api

Social networks are front and center in the latest redesign of AOL's AOL.com homepage, which the company announced Thursday and says it will start to gradually roll out to users over the next few weeks (unless they choose to opt in earlier).

A widget (or module, or gadget, or whatever you want to call it) on the new AOL.com features a tabbed interface with updates from five different social-networking and messaging services: AOL's own AIM and Bebo, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook. Called "My Networks," the tabs invite members to log into their social profiles … Read more

The New York Times announced that it has launched a movie reviews API that will make it easier for visitors to access the publication's library of 22,000 movie reviews dating back to 1924.

Realizing that it's sitting on a vast library of movie reviews and its current RSS feed only displays the latest 65 articles, the Times decided that it needed to give its readers access to its entire library of reviews to complement its current offering and make it easier for visitors to find all the film information they're looking for.

So far, the Times … Read more

Note: this story was updated at 12:34 p.m. PDT with analysis and information about Google.

It's like watching a race between two glaciers.

Yahoo and Google are undeniably the two biggest powers on the Internet, each with a vast number of features and users. Each is trying to remake itself during a time when faster-moving start-ups show how hard it is for a massive site to transform itself.

But change is indeed in the works, and given the companies' scale, it's profound for both companies and for millions of people using the Internet.

On Tuesday, Yahoo … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Phase one came last week, when Yahoo launched its new profiles site. Phase two begins next week, when Web developers can start sinking their teeth into Yahoo's attempt to replace its present static design with one that's customizable, application-rich, socially connected, and woven into other parts of the Internet.

Developers are essential to what the company calls the Yahoo Open Strategy. Yahoo is building the foundation, but it will be the arrival of others' applications that will show whether Yahoo's transformation attempt is fulfilling those hopes.

"That starts changing Yahoo from a walled garden to … Read more

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--It only took a few years for the science of information retrieval to move from an obscure academic niche to the secretive research departments at the heart of multibillion-dollar Internet companies.

But one of those companies, Yahoo, is trying to give a little more power back to the professors and grad students through a program called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). The service lets academics and start-ups build their own search sites around Yahoo's search engine for free, manipulating results however they want.

Two dozen researchers and students from Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue, … Read more

Wikia Search has released an interface called Wikia Intelligent Search Extensions (WISE) that lets sites build their search results into custom-made applications.

WISE launched Wednesday with a number of partners offering sample "WISEapps," including AccuWeather, Digg, and The Washington Post, which built an application that can show its news articles directly within search results.

The technology is similar to Yahoo's SearchMonkey.

Incorporating the collaborative Wiki philosophy, Wikia Search lets people edit search results, including the order in which results appear. Google has begun a much narrower experiment that lets people move, add, and remove search results, but … Read more

Video games have long struck me as a perfect platform for open-source development. Unfortunately, many gamers agreed, and the courts are littered with copyright lawsuits over the years when developers tried to extend their favorite games.

Now Come2Play has made building and extending games and open-source affair: safe, legal, and fun. No, Come2Play won't let developers hack the games of Electronic Arts, Activision, etc. But it will allow them to create fun multi-player games and easily distribute them on Facebook and across the web, as TechCrunch reports:

Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, the [Come2Play] API currently … Read more

Attention coders: Google has released version 1.0 of the Android software developer kit.

The kit lets programmers create applications that will run on Android phones, even before T-Mobile starts selling the first Android-powered G1 on October 22. The biggest difference from the previous Android SDK 0.9: software built with version 1.0 will actually, not just probably, work on those real-world phones, according to the SDK release notes.

Google hopes its Android operating system project will help spur the mobile phone industry into a more enthusiastic embrace of Internet technology. Google of course profits from ads next to … Read more

After booting applications from Facebook this summer for violating user privacy, the social-networking company is gearing up to vet apps for trustworthiness as part of a voluntary validation program.

The validation badge will give Facebook members a gauge to use in deciding whether to add a particular app or not. Experts praise Facebook's effort, but say apps posing security risks will still be around despite that, partly because of the popularity of the network.

Facebook gives a tremendous level of access to its APIs, which has enabled developers to create more than 24,000 apps for the platform since … Read more