Amid all of the API and mashup news last week between the
Where 2.0 Conference and
Google Developer Day there was another interesting tidbit of mashup news: the Google Earth team bought the Spanish geo-centric photo sharing service
Panoramio. The service, started in fall of 2005, lets users upload photos and geolocate them on Google Maps and Google Earth. This application was one of our earliest ProgrammableWeb mashup listings back in 2005 and you can see our
Panoramio Profile here. Below is a screenshot from the service back when they started:
Of course it’s much more than just a mashup and Panoramio has lots of useful features and a large, quickly growing community (over 1 million photos, 4 million monthly uniques, and 30 million page views — see
this Alexa chart on their blog to view how fast they’ve grown). For some time now, Panoramio has been the default photo layer for Google Earth which in turn had a lot to do with this acquisition. A big congratulations to co-founder Eduardo Manchón and the Panoramio team. You can read more at
Panoramio’s Q & A page and the
Official Google Blog.
If you want to write mashups in Java these libraries might save you a lot of time. Just as with the
12 Ruby Resources we looked at last week, these resources can greatly simplify access to major APIs. Some are officially supported by the API providers themselves and others are independent, open source efforts.
- Facebook Java Client: Wraps the increasingly popular Facebook API. This library was recently updated in March.
- flickrj: A Java wrapper for the Flickr API.
- Amazon E-Commerce Applet: Java applet that demonstrates how to use every AWS 4.0 operation in REST and SOAP.
- Java Developer’s Guide for the Google Calendar API: Detailed examples for using the Java Client Library to work with the Google Calendar service including examples of adding events, updating events, deleting events and querying events. Note that Google also has a brief Java Developer’s Guide to Google Technologies.
- Google Base Java Client Library: “Google provides an extension to the Google data Java Client Library that helps connect to the Google Base feeds and interprets the result. This client library is by no means the only way of connecting to the Google Base API server. You can achieve the same result using an Atom parser, such as Rome, or a command-line tool, such as curl coupled with an XML parser.”
- Drest: Java API for popular web services. At the moment it supports Bloglines, Twitter and YouTube services.
- Yahoo! Mail: SOAP wrappers for a variety of languages including Java, PHP, Python and .NET.
Quick post to let everyone subscribing to this blog and not
Goplan’s own blog that there are three very important updates with the application. We just
opened a public sandbox (a server everyone can access and test, even you!
Now!),
opened our SOAP API and announced
our pricing model.
Without going into too much detail (all details are on the
Goplan weblog), we have been getting a lot of requests to see bleeding edge updates on Goplan, as well as press requests to see the application, so the now open
sandbox server can be accessed by anyone freely for evaluation purposes - but you need to keep in mind that data in the sandbox server is NOT preserved, as we frequently update the code and conduct tests on it (so don’t use that one for production).
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg just published an
open letter to users apologizing for the privacy problems around the new News Feed and Mini Feed features (see
Facebook’s Facelift). Zuckerberg says they were trying to provide members with a stream of information about their social lives, but failed to give enough control of these features. He also points out that Facebook’s aim is to help people share information, as well as having control of that information. Facebook’s extensive privacy settings, says Zuckerberg, are part of that mission:
We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.
As a result,
Facebook have added more advanced privacy controls for the News Feed feature, as many expected they would. The new controls allow you to decide which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds. The feature also lists the actions that Facebook will never inform your friends about. You can, for instance, remove profile information, photo comments, group discussions, wall posts, added friends, and your relationship status from both of the feeds. The Mini Feed also allows the removal of time stamps. And in the name of open discussion, Zuckerberg and the team will drop in to a group called “Free Flow of Information on the Internet” at 4pm EST tomorrow - they’re inviting Facebook users to join them.
Will this be enough to reverse the Facebook backlash? I don’t think so. Facebook should have simply provided an “off” switch for the feature, allowing you to disable the feeds completely. Instead, they’ve just added more confusing privacy controls that you’ll need to tweak. Opposition groups like “Students against Facebook News Feed” might declare a small victory, but I don’t think this battle is over yet.
(hat tip to
Adam)
Houston, Texas-based
ChosenVIP, which launches next month, wants to put a new spin on exclusive
social networking. But unlike
aSmallWorld, it isn’t an entirely closed community. In fact, ChosenVIP will allow anyone to sign up and create a profile, after which you can start a campaign with the hope of entering the VIP section of the site. Existing VIP members rate non-VIPs with “kudos”, and the amount of kudos you receive determines whether you qualify for VIP access - you’ll need to receive 500 kudos from 500 different members to get in. VIP members have access to special features and privileges, although founder Bryan Thompson hasn’t disclosed what those will be. What’s more, VIP members continue to climb a social ladder, hoping to become one of the top 10 girls or guys displayed on the front page. The top VIPs (one male, one female) earn a paid VIP party in their hometown - like
Bix and
SingShot, this is promoted as an opportunity to become a web celebrity.
Is this a new model for social networks, or a cheap gimmick? Without testing the site (it’s still in heavy development), it’s a tough call. A bit of Googling shows that they’re hiring programmers through the various bulletin board systems, and that’s not always a good sign. Nonetheless, we know that
MySpace and others succeed despite being hacked together. The early mock-ups look passable and they’re certainly talking it up, but I’ll reserve judgement until we see them walk the walk.
ChosenVIP
