Digg’s New API Allows Digging of Stories and Comments

Digg released a new version of the Digg API today, which lets developers write and contribute data via OAuth. This API supports the digging and burying of both stories and comments.

"In addition to the revamped API, we focused extensively on usability and have included an updated API documentation section on Digg with more detail on each API method including code and response examples," says Digg's Jeff Hodsdon. "Today’s changes, as well as our updates this summer to the API license, give developers much more freedom to create (and profit from) great new applications off the Digg platform."

"To help showcase some of the new functionality, we’ve created a reference app off the new API, a streamlined version of the Digg site called DiggLite, which can serve as a blueprint for any basic Digg-based application," Hodsdon adds. "It includes a river of the most recently popular stories, which can be Dugg and buried remotely, and the means of breaking things down by top-level topics. You can find it at digglite.com or download the source code on Github."



Developers interested in keeping updated on happenings with the Digg API can follow @diggapi on Twitter. Digg says it will communicate any API-related issues and downtime information through the Twitter account.

At first, only a limited number of beta testers will be able to create apps that can write data, using the new API. Digg is requiring developers interested in creating apps to send a brief description (along with their Digg username) to api@digg.com.

Have You Read This?

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Report Details Ongoing Twitter Downtime Problems

Most companies try to improve themselves over time.  Twitter, unfortunately, hasn't managed to do so.  A downtime report from CheckMySite indicates that Twitter's still suffering problems on a regular basis, and that it hasn't done well at all in comparison to Facebook and MySpace.

Here's the golden standard (or the norm, depending on how you look at it): Facebook and MySpace both achieved an uptime of 100 percent over the past 14 months, according to CheckMySite.  Twitter, meanwhile, averaged closer to 99.69 percent.

What's more, Twitter's figure for November 2009 - 99.91 percent - is worse than the figures recorded in July 2009, January 2009, and December 2008.  Plus, October 2009 was especially ugly, with CheckMySite pegging Twitter's uptime at just 99.18 percent.

Some folks might shrug Twitter's outages off as a quirk; the failwhale has its own fan club, after all.  Downtime can be off-putting to other individuals, though, and could pose a very serious problem as far as Twitter's appeal to businesses goes.

There's not much else to say on this subject, considering how long downtime issues have plagued Twitter.  The company just needs to sort this out sooner rather than later.

Hat tip goes to Don Reisinger.

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Google Wave Invitations Roll Out

Update: It has been discovered that someone is selling an invite on eBay, with the price steadily rising (over five grand right now). I would be surprised if this doesn't get shut down, and there's no telling how many bids on here are legitimate anyway.

Original Article: Google is sending out over 100,000 preview invitations to developers who have been participating in the developer preview, the first users who signed up and offered feedback on wave.google.com, and select customers of Google Apps.

"Some of you have asked what we mean by preview," says Google. "This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky."

The company also says there are some key features that have yet to be fully implemented, such as removal of participants from waves, defining groups of users, and permissions configuration. These things will be rolled out in the coming months.

According to Google, over 27,000 developers have been prototyping with the Google Wave APIs since Google I/O where it was introduced. "Amazingly, these developers persevered, found work arounds, and advocated for new features when our APIs didn't do what they needed," says Google Wave Product Manager Stephanie Hannon.

Google is featuring a few extensions that are ready to use today. These include extensions for Sudoku puzzles, telephone conferencing, real-time video chat, maps, and weather forecasts.

Google tells sandbox developers that they will get Wave accounts tomorrow at wave.google.com. They will get instructions for logging in from their sandbox accounts. They will also get invitations to bring on people they want to "wave" with. Below are some prototypes of extensions from SAP, Salesforce, and MediaWikiWave:

 

 

Twitter Adds New Exec Talent

Twitter is really trying to become the company that everyone has it pegged to be, or at least it seems that way by their hiring tactics as of late. While the media daily predicts the emergence / unfettered growth / imminent doom of the micro-blogging service daily (are you sick of it yet?) Twitter goes about its merry way showing signs of brilliance (rapid growth) and signs of “WTF?!” (outages).

The latest attempt to move to the next level, according to TechCrunch, is the hiring of Feedburner co-founder and CEO Dick Costolo as the new COO of Twitter. Costolo left Google in July after spending enough time with Feedburner’s new owners to watch them drop the ball. What makes this hire significant (aside from Costolo being an early investor in Twitter) according to TC’s Michael Arrington is

Costolo, who is also an early Twitter investor, is someone who has actual experience building scalable infrastructures, which Twitter sorely needs. The company hasn’t launched any new features in recent memory, and continues to have regular downtime. In fact, Twitter’s inability to build features and keep the service live is a serious competitive disadvantage. Costolo can presumably fix all that.

So here we are living out another day in the never ending soap opera of hope and flame-outs that is Twitter. From the confusion of “How does thing work for business?” to the predictions that the service is woefully undervalued and underhyped and all stops in between, everyone wants in on the Twitter phenomenon. Fortunately, it looks like Twitter is taking notice as well by hiring the likes of Costolo. They recently hired Google’s top legal ace as well.

So Twitter is still busy in the background trying to get the right people on the bus. Stay tuned as something is likely to change or be predicted in the next 15 seconds or so that will keep everyone busy for another short period of time.

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