Heroku API to allow developers to instantly have a basic Facebook app running in minutes instead of hours or days. Facebook’s app wizard lets you choose from Heroku’s supported languages, then pre-populates an app with working examples of common tasks using the Facebook API.
The semantic text mining Alchemy API is now a member of the API Billionaires Club. The service, which makes sense of raw unstructured data, averages 65-75 million requests per day, according to Alchemy’s Elliot Turner. That brings the monthly count above 2 billion API requests.
Can you hear the collective developer community saying “finally?” After less than three months, Google has made an initial version of a Google Plus API available for developers. The service can access public information on people and the activities the user’s have chosen to post publicly, as opposed to a specific circle. In July we asked Is Google Plus Intentionally Late? Google said it wanted to learn how developers will use the service before providing an API. This is likely only the very first version of a Google Plus API.
Do you fancy yourself checking in for dinner with Foursquare founder, Naveen Selvadurai wearing a Foursquare Champion Belt? The location-sharing platform has thrown in that opportunity as part of its unique Round-The-World, Round-The-Clock Hackathon. The event plans to bring together developers to collaborate locally and globally to build cool applications using the Foursquare API and win some cool prizes too.
MapQuest’s recent entree into mobile developer tools is an interesting one. Choosing Android over iPhone means going toe to toe with Google, a familiar competitor to MapQuest on the mapping front. Mapping is logically MapQuest’s turf. The company was helping people find directions online before Larry and Sergey were even in graduate school, let alone leaving to found Google. Of course, another way of looking at it is that Android is in line with MapQuest’s latest push to open up mapping data.
X.commerce is the new brand for the developer commerce tools that include the eBay API and PayPal API. The first conference under this new brand is coming in October to San Francisco. As a media partner, we have a promo code, as well as a little more information about how the company is looking to create a sum greater than its parts with the X.commerce platform.
Samsung is back with its Free The TV challenge. The first edition of the challenge was held last year when WeDraw bagged top honors. Samsung has had a great year with its mobile devices garnering a fair share of attention. The TV as a developer platform has also seen interest in platforms from Apple and Google and with its latest SDK and contest, Samsung definitely wants to woo the developers.
A little over a month off of its pricing structure changes, location database-as-a-service company SimpleGeo has updated its SimpleGeo Places API with more data based on an earlier partnership with Factual. In addition to new data, there are new ways to access it, as well as some changes to the structure of the data returned, so if you’ve already built on the API you will want to take note.
Aviary, the photo editing suite that includes a number of Aviary APIs to incorporate photo editing into your web applications is moving its tools to mobile. Today it announced SDKs for iPhone and Android, as well as an impressively long list of launch partners who have already incorporated the platform in their mobile apps.
It has been two weeks since Google’s unpopular pricing changes on its Google App Engine platform. The pricing left many developers upset since it pushed up their charges by 3x-5x in many cases. Google was pushed to the back foot in the face of the uproar and realized it needed to do a better job explaining the pricing and give developers a little more time to make changes in their apps.
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