developers

Facebook says its app recommendation engine, which runs on your data, has become a major way for developers to get to the millions of users who visit the App Center each month.

In a developers blog post today, Facebook estimates that every month, some 220 million people visit the App Center, which went live in the U.S. in May and globally in August.

"We built the App Center to give the growing audience of app users a central place on Facebook to browse apps. However, given the multitude of apps that use Facebook, recommending the right apps to … Read more

App.net, an alternative social network, today rolled out a financial incentive plan to persuade developers to build on apps on its APIs.

Next month, the program will begin distributing $20,000 a month to eligible App.net developers, with payouts to individual developers varying based on user satisfaction with the apps, App.net founder Dalton Caldwell said in a company blog post detailing the program.

"The goal of this program is to financially reward the development of great App.net applications," Caldwell said.

Deciding on a metric to determine which developers deserved the greatest reward for creating &… Read more

Facebook released a new developer kit today that will make it easier to integrate Facebook into apps running on iOS 6.

This upgrade, which Facebook says is its most significant ever, means developers can create apps that functions more as a built-in part of the operating system rather than as an afterthought. Facebook said this will drive installs and encourage users to spend more time on apps.

"This integration opens up new opportunities for mobile app developers as you can easily build the foundation for a social app, Facebook log-in and sharing functionality, into your product," Platform Product … Read more

We may not have BlackBerry 10 yet, but we've got a heartfelt power ballad to last us until the much-delayed OS finally makes an entrance.

Three RIM vice presidents -- Alec Saunders, Christopher Smith, and Martyn Mallick -- joined up to create a band for a passionately geeky version of REO Speedwagon's "Keep on Loving You." A really, really geeky version, that is.

Saunders, vice president of developer relations, lip syncs his way through gems such as "A whole new mobile computing platform may be one tough proposition" and "We'll have BlackBerry 10, both in full touch and QWERTY editions." … Read more

Twitter users should be able to download their entire archive of tweets by year's end, the company's CEO, Dick Costolo said today.

During a keynote conversation at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco, Costolo told interviewer Emily Bell of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism that Twitter expects to provide its users by the end of the year with one of the most-desired capabilities of all -- being able to download their entire tweet history.

"The caveat is that this is the CEO saying this," Costolo joked, "not the engineer who's … Read more

Twitter officially launched its new developer interface today, which means developers will have six months to conform to the company's new, restrictive guidelines.

After some confusion and disgruntled comments from some developers, Twitter is also trying to clear up some aspects of the new application programming interface, known to developers as the API.

"Additionally, based on feedback after the original blog post, we felt it was important to clarify one thing about user tokens and the 100,000 user token limit," Jason Costa, who works on the company's platform, wrote on the company's blog today. &… Read more

If you feel like you've been getting more Facebook notifications than usual, it's because app developers can now contact you directly via the notifications channel, Facebook officially announced to developers today.

The social network has allowed developers to directly contact app users through notifications, which are easily accessible through the little globe icon at the top of the page and the main way most users get updates on their profile activity.

So if your friend has just passed your high score on a game, you could get a notification from a game egging you on to win back … Read more

As the dog days of summer come to a close, Facebook today introduced several developer updates that the company touted as among some of its most significant to date.

The changes to Facebook's Graph application programing interface (API) are meant to foster "easier and faster to access data from the social graph," software engineer Harshdeep Singh wrote in his post. The upshot: to allow web and mobile developers to access the exact data they need with less work. This means less time sending requests to Facebook for access and -- theoretically -- more time left over for … Read more

Twitter launched a certification program today that clearly identifies which Twitter-based services the company values, no doubt further upsetting developers who have been left out of Twitter's good graces.

The micro-blogging site is focused on promoting companies that "bring some of the most innovative products and services" to businesses and organizations, according to a blog post from Seth Bindernagel, who works on platform marketing for Twitter.

Twitter recently tightened its restrictions for developers, drawing ire from some but solidifying its relationships with developers who created products that tie Twitter into the business world.

These developers include the … Read more