Charles Arthur analyses the data from Google’s woeful history of shutting down its services.
So if you want to know when Google Keep, opened for business on 21 March 2013, will probably shut - again, assuming Google decides it’s just not working - then, the mean suggests the answer is: 18 March 2017. That’s about long enough for you to cram lots of information that you might rely on into it; and also long enough for Google to discover that, well, people aren’t using it to the extent that it hoped.
Oh, my! This excellent, excellent post from Anil Dash is a great summation of what has changed on the web, and how many of today’s big-name services are no longer imbued with the spirit of the web.
Either you remember how things used to be and you’ll nod your head vigorously in recognition and agreement …or you’re too young to remember this, and you won’t quite believe that is how things worked.
This isn’t some standard polemic about “those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!” I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.
The best “Mobile First” strategy is an “API First” strategy:
“Mobile first” companies really are just a front end selection accessing a solid API driven backend infrastructure.
I think Luke would agree. He built a command line interface for Bagcheck, for example, before there was even a UI—mobile or otherwise.
Brent Simmons follows up on that Dave Winer post with some future-friendly thoughts:
If I had to choose one or the other — if I had some crazy power but I had to wipe out either native apps or web apps — I’d wipe out native apps. (While somehow excluding browsers, text editors, outliners, web servers, and all those apps we need to make web apps.)
That’s not the case, though. Nothing has to get wiped out.
I think instead that we’ll see a more tangled future. Native apps will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript more. Web apps will appear more often on smart phones as launchable apps.
This just launched at the Breaking Development conference: another site that uses the term HTML5 to include CSS and Ajax. Still, despite its inaccurate nomenclature, it’s a useful compatibility table of device support in mobile browsers.
An excellent little service: give it your Last.fm username and it finds music blogs you’ll probably like. I’ve found a treasure trove of Huffduffer sources through this.
Kellan outlines the bare minimum you should expect from any service that you are putting data into.
A set of APIs built on top of OpenStreetMap data.
The first ever Last.fm hack day is taking place in London on December 14th. I'll be there.
Here's a nifty little mashup from Simon: create Moo cards with book details from Amazon.
Tell the UK government what you'd build with public information and they could help fund your idea. Time to put your hacking hat on.
All of Google's data APIs (Calendar, Blogger, Contacts, etc.) all now support OAuth. Excellent!
Christian is using the prize money he won at Mashed to put on an event in London in September devoted to "ethical hacking": creating mashups to make social networks more accessible.
David Recordon shares his first impressions of Google App Engine.
Now this is how to do the "find your friends" trick. For GMail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail, Flickr never once asks for your password. Bravo!
I had a chat with Paul Boag this morning and now the podcast episode is online. Me, Paul Hammond, Drew McLellan and Christian Heilmann discuss APIs.
Dopplr can has API.
The second part of Gareth's series for Digital Web on APIs. This time he's got some PHP code samples for parsing XML and JSON.
PayPal has a new competitor. Amazon is now offering a payment services to developers.
Find out whether you really need a car in your neighbourhood. My place got a score of 75 which is pretty darn good.
Aaron weighs in with his thoughts on JavaScript, web apps, the iPhone, dashboard, the papernet and more. Oh, and he's built a machine-tag mashup.
I'm loving this mashup of lolcats, Twitter and Flickr. Occasionally the text and the picture matches up in a serendipitously hilarious way.
This is a brilliant idea by Aaron: printing QOOP books of Flickr pics where each picture is accompanied by a map. It's all about the context, baby!
Multimap's API is now open and free as in beer (as long as the traffic is within reasonable bounds). This is good stuff. And they're all in with the Open Street Map guys too.
Track Cindy and Jason on their trip across the country... mashup style.
Registration for Hack Day Europe (June 16th-17th) is open. Sign up now! This is going to be a lot of fun.
Google Developer Day will be taking place around the globe on May 31st, including a London event. I'll probably be in Copenhagen though.
Google gets behind GeoRSS. This is good. Somewhere, Mikel Maron is doing a little dance.
Another fun toy that uses Twitter's API, this one from Richard Pope.
A mesmerising mashup of Twitter and Google Maps. I could watch this all day.
Aral just posted his extensions to the Twitter API.
A nice collection of royalty free texture photos using the Flickr API.
Here's a mashup for ya: Google Maps meets young love.
A very nice life stream implementation that uses APIs to pull in images (though the underlying markup is a bit weird).
A mashup of Pandora and Last.fm. While you listen to Pandora, the track information is uploaded to your Last.fm account.
Find the antipodes of your location. Remember, most of the world is ocean.
A cool way of looking at photos from your Flickr contacts, built using the Flickr API by Jason Garber and Jeremy Carbaugh (who are here with me at Refresh Orlando).
Here's an API for accessing material that is censored in countries like China or Iran.You can use this API to republish that information on other sites, circumventing the censorship.
The W3C Validator now has an API. It's SOAP only unfortunately, but this could still prove to be immensely useful for rolling into a CMS.
This new method in the Flickr API could be used to create some fun zeitgeist-driven mashups.
Hallelujah! I've been waiting for Flickr to add this method. Now the API is truly complete.
You can now get responses from the Flickr API formatted as JSON.
Yahoo is opening up Hack Day to the masses. If you're anywhere near Sunnyvale on September 29th, this should be fun.
Cameron has written a great article on using APIs with Ajax. I love the idea of using .htaccess to fake a proxy and get around the same-site restriction.
Yahoo! acquires Upcoming.org. First Flickr, now this. Yahoo! are snapping up all the coolest social apps.