Kai Mai's Blog - Take Back the Web - Nodes for api

To Twitter: Stop Replying on Developers Building Features using Your API. Take Control of Your Own Destiny

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:23:23 -0700

Twitter is famous for its openness on its API and have a lot of tools built by 3rd party developers. But many 3rd-party tools are built/abused to add automated spammy tweets, robots to Twitter.

Last month, Twitter engineer Alex Payne tweeted “If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)"

I'd love to see the niffy site features! Twitter's web UI is just way too simple. Example: Where can I follow conversations(aka: thread of retweets, replies) on a tweet?

Twitter should surely use its $160 million funding to beautify its web presentation and blow away all the 3rd-party clients(whoever builds its entire business model on features that are core to Twitter should have seen this day coming).

Tags: api twitter

The Next Battle Field between Yahoo & Google & Microsoft: Email 2.0

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:14:24 -0700

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

Yahoo! Search BOSS API FAQs

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 23:35:19 -0800

I am a big fan of Yahoo! Search BOSS API as it empowers users to leverage Yahoo's search's crawler and indexes to develop applications without spending a huge amount of money on infrastructure/bandwidth! Google, do you know what I mean?

As an observer on the active Yahoo! Search BOSS API mailing list, I document the Yahoo BOSS API's limitations which I over-hear on the mailing list:

API fees and Monetization
- Yahoo is going to charge fees on API usages beyond a certain limit.

Tags: api search yahoo_boss_api

The Importance of Web 2.0: Public API for Ad-Hoc Application Integration

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 21:41:12 -0700

There have been lots of articles/blogs written on Web 2.0.

Here is my take on it: Web 2.0 comes with richer, more responsive user experience. But behind the theme, it really drives the semantic web adoption although people may not have realized that. When you have a web application that updates part of its view (a web page) instead of reloading the whole page or directing to a brand new page, the web application mostly gets the DATA(not the view) from a server and updates the view with the new data. A crucial feature of any web 2.0 application is that it opens a API for getting the application data. Like it or not, the API is public because it's exposed through HTTP regardless whether developers behind it indent to have it as a pubic API. People can easily use some tools to analyze HTTP requests to reverse-engineering the API.

Tags: web2.0 semanticweb api mashup