Posted in: api, developers, google, linkedin, myspace, ning, platforms, plaxo, rockyou, social networking, web20

OpenSocial – Is Opening Up the Answer?

I’ve been reading a bunch of posts about Google and friends launching the Open Social. So far, my favorite posts are this one, this one, and this one. Overall, I am skeptical (are you surprised?) that simply “opening up” is the recipe for victory. A few thoughts arranged in some rough form. At the end […]

Posted in: api, Email, fuser, microsoft, office20, orgoo, outlook, xobni, xoopit, zimbra

The Challenge in Switching Back to Outlook after Two Years on Gmail

VentureBeat is one of my favorite blogs – I read just about every post as soon as it comes out. I spend a lot of time thinking about email and I spend a lot of time reading, writing, and reacting to email. So when I saw this article entitled “Four Startups Ready to Change the […]

Posted in: api, developers, facebook, office20, salesforce

The Salesforce Force.com Venture Fund – Marketing or Profit Opportunity?

I was reading this post about how Bessemer and Bay Partners are going to invest at least $25 million in companies building applications on top of the Salesforce platform. This is an investment strategy that I can (actually) understand. As I read it, based on this press release, the goal is to deploy a minimum […]

Posted in: api, developers, Uncategorized

A Simple Formula for Developer Programs

I’ve been playing with a bunch of personal homepage products (primarily Netvibes and iGoogle) and I’m kind of disappointed with what I’ve seen in terms of 3rd party applications developed for each platform. That got me thinking about what it takes to make a good developer program work. I think a lot of the lessons […]

Posted in: amazon, api, developers, ebay, google, paypal, web20

Amazon Flexible Payments – Scary Good for Merchants

I have to give Amazon credit – they’ve put together most of the things you need to assemble to make life easy for developers. They have a compute environment, bandwidth, affiliate products, an existing customer base, and a way to accept money. What more could a developer ask for from a platform provider? True cost […]

Posted in: api, plaxo, yahoo

What I Would do with the Yahoo! Mail API

I was very impressed with the Yahoo! Mail API and all of the buzz that it has generated. First and foremost, I think it’s very clever how they have limited most of the really interesting functionality to those users who have premium accounts. They have also offered developers a referral fee for encouraging basic users […]

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