Twitter, Myspace to open live stream to developers
Microsoft and Google have already integrated Twitter’s public timeline in their search results, resulting in a more realtime search experience. Soon all develop will have the same opportunity.
Twitter already supports a rich API for accessing tweet data, and has lead to the development of many brilliant applications which utilize this data for creating rich social applications. Applications such as TweetDeck which integrate multiple social networks (Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn) or applications such as Postbox which use information from social networks to improve contact management.
In the LeWeb conference Ryan Sarver — a member of the platform team at Twitter — revealed that Twitter would soon be opening up its “fire hose” of live status updates to all developer partners. This means than in we could see many more realtime social search engines erupt, as more developers will gain access to Twitter pretty much the same way Google and Microsoft have. Stand back for the web to get even more awesome!
Ryan Sarver also shared that there are over 50,000 applications for Twitter! A startling number indeed. To move the platform even further they will be launching a new site for Twitter developers appropriately titled Chirp. Also, the old Basic Auth method of Twitter — which requires the user to enter a useername and password in each app — has been depreciated and developers are encouraged to use OAuth instead. To give then further incentive to switch to OAuth, OAuth users will be given a 10 times greater number of requests per hour.
MySpace too has unveiled significant updates to its developer services. Among the many updates to their service are:
- An open search API which allows for greater flexibility while searching, with support for filters.
- Commenting on Mood and Status messages can now be done even via an external application, and an API for that is being provided.
- A Photo Upload API now allows developers to build apps which can not only download — already supported — but also upload images to a users MySpace account.
- Finally, MySpace is also opening its Real-Time Stream API for all developers.