"I cannot think of a worse fate: hearing something worse than John Mayer when you have to click on a link that says John Mayer. (Consider clicking on a Google search result for your dentist’s office phone number and getting your ex-girlfriend instead.)" This line is very funny, but the whole post is a shrewd explanation of the importance of resolution, and the fist Facebook makes of it. I hope consumers will discover they care about this more than they thought, too.

"With the full avatar spritesheets available in the API, we dream of Glitch characters overflowing the bounds of the browser —and even the game itself— to find new adventures, anywhere people can take them. To this end, our new developer site is chock-full of resources to enable web/HTML5, iOS, and Android developers to build interesting applications leveraging Glitch APIs." Full spritesheets! Gorgeous. But really: this has the potential to be super-brilliant, and it's nicely designed. Hopefully more conventional developers will get on this sort of thing at some point. Bungie? Valve? Blizzard? Watch out.

"This page documents the web API calls that allow you to retrieve information from the item system in Team Fortress 2." Steam now has a Web API. Ooooooooh.

"Flickcurl is a C library for the Flickr API, handling creating the requests, signing, token management, calling the API, marshalling request parameters and decoding responses. It uses libcurl to call the REST web service and libxml2 to manipulate the XML responses." I did not know about this, but it looks nifty. Now, to compile it on OSX...

"Today, I made a little application using the Spore API." Specifically, rendering the skeletons of creatures in Processing. Nice.

The Guardian Open Platform launches, with their Content API, their Data Store, and a selection of client libraries for the API (one of which I did a smidge of work on). This is not just a good thing, it's a good thing Done Right, and I'm looking forward to what's next from the Open Platform team.

Custodian is the Ruby gem for accessing the Guardian Open Platform Content API that James Darling, Kalv Sandhu, and I (although my contribution was minor) built. There's a Google Code link to it, but I'd imagine the github version is where the action will be.

"I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK." Analysing tempo fluctuation on a variety of popular recordings to find out who uses a click track; as you might have guessed, Ringo and John Bonham didn't.

Bandcamp add an automatic way to generate one-time use download codes for music - so bands can promote singles and the like. And then: they add automatic Moo Minicard generation to the mix. Bloody brilliant, and definitely The Right Way To Do Things.

Playground for Google's Ajax APIs. Well implemented, and very useful.

Leonard Richardson's talk from QCon, about REST, his work on Canonical's Launchpad and its web service, and some useful history for anyone wanting to contextualise web services as part of the web.

"Whiskey Media provides fully structured data APIs for the following: Giant Bomb (games) Comic Vine (comics) Anime Vice (anime/manga)". This is a really good page for both explaining what you can and can't do, and explaining what the damn thing is. Wonder how good the data is?

"Have you ever wanted to sink your hooks into a gaming database full of release dates, artwork, games, platforms, and other sorts of related data? I'm going to guess that, for the bulk of you, the answer's probably no. But if you're out there wondering what to do next with your developer-savvy smarts, you've got another big source to pull data from. The Giant Bomb API is now available for non-commercial use." Giant Bomb really are doing some pretty interesting stuff, alongside their more traditional content.

"...most public objects - and certainly all municipal objects - should offer APIs. Furthermore, specifically with regard to public infrastructures like transit systems, I believe that this should be a matter of explicit government policy. What’s a public object? A sidewalk. A building facade. A parking meter. Any discrete object in the common spatial domain, intended for the use and enjoyment of the general public. Any artifact located in or bounding upon public rights-of-way. Any discrete object which is de facto shared by and accessible to the public, regardless of its ownership or original intention. How’s that for starters?"

"The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign."

"APIdock is a web app that provides a rich and usable interface for searching, perusing and improving the documentation of projects that are included in the app." Handy.

Constant Setting, by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino et al. Constant Setting shows you a crowdsourced photograph of a sunset from wherever the sun is setting right now. Beautiful.

Eric's written a command-line interface to Basecamp. Very nice.

"Eats your del.icio.us tags and spits out a tasty timeline."

"If you are going to build a RESTful API, do it right. Your developers will thank you for it." Dare is right; the Newsgator REST API is very lacking, to say the least. When I used it, it even missed documented functionality.

"it doesn’t sound particularly astounding on paper, but within a day it recommended to me a couple of albums i that was very excited about but had no idea they were forthcoming." Excellent stuff.

"Merchants can store their own products to our fulfillment centers and then, using a simple web service interface, fulfill orders for the products. That’s right – make a web service call, ship a product to a customer!"

Wow. Bookmooch has some seriously comprehensive data available from it, if you fancing munging their entire dataset (security-sanitised, obviously).

"While this implementation of the API was based on publicly discoverable information (like Google's), we simply didn't feel comfortable shipping that project based on current implementations." Interesting corollary to the Social Graph API.

"The idea is something I’m calling web hooks...simple server-side mechanisms for web applications that allow users to do what they want with their data. You just let them specify URLs for various events...to pass data or notifications to in real-time."

"The good news is, Flickr reached photo number 2147483647 yesterday. Go Flickr! The bad news is that number 2147483647 is the limit for signed integer data type."

"I'm willing to accept that the API as a model for architecture contributes less to the design of individual buildings than to the function of the city, but it should effect both." Some good stuff in here I need to go back over.

"The Relationship Update Stream is an endless feed of social relationship data, designed for web services to be able to send and receive information when changes to social relationships on their service occur." Neat URL, too.

"SOAP Client is a free Cocoa-based developer tool for Mac OS X Tiger that allows you access and debug WSDL & SOAP-based Web Services from the comfort of your desktop." Yuck, but might be useful.

"Your lists of friends and connections on the social websites that you use, sometimes called your social graph, belongs to you. No one company should own who you know and how you know them." This could be interesting!

Twittercal is "a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar". Very nice!

This will come in handy, I think.

Marc Andressen provides some interesting analysis of F8. The news for popular applications, such as iLike, isn't good.

"‘Facebook hasn’t told people they are now being exposed to third party applications,’ Roschke said. ‘They have made the general announcement, but there was no notice to me as to whether I wanted these settings."

What it says on the tin.

Facebook's new development platform looks fantastic - very rich, very unusual for its sector.

The Jodrell Bank telescopes are twittering what they're looking at. Beautiful. Devices talking to devices.

"Scrobbler is a [ruby library] wrapper for the audioscrobbler (last.fm) web services." It looks very ncie.

Fixing up the Flickr.rb library.

Prototype finally has its own website. About bloody time - but it's great to see it being supported so thoroughly.

"I trust that the guys who wrote this have been shot. It’s not even internally consistent. And what’s with all this HTTP GET bindings. I thought GET was undefined."

MattB on fine form - an exceptionally clear explanation of the potential design patterns of building an API into your application

Distributed spam-catching system. Built for Wordpress, but works with anything. Will be putting this to use soon...

Y!DN Weather forecasts by location, through API. I'm trying the "Weather forecasts" challenge in Rubyquiz (flexing muscles, etcetera) and it seems ilke a good place to start.

As seen in the new Rails screencast. It's very simple, and cleanly dewsigned.

Matt Biddulph over at xml.com looks at making a RESTful website/app in Rails

Useful overview of weblog apis

Using the Flickr api in perl, courtesy of Linux Gazette