Twitter Really, Really Hates Google’s New Google+ Integration. This morning, Google began rolling out a major change to its core search engine that intertwines results from Google+ (and Picasa) with the ‘normal’ algorithmically-generated results we’ve come to expect.
There have been plenty of critiques of the news, including John Battelle’s discussion on how this isn’t actually integrating ‘Your World’, as Google calls it, but rather just its own social network. And now there’s another critic that’s coming out swinging: Twitter. Earlier today the company’s General Counsel Alex Macgillivray, who was a top attorney at Google prior to making the jump to Twitter, called it “A bad day for the Internet”, and stated that some of his former colleagues were likely upset by the decision to “warp” Google’s results.
And now Twitter itself has followed up with a statement denouncing the feature — and rather than relying on the wishy-washy PR speak big companies are fond of, it’s very direct. VISION Cloud - Amazon S3: Cloud Storage Almost Doubled In Less Than One Year. Amazon S3 Now Stores More Than 262 Billion Objects In Its Cloud. 30 January '11, 09:59pm Follow Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) plays host to some of the most important services we use today.
Dropbox, Ubuntu and popular game Minecraft all make use of Amazon’s web service to serve and host files at a cost that can be significantly lower than deploying a company’s own servers. Posting to the Amazon Web Services Blog Jeff Barr, Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions at Amazon details just how quickly Amazon’s S3 service continues to grow. In just one year, Amazon S3 added 160 billion objects to its Cloud servers, more than doubling in size in that period. The service shows no sign of slowing its growth either, Barr noting that Amazon’s peak request rate for its S3 service is now above 200,000 requests a second. Put simply, Amazon is transmitting and receiving a staggering amount of data – and it still guarantees 99.9% uptime. Mashape, The Etsy Of Cloud Services, Goes Beta; Lets You Monetize Your APIs In A Click. Mashape has a somewhat unusual backstory: The Italian startup spent two years looking for funding in its home country, only to be rebuffed at every turn.
So, in 2009, it moved operations to Silicon Valley. The team found funding in less than three weeks. Granted, it was $100K, but it was enough to begin building a real service. Mashape Turns Down Acquisition Offers; Raises Seed Round From Big Name Investors. APIs are hot.
Twitter attracts 15 billion API calls per day, and Saleforce.com receives 50 percent of its traffic through its API, to site a few big name examples. So here’s a simple thought: If everyone and their mother is beginning to take advantage of APIs, why not create a marketplace where developers can easily discover, distribute, and consume all things API? This was the thinking employed by a young Italian startup (transplanted to San Francisco) named Mashape.
As we wrote in our original profile of the startup in June, simply put: Mashape wants to be a little bit Etsy, a little bit Github by offering a unified, all-in-one marketplace where users can find, sell, distribute, and hack on APIs. When the startup arrived in the U.S. in 2009, it quickly raised $100K from several angels and VCs. It’s an impressive list of investors, especially considering the fact that Mashape launched in private beta last June and has still yet to officially launch publicly. Who Belongs to the API Billionaires Club? We write a lot about the growth in the number of APIs on ProgrammableWeb.
But how about usage? Some APIs see so many requests that they measure in billions. We refer to these companies as the API Billionaires Club. The image below, which comes from ProgrammableWeb Founder John Musser’s talk later today at Glue, shows the big names that make up this exclusive club (update: the APIs State of the Market 2011 slides are up now). Twitter Serves More API Calls Than Facebook and Google Combined [Infographic] List of the 10 most important API for SaaS businesses. We wrote a few months ago about the increasing importance of APIs for SaaS vendors and buyers.
As a web-app developer, if you still have a doubt about the need of an API strategy, think about these two hard facts: The Top 5 APIs get billions of calls /day Salesforce.com get over 50% of all their transactions and Twitter 75% of its traffic via APIs! Although there is no formal ranking system to measure the popularity of an API the following metrics should be considered :# call, # mashups, # developers, # apps using the API Combining two different sources from the ProgrammableWeb website and a presentation from John Musser we have established a short list of 10 important APIs (some numbers can be a bit outdated and likely to be even higher): 1) Google Maps – mapping: 5 billion calls /day and 2184 mashups 2) Facebook - social networking: 5 billion calls /day and 237 mashups 3) Flickr- photos sharing : 567 mashups.