If you’re at the South By Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival this year and you haven’t had a chance to swing by the Circus Mashimus lounge, I suggest you do. It was a smash hit at last year’s SXSWi and I’m happy to see Mashery CEO Oren Michels and team are back at this year’s SXSWi.
The Circus Mashimus lounge is not only a great place to grab free coffee in the morning while you check your email, and then beer and popcorn in the afternoon; but it’s the place to be to talk mashups and visit with the Mashery team and its customers and sponsors to learn how to get more from your data by opening it up to developers.
Mashery offers customers a flexible, secure and effective way to manage their application programming interface (API) programs. Offering developers open APIs is an ongoing process from performance and security to registration and provisioning, so having a way to manage it all is critical to the success of an API developer program. And nowadays it’s all about the apps and giving information to customers in new and creative ways, and in the manner and places that they want it, so having an efficient API management platform, such as Mashery, can greatly contribute to the success of an API developer program.
Mashery has an impressive list of customers from Best Buy, Netflix and Etsy to CafePress, among many others. Best Buy, with its Best Buy Remix, and CafePress are sponsors of this year’s Circus Mashimus lounge, so swing by and grab a coffee or beer (depending on time of day) and check out the cool mashups being created by developers and how it’s all managed easily through Mashery.
The Circus Mashimus lounge is open from 9:30AM-6:00PM through tomorrow and is located on the first floor in room three near the Screenburn Arcade in the Austin Convention Center where SXSW is being held.
And check out Bubblicious Reporter Alison McNeill interviews with Oren Michels and Best Buy’s Michele Azar from last year’s Circus Mashimus at SXSWi 2009.
Twitter released a new Terms of Service today. You probably got an email about it, and they covered it – in brief – over on the Twitter blog.
The basics are just that you own your own tweets, although Twitter can republish them (since that is their purpose), they’ve left the door open for advertising, spam is bad, and there are specific guidelines for use of the API. The summary from their blog is
Advertising—In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We’d like to keep our options open as we’ve said before.
Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.
APIs—The apps that have grown around the Twitter platform are flourishing and adding value to the ecosystem. You authorize us to make content available via our APIs. We’re also working on guidelines for use of the API.
The two things that stand out to me are that I have ownership of my tweets, which heads off the whole Facebook TOS Privacy fiasco, and that Twitter is leaving the “door open” for advertising. By doing this, they’re allowing themselves to take their time deciding what advertising/sponsorship option works best for them.
Yesterday, Biz Stone announced on the official Twitter blog a new initiative called Project Retweet. Like many Twitter conventions before it, retweeting has become a popular, user-created way to share tweets across tweetstreams. Twitter has decided to integrate retweet functionality into the application itself.
It’s not ready yet. In fact, first was the announcement and the release of a draft API to developers. Twitter wants to get everyone on board and work out kinks. Soon, it will be rolled out to a select number of users, and after testing, a site-wide roll-out.
The biggest difference is in appearance. It’s not a small change – in fact, I think it will take many users a bit to adjust to it. The new feature shows the original tweets in their entirety on the timeline of anyone following the retweeter, whether or not they’re following the original author. I know, that’s confusing.
Let’s say that I’m following @briansolis and you’re not. You are following me, however. If I retweet one of @briansolis’s tweets, you’ll see HIS tweet in your timeline. Underneath that retweet, it will say retweeted by @writetechnology so you’ll know it’s a retweet. Retweeting will be an option you can turn off in your Twitter setting. Here is a screenshot of the entire process.
You may also notice that there is a Retweet section in the sidebar. I’m not clear on whether that displays what I’ve retweeted, or my own tweets that got retweeted. Regardless, this is a fundamental difference in how Twitter operates.
The retweeting will include
Hovering over a tweet will give you options of Retweet or Reply
Retweeted items appear as original tweets followed by a small link (Retweeted by @writetechnology)
I’m not completely sold on how this operates yet. Perhaps it’s because applications such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck have such simple ways to retweet. I sort of feel like Twitter is overcomplicating something easy. Sure, I don’t want to have to cut and paste to retweet, like I do on Twitter.com, but I don’t have to do that in most of the third-party applications out there. The apps do it for me.
Additionally, this method of retweeting disallows the ability to comment directly within the retweet. Sure, you don’t get to comment much, but you can still make some sort of commentary.
What are your thoughts on the potential retweeting changes coming to Twitter? How do you think this will affect third-party developers, many whom already integrate a different method of retweeting?
And in the News-That’s-Not-Twitter stack, we’ve got some interesting stuff. Top of the list is that DocStoc has come rushing out of the Beta gates. DocStoc first launched at the TechCrunch 40 conference in September 2007 and has since raised $4 million from several different investors. With the shedding of the Beta tag, they’ve also added a new look and some new features.
New Look
DocStoc now has a full-time content editor whose sole job is to make the front page look rather awesome and timely. The new page has a blog-type feel to it and includes that day’s featured documents and links to outside news sources.
DocCash
You can now make money from all those documents that you upload. Docstoc has partnered with Google Adsense to create DocCash. Now when you upload documents to Docstoc, you can share 50/50 in the revenue whenever someone clicks on one of the Google Ads on your documents. DocStoc allows you to associate your current AdSense account with your DocStoc profile and the DocCash program is completely opt-in.
API Release
And rounding out the new features, DocStoc has now publicly released their API. If you’re a developer, you can now access the data on DocStoc for your apps, including access to the document library, proprietary previewing technology, and search results. Some pretty cool apps could be built. DocStoc sent along a list of some of their partners, which include PR Wire and the intriguing Firefox plug-in MashLogic.
This is all great news for DocStoc. Of course, as document sharing gets more popular, they’ll run into the same copyright issues as everything else. I read a NY Times article the other day where several famous sci-fi authors were upset at finding their works on Scrib’d, a similar document sharing service. Hopefully that full-time content editor can also police the copyrights. It will be interesting to see where that road takes us in the next few years.
At last week’s Web 2.0 Expo we caught up with ooVoo, a company that enables people to connect, collaborate and communicate in real-time through online video. Bubblicious Reporter Jolie O’Dell spoke with Tom Herman, VP of product marketing at ooVoo, about their core products and their new open API that allows developers to build customized applications and widgets for use within the ooVoo platform.
ooVoo enables people to have video chats with up to six people on camera and another six people by audio, as well as screen-sharing capabilities. ooVoo competes against more established players such as Logitech’s SightSpeed, and is an alternative for businesses who cannot afford the higher end solutions such as Cisco’s TelePresence.
Developers interested in building a video app on the ooVoo platform should participate in ooVoo’s developer contest where he or she can win $2,500 by building a creative video widget and embedding it on their personal or company site. Video is a powerful medium and it’s one more way to communicate with readers, viewers, customers, partners, colleagues, etc. Check out our interview with ooVoo:
In addition to ooVoo, the Bubblicious team talked with a few other companies offering social computing applications and services. If you missed yesterday’s video, watch our highlight reel and stay tuned all week for the full interviews with each company. Tomorrow’s video interview is with MindTouch.
