platform

I wrote about Email as a platform one year ago. Now Gmail has finally allowed OAuth on IMAP which means you don't need to reveal your password to any app that accesses your emails through IMAP on your behalf.

Why would you want an app to access and act your emails? Because your email box is so overflowed. Here are a couple of uses:

• get alerts on important emails
• have an app scan through your order confirmation emails and keep a history of your purchases(this is how Blippy got your Amazon purchase history. I know Blippy sounds crazy. I don't think it'll ever succeed in consumer space. But for business users, there's a business case for auto-parsing out email order receipts and filling out expense reports.)

Tags: application platform email gmail oauth imap

Yahoo has already been working on Yahoo Mail Platform to allow 3rd-party developers to write applications enhance Yahoo Mail experience.

Xobni has been enhancing the Outlook experience. I don't know what's the reason of MS not buying Xobni. But Xobni has everything that Outlook and email services ought to have.

Today, Google rolled out new Gmail Lab features to allow preview of youtube, flickr, picasa, Yelp contents whenever they detect relevant links in your emails.

Tags: application api platform email gmail yahoo_mail xobni

If you can't fight the biggest player. Unite others to fight him.

OpenSocial API, proposed by Google, and supported by popular social networks including hi5, iLike, Slide, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning, Bebo, MySpace and SixApart, but excluding FaceBook, are going live in any minute(supposedly to be open tonight).

The open API will have three parts(from Oreilly Radar

• People
• Storage
• Activity stream

All of these calls will have a GData counterpart and they will use HTML and JavaScript only. Google is considering adding OAuth (Radar post) to the API.

Tags: google facebook microsoft opensocial platform myspace