All Things Digital

The Austin Game Developers Conference featured one of the first official public dissections of the Lively by Google virtual world (or virtual room), and I got a chance to sit down with the project’s creative director, Kevin Hanna, in advance of that talk.

One of the news tidbits: Lively could be expanded into the casual game space as Google plans to release guidelines for more interactive components, meaning games, inside Lively spaces.

“We’re about to open up the API for interactive gadgets–meaning games,” he said.

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I don’t know why, but when I saw a post about the New York Times–known for decades as The Gray Lady–working on releasing an open API, I couldn’t help but picture an elderly woman in an evening gown trying to breakdance. That aside, however, I think it’s great that the Times is going to set its data free. Epeus Epigone says it would be better if the paper adopted open standards rather than just releasing an API, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.

It will be interesting to see what kinds of mashups programmers will be able to come up with using maps, or images, or other services. It reminds me of the experiments that the Washington Post conducted a few years ago as part of a project called Mashington Post (a great name) or what became known as Post Remix. That was mostly aimed at different interfaces to the news, including a tag cloud, but it was still pretty cool–but just as it got going the paper seemed to lose interest, and as far as I can tell none of the ideas went anywhere.

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Lately the echo chamber of the blogosphere inhabited by the Gillmor Gang (of which I am a member) has been caught in a loop of Twitter-FriendFeed convulsions.

Steve Gillmor believes that Twitter is the communications medium of the future. Send out a message to your followers and track (when the feature is enabled) the loosely coupled conversation as it wafts deeper into the cloud. FriendFeed, on the other hand, aggregates feeds from Twitter and many other sources, creating an index of the content (gestures in Gillmorspeak) an individual chooses to share with followers.

Twitter’s friendly API allows applications to be built on top of it (when the site is up), letting FriendFeed and other services tap into the Twitter stream. In addition, FriendFeed allows users to comment on the contents of the aggregated feeds and has “rooms” for discussions among a group of people.

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Last week I discovered I was using Twitter too much. After an hour online with Twhirl, I got this message in the app: “Limit exceeded, paused 5 min.” The error condition cleared up shortly, but the next morning, after just a few minutes, it came back and did not resolve. I had to go back to accessing Twitter via the Twitter.com site, where I still had access.

I had been bitten by a deficiency in Twitter’s API (application programming interface), which allows alternate interfaces like Twhirl to work at all. The problem, it turns out, is temporarily fixable for end users, but Twitter is going to need to re-code its API to make the Twitter platform for third-party apps and services more robust.

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It was a good day for Web workers who build applications. On the one hand, Google released their Visualization API, which provides sophisticated ways to display tabular data with relatively little coding. On the other hand, we have the launch of the Amazon Fulfillment Web Service, which allows anyone to use Amazon’s network of fulfillment centers and packers to ship physical products to their customers.

Taken together these–and other APIs that are already out there, from Google Charts to Amazon S3 and ECC–are making it increasingly possible to build complex real-world Web applications without supercoders. But there’s a threat, too: the more services you depend on, the more points of failure you have, as demonstrated by last month’s Amazon S3 Outage.

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