Netvibes announced a “Universal Widget API” at last week’s Future of Web Apps conference in London, promising a write-once run anywhere widget environment using an open-source widget runtime. The new widget system encourages publishers to author widgets using the Netvibes API and extend the reach of their content beyond the Netvibes user base through an adaptable wrapper. In this post I’ll walk through some of the differences between widget deployment endpoints from the publisher’s point of view, explaining just a few ways a widget must adjust its dialect and structure to adapt and optimize in different widget environments. Manifests Inline…
Category Archives: Web services
Netvibes module developer collects web credentials, personal content
A French security blogger gained access to private user data on personal homepage service Netvibes last weekend, exposing stored usernames and passwords for popular integrated web services as well as user content loaded in the page. The blogger’s account has since been deleted from Blog*Spot (currently cached on Yahoo!), but he provided extended details to French blog Le blog de ¥€$ (English translation). Netvibes has since claimed to patch “a security vulnerability in webnotes” exploited by this developer. I alluded to some of these issues with stored user information, phishing, and general brand confusion in a post two months ago…
Yahoo! Pipes remixes the syndicated web
Yahoo! released Yahoo! Pipes tonight, a visual editing interface for web feed manipulation and reconstruction. The 5-person Pipes team, part of the Yahoo! TechDev incubation group, spent about 5 months developing the product to help people better remix the syndicated content they find online. Yahoo! Pipes lets any Yahoo! registered user enter a set of data inputs and filter their results. You might splice a feed of your latest bookmarks on del.icio.us with the latest posts from your blog and your latest photographs posted to Flickr. You might automatically translate your favorite news sources to your native language, or only…
Boost Ajax performance using local storage
The migration of popular computing applications to the Web has changed the way we view the web browser. Some of our most frequently used applications now exist within a tab of Firefox or Internet Explorer, constantly polling a remote server on our behalf and presenting the results in a rich interface powered by the latest features of JavaScript and/or the Flash Player plugin. These “live” web applications have pushed the browser to its limits (and sometimes beyond), consuming increasing amounts of memory and network bandwidth as our browser terminal remains connected to the data cloud. Storing data and preferences directly…
Google and Microsoft gadget developer setup compared
Modern web APIs embrace the self-publishing tinkerer, making integration an easy step for a variety of web publishers. A few lines of HTML and a quick copy and paste of some JavaScript might be all a publisher needs to add new functionality to their site or roll out a completely new feature. I think the most successful developer programs will offer resources for the tinkerers as well as the developers, extending their reach and developer base beyond those with a knowledge of post versus get. The Google Gadgets getting started guide walks would-be gadget makers through the process of creating…
del.icio.us API for URL top tags, bookmark count
Social bookmarking site del.icio.us has exposed a new API providing the top tags and total number of bookmarks for any URL in its system. Yahoo’s Developer Network provided a short preview earlier tonight of a soon to be released del.icio.us web badge but currently anyone can request data from the open API. It’s a useful feature to provide additional context for a URL, suggest tags, or measure one aspect of a site’s popularity. endpoint http://badges.del.icio.us/feeds/json/url/blogbadge parameter hash Simply submit a request to the above API endpoint with a hex MD5 hash of the URL of interest as your hash parameter…
Open Hack Day helps build YDN from the inside
Yahoo! hosted a public hack day last weekend, inviting 400 developers to learn more about the company, web development best practices, and how to use Yahoo! services in their own products and projects. The Yahoo! open hack day was the first big effort by a newly formed team seeking to gather support inside and outside Yahoo! as the programming world begins to embrace connected services in the data cloud. In this post I will provide some background on the team behind the event and present some of the direct and indirect benefits obtained within Yahoo! for their hard work. Background…
Microsoft awards three Windows Live MVPs
Microsoft has awarded three web developers with its Most Valuable Professional status. The MVP program is Microsoft’s way of recognizing the work and contributions of independent developers and these individuals are rewarded with a fast-track to product feedback teams among other benefits. The first three awards include a consultant in Australia who maintains the Via Virtual Earth community and a consultant in Washington D.C. who creates Microsoft gadgets. Recognition of independent third party developers and community leaders will play a significant role in the rollout of web as a platform strategies from big Internet companies. How do you reward…
Yahoo Mail introduces web APIs
Yahoo Mail announced a SOAP and JSON-RPC API this morning at Yahoo! Hack Day. The new calls allow any developer to access a Yahoo! user’s existing mail preferences, messages, folders, and change data through create, delete or flag. Documentation of the pre-release API is currently only available through the Yahoo! Mail developer mailing list. You can do pretty much everything that’s possible with the new Yahoo! Mail beta, including searching mail messages (including attachments), fetching mail from external POP accounts, scrubbed HTML message bodies, and MIME decodings. I’m pretty impressed with the amount of effort spent on these APIs and…
NewsGator syncs Windows RSS platform into its cloud
NewsGator just released NewsGator Desktop Sync in beta. The Windows application sits in your desktop tray and keeps your feeds, folders, and item read states synchronized between NewsGator Online and the Windows RSS Platform. NewsGator Online may be viewed in a web browser or synchronized to your mobile phone, Mac, Windows Media Center, or other applications hooked into NewsGator Online. NewsGator Desktop sync connects Windows PCs running the Windows RSS Platform present in Internet 7 and above. Synchronization is like a personal teleporter for your feed data, breaking up your data into many tiny bits capable of being reassembled wherever…