api

Why the long Face...book? A woman battling depression put some pictures of herself having fun privately on Facebook. Somehow the insurance company found them and cut off her benefits saying she looked happy enough and must be cured. Really? We also get further impressions on Google's Chrome OSD now that we've had more time with it, and YouTube pulls a Hulu, but not in the good way.

Try out Chrome OS for yourself http://gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/download/ … Read more

Gizmodo reported early this week that Apple may be using software to perform additional automated checks on all new App Store submissions during the app review process.

A series of tweets on Twitter from John Gruber of Daring Fireball and Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory claimed that Apple is using an automated software tool that checks for private API calls in all new App Store submissions.

Hockenberry stated, "It wouldn't surprise me if the [App Store] review process now includes a step where they pass your binary through something that checks framework use."

Gruber responded saying, "Yup: … Read more

Iron Mountain, a longtime provider of physical- and digital-records management, on Wednesday announced a cloud storage API that enables developers to take advantage of Iron Mountain's off-site storage facilities.

Despite the recent issues related to T-Mobile/Danger/Microsoft's data loss, cloud-based storage is not only here to stay, it's a good use case for organizations that don't have the internal processes or means to deal with off-site data management.

And while you can never know all of the things that can go wrong with your data (meaning that no one would have expected Danger to lose the T-Mobile data), established vendors like Iron Mountain have not only the customer base to support their abilities but also the processes to support customers effectively.

Iron Mountain's cloud storage application programming interface is the next evolutionary step beyond a cloud NAS (network-attached storage) that we've seen from providers like Mozy and others. The cloud storage API is similar in function to Amazon's Simple Storage Service interfaces, enabling developers to access data using restful interactions. … Read more

Amazon Payments today launched a new service that brings the company's payment processing tools to mobile devices. Amazon Mobile Payments Service (MPS) includes a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow mobile developers and merchants to provide payment options to their customers within mobile Web sites and applications--including the convenience of Amazon's 1-Click checkout system.

There are already a number of mobile payment providers, but Amazon is the big dog of the e-commerce world with an enormous amount of customer accounts already in use. This could be an excellent option for companies that offer mass-market mobile applications and are looking for ways to easily accept payments.

The service will automatically detect the request origin, meaning a Web or mobile browser, or a mobile application so that developers don't need to re-work their applications. … Read more

The development team at Twitter has released a mockup of its forthcoming "retweet API"--basically, the first formal way that Twitter has baked retweets, the copying and attribution of other Twitter users' posts, into its own product. It displays the user avatars of members who have retweeted a given tweet below the original, "collapsing" them into a single space.

Some background detail on the forthcoming new API: Retweets have been a mainstay of Twitter for some time now, but the feature was created by users rather than officially. Several third-party Twitter clients have built in retweet … Read more

On Thursday night, Facebook announced that it's launched its first official Twitter app--sort of. In a post on the company blog, Facebook announced that updates to "fan pages," public profiles for celebrities, brands, organizations, and what-have-you, can now be sent out through Twitter.

"Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who've created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible," the post by Facebook employee Michael Gummelt read. "Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities … Read more

Facebook has changed its application-programming interface to close a loophole developers were using to write applications based on access to photo albums set to be viewable by everyone.

The move has angered some developers who built applications that offer the ability to view photos of people the user is not friends with.

For example, the Photo Stalker app, which CNET News wrote about in March, previously allowed people to see photos of strangers who may or may not know their photos are exposed to the public. Notified of the app, a Facebook spokesman said at the time that it did … Read more

PayPal, eBay's well established but aging mechanism for online payments, is trying to rebuild itself for a new generation of online commerce possibilities.

At an event for press and developers on Thursday, PayPal and its partners described several new programming interfaces that are part of the company's upcoming Adaptive Payments Service and showed what developers can do with them.

For example, Microsoft will use the interface to enable payments within its forthcoming Azure cloud-computing service. And LiveOps' on-demand outsourcing service will use it to automatically handle fluctuating payment amounts and changes to who's being paid. Finally, the … Read more

Is Twitter getting possessive of its own name? Maybe.

A developer building an application using Twitter's API was told via e-mail that Twitter took issue with the user interface of his application, allegedly very similar to Twitter's own, as well as his use of the word "tweet" in the application's name.

The developer forwarded the e-mail to TechCrunch: "Twitter, Inc., is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own."

Uh-oh. If Twitter is staking a claim to the word "tweet," … Read more