api

Hunch homes in on who you are

It took 39 questions for the Hunch Twitter Predictor to make a wrong guess about me. The question was, "Have you ever ridden a Segway?" Yes, in fact, I have.

"We call it a 'stunt' internally. It's a fun way to show off the accuracy of our data," Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon told CNET about the Twitter Predictor, a new tool that takes a look at your Twitter network in an attempt to figure out as much as it can about you.

Start-up Hunch launched the prediction tool earlier this month and racked up about … Read more

Google aims for easier 3D Web on Windows

Google announced a move Thursday that could broaden the appeal of a nascent 3D Web graphics technology called WebGL.

A year ago Mozilla and the Khronos Group announced WebGL, which gives Web programmers a way to use hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on their Web pages, and in December, the two issued a draft WebGL standard. One hurdle, though, is that WebGL uses the Khronos Group's OpenGL graphics interface standard, but not all video cards have OpenGL support.

Google hopes to sidestep this issue with a new open-source projet that translates the OpenGL commands into the related dialect more common on Windows computers, Microsoft's Direct3D. The project is called ANGLE, short for Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, Henry Bridge, a Google product manager, said in a blog post Thursday. … Read more

Hi5 to support Facebook games

Hi5, a social network that changed its focus to gaming relatively recently, announced Tuesday that it's built some code so that Facebook application developers can transport their creations to Hi5's platform with minimal effort. It's specifically targeting game developers, so that some of the smash-hit games built on Facebook can now wind up on Hi5.

This may sound familiar: Bebo, the social network eventually acquired by AOL, announced a similar plan to accept Facebook apps late in 2007, but it's unclear as to the extent it was actually executed.

"As a leading game distribution platform, … Read more

More developments coming to Twitter 'geo API'

Pretty soon, you'll be able to learn a bit more about where your Twitter contacts' tweets are coming from.

CNET has learned that select third-party developers were informed earlier this week about some forthcoming modifications to Twitter's "geo API," the set of developer tools that currently allows Twitter messages to be accompanied by the latitude and longitude coordinates of where they were posted. (For example, if you're updating Twitter client Tweetie from your iPhone, you can opt to tag the tweet with your location and it'll be visible to people reading your Twitter feed.)… Read more

Teen Muziic founder chastised by Vevo

The music industry's patience with Muziic and the site's teenage founder may have finally run out.

Rio Caraeff, chief executive of Vevo, the recently launched Web site that features music videos from three of the top four recording companies, wants 16-year-old David Nelson to stop using the service's content and trademark. Caraeff e-mailed Nelson on Tuesday asking him to comply.

Nelson is the precocious high school coder who launched a music service last March that enables users to treat YouTube music videos in much the same way that song files are handled at iTunes. The videos can … Read more

Twitter buys developers of GeoAPI

Twitter is usually the subject of steamy acquisition rumors, but chose perhaps the deadest afternoon of the business year to announce that it has made an acquisition of its own.

Twitter has bought Mixer Labs, the company that created the GeoAPI location service for developers building application atop Twitter. Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, announced the acquisition on the company's blog, saying "when current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge--everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically enhanced."

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it … Read more

MySpace launches new developer tools

Not willing to let Facebook and Twitter completely own the market for searchable, up-to-the-minute information, MySpace announced on Wednesday a set of new developer application programming interfaces (APIs) designed to let third-party sites access more of its content.

The new APIs offer a variety of features: letting third-party sites tap into MySpace members' status and "mood" updates, incorporate real-time activity information (this is something we saw implemented earlier this week in Google's real-time search announcement), upload photos to MySpace from external services, and make public MySpace content more searchable.

Developer announcements used to come out of MySpace regularly … Read more

Digg expands its API, launches 'lite' version

Digg on Wednesday introduced a small change to its developer API that could have a big effect on the need to visit Digg.com.

The company is now allowing third parties extended write access to the site, which will give users the option to Digg and bury both stories and comments from outside applications. Short of allowing users to submit and comment on stories, these new changes will provide much of the same experience as visiting Digg.com with whatever interface third-party developers have created.

Along those same lines, the company has also launched a reference page for what developers … Read more

Twitter needs a pretty face to beat Facebook

Twitter and Facebook are duking it out to own the future of the social Web, though users won't have noticed. Indeed, for those who use both, this may come as a surprise, since the two, while both social media platforms, seem to serve very different purposes.

Tell that to Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly have painted big bull's-eyes on each other.

They probably should spend more time painting their home pages. While the two Silicon Valley companies have opted to skirmish in the hinterlands of APIs and data feeds, the war will almost certainly be won somewhere else: … Read more

New standard lets browsers get a grip on files

The World Wide Web Consortium has published a draft of an interface that browsers can use to manipulate files better, one of a series of steps aimed at gradually improving the sophistication and polish of Web site interfaces.

The draft File API (application programming interface) defines a number of ways that browsers and Web sites can handle files better. One big part of it: being able to select multiple files for upload, such as on photo-sharing sites or Web-based e-mail, a task that often relies on Adobe Systems' Flash today.

But there are other aspects, too. For example, the Files … Read more