Emanuele Vulcano is making waves with his latest Infinite Labs release . The grad student recently released SwapKit - a new iPhone OS exchange protocol that allows developers to share data between locally installed iPhone apps. Sponsor SwapKit is a unique protocol in that it allows developers to transcend the walls of the iPhone OS and pluck information from across a local network. In his own Mover application, Vulcano allows iPhone app users to add photos, videos or contacts to Mover's table. From here you can slide your various forms of media to nearby Mover app users. The result is a Bump -like application interface that allows for easy flow between devices. The Mover app will ship with SwapKit support in its next update. In this case, the application will use SwapKit's built-in UI to identify the sending and receiving app using a grand total of two lines of code. SwapKit is available as a binary package or you can view the source repository in GitHub . The API documentation is also available on Vulcano's Infinite Labs site at infinite-labs.net/swapkit/docs/api . Below is Erica Sadun's TUAW demo video of the protocol. Discuss

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iPhones Share Data with SwapKit Protocol

One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers tell us that a whole new world of applications and features may become possible. Twitter's Director of Platform Ryan Sarver followed up on earlier public announcements this weekend with an email to developers explaining plans to raise the limit on the number of times an application can request information from Twitter for a single user to 10 times what it is today (from 150 req/hr to 1500/hr) and to offer everyone the same kind of paid access to the full "fire hose" of user updates that Google and Bing enjoy. People who build cool Twitter apps say this is very big news. Sponsor Twitter developers say the new changes could lead to: Richer functionality for apps and services, beyond new user interfaces. More development around new features like Retweets and Lists. More real-time user experiences. Improved viability for the Twitter API. The Twitter API gets hit every time an application wants to look up a user's friends, their updates, their bio information and more. If you're building an application that analyzes, cross-references and offers useful and fun insights and features based on those types of information, then current API limits are a constraint on how much analysis you can perform, bake-down and present to your users. Raising the limits on developer access to user information will enable more processing to be done behind the scenes and more magic to be presented to end-users of Twitter apps. We spoke to some of our favorite developers about both the API limit increase and the fire hose access. Here's what they had to say. Iain Dodsworth, Tweetdeck "Not wishing to overstate the case but these changes will allow for the next generation of Twitter app. So far the ecosystem has mainly concentrated on providing numerous new UIs onto Twitter (with pretty good success I might add). Potentially the 10x API will signal a shift towards richer functionality & service development: Twitter 2.0. [emphasis added] "We're already working on functionality which mines and analyses Twitter data within the application layer which wouldn't be possible without a 10x API limit. I'm interested to see how the API scales with these new API limits." Loic Le Meur, Seesmic "The increased API limits allow apps to come up with new interaction models for Twitter, and also to catch up on all the new features Twitter added (new RTs, lists), which couldn't be supported properly with 150 requests per hour. " Justyn Howard, SproutSocial "On the 10x increase - Not too many people bump into the authorized limit today unless they run multiple apps, but that was by design. All of us developers built in controls to limit the calls, which has left power users constantly slamming the refresh button. So this does a couple of things: 1. It allows developers to loosen the logic throttling API calls which will create a closer to real-time experience for the end-users. 2. Also opens some new opportunities on cool things we can do which require the user API vs. Search (some things you can't get from the open API's, you need to use the user's account to do them). 3. Will open the doors for more secondary apps, where users previously couldn't have more than one or two [different Twitter apps] open without hitting rate limits, you'll see more people using niche apps in the background if they provide some capability beyond what Seesmic, Tweetie and Tweetdeck offer." On Access to the Firehose for Everyone Kevin Marshall, co-founder of innovative social graph parsing application provider Wow.ly , builds apps that have a clear need for increased rate limits. "This is great," he told us, "because the 150 per hour limit in conjunction with various API features (for example, the social graph API) makes it very difficult to pull off some more 'advanced' features I would like to build." On offering the Firehose to everyone, Marshall had an unusual and interesting response that demonstrates the maturity that this ecosystem is developing. It's not a simple matter of everyone chasing thoughtlessly after the real-time stream. "The more I do with and around social data, the less interested I seem to become in 'realtime' and the more interested I become in 'over time.' When I first started hacking on Twitter (and Facebook) apps, I was in love with the idea of parsing and analyzing data in real-time and I was very link/content focused. But the more I build and use these tools, the more I see the value in the history and the trails of the data set - especially when you consider that we are all living in a more asynchronous world then ever before thanks to things like blogs, Tivo, Hulu, iTunes, and other media-on-demand stuff. I don't think it's really so much about 'what are you doing right now' as it is 'what have you done that's interesting to me right now?'...and I think you get that by aggregating and analyzing." None the less, many developers will welcome the opening of previously selective fire hose access. Mailana founder Pete Warden says even his seed-funded company is looking forward to ponying up some cash. "This may sound counter-intuitive as a starving entrepreneur," he told us, "but the best guarantee the API will stay open and available is if Twitter makes money from it." "It gives developers the chance to move from being charity-cases to paying customers, and so gives Twitter a lot more reasons to listen to what we want. Anyone who wants to deal with the flood of data from the firehose already has to invest in some beefy hardware, (my server and bandwidth bills are thousands of dollars a month) so reasonable fees from Twitter shouldn't raise the barrier to entry by much." These changes are expected to go live soon and we look forward to seeing what they enable new and old Twitter apps to do. You can find and follow the RWW team on Twitter here . Discuss

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Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features

In 2006, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake coined the term "BizDev 2.0" when looking at the phenomenon of supplying commercial API keys to startup partners. Said Fake, traditional business development meant "trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. [It's] much, much better this way!" Three years later, many are finding that while APIs are great biz dev tools for the larger provider, startups can often suffer under the thumb of their platform keepers. Sponsor In November ReadWriteStart spoke to

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The Perils of 3rd Party APIs

We've been keeping an eye on real-time search company Collecta for a while now, and we've been consistently impressed with their product. The startup has been making headlines throughout 2009 and is wrapping up the year with a bang. This morning, they announced a partnership with MySpace. The resulting utility is part pulse check, part search engine and all fun. It also serves as an automatically refreshing reminder that this social network is far from dead yet, especially where entertainment properties are concerned. Sponsor The new product is based on Collecta's site search platform and MySpace's real-time API. For search results on everything from weather to celebrities to trending keywords, tit returns a filterable, streaming gallery of collection of comments, photos, links and videos posted to MySpace by users. Based on IM protocols, Collecta's search platform pushes out content in real time as it's published. Each result also includes the poster's "mood," which also serves as a built-in mechanism for sentiment analysis. "Collecta brings the size and richness of the MySpace community to light," said MySpace COO Mike Jones. "Its instantaneous results provide insight into our users' moods and activities. It's great to see how quickly Collecta has used the MySpace Real-Time Stream API to deliver new value to people on the web." Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell also called MySpace one of the most vibrant web properties, saying, "MySpace users are actively sharing an amazing volume of pictures and media, as well as expressing their thoughts on a very emotional and raw level. Our search platform cuts right into the center of all this activity. It reveals a slice of humanity that you couldn't see otherwise. Even a search for a basic term like 'happy' is incredibly fascinating." In addition to showing results for search terms, the new product also shows a brief overview of three top trends currently on MySpace. Collecta's general search function currently aggregates data from a slew of news and social sites and will soon incorporate publicly available data from MySpace, as well. MySpace's partnership shows an interesting use of Collecta's site search, but it's far from the only application. The platform can be used to show activity, trends and perspectives on just about any website. Discuss

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MySpace Taps Startup Collecta for Real-Time Search

While 2009 has been the year of the API, it's the codeless creative experiences that drive mainstream adoption. Every December ReadWriteWeb's writers collect up their thoughts from 2009 and make predictions for the year ahead. My

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Augmented Reality: Passive Consumers versus Creative Contributors

This week ReadWriteWeb will run a series of posts detailing what we think are the five biggest, most cutting-edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We'll be posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we'll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. The first major Web trend we're looking at is Structured Data . In prior presentations , this has sometimes been referred to under the umbrella term of 'Semantic Web'. However the way 2009 has panned out so far, it's become clear that this trend is much more than the Semantic Web. In this post, we'll analyze the developments in Structured Data this year and provide you with 3 product examples: OpenCalais, Google, Wolfram Alpha. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Web of Data, Not Documents Tim Berners-Lee said in February this year that we're now in a Web of Data , rather than a Web of Documents. The organization that Berners-Lee heads, the W3C, has heavily promoted two key initiatives that are helping to build this Web of Data: the Semantic Web and more recently Linked Data . However over the past few years, we've seen that there are many other ways to structure data and enable others to build off it. The best current example is surely Twitter , whose API has historically been responsible for around 90% of Twitter's activity - via third party apps. The basic principle of the Web of Data is still the same as what Alex Iskold articulated on ReadWriteWeb back in March 2007: "unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing." Example 1: OpenCalais Our first example product, OpenCalais , is probably the best current example of Linked Data (which is a type of structured data endorsed by W3C). Thomson Reuters, the international business and financial news giant, launched an API called OpenCalais in Feb '08 . In a nutshell, OpenCalais turns unstructured HTML into semantically marked up data. It orders data into groups such as 'people,' 'places,' 'companies' and more. This way, third party applications and sites can build interesting new things from that data - one of the defining principles of Linked Data. For a full explanation of Linked Data, read Alexander Korth's technical introduction The Web of Data: Creating Machine-Accessible Information from April 2009. I also explained the background and benefits of Linked Data in a May '09 post entitled Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care . Example 2: Google Rich Snippets In May this year, Google added structured data to its core search, in the form of a feature called 'Rich snippets.' Essentially this feature extracts and shows useful information from web pages, by way of structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa. On launch in May, Google invited publishers to mark up their HTML. While it will take a while for this markup to become widespread, the fact that a huge company like Google implemented it shows the increasing importance of structured data on the Web. Other big companies are also heading in this direction - in particular, Yahoo was an early leader . Example 3: Wolfram Alpha Ever since Wolfram|Alpha 's much hyped launch in May , we've been tracking this innovative product closely. It's a self-described "computational knowledge engine" and while it's not quite the Google killer some predicted, it has many potential uses . Wolfram|Alpha has a search engine-like interface, allowing you to type natural language statements into it. But the main part of the product is the computations you can do on data. The product is premised on using and computing data . If Web 2.0 was about creating data (a.k.a. user generated content), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Conclusion We can see from the above three examples that structured data is rapidly becoming a feature of today's Web. Companies like Thomson Reuters and Google are enabling data to be structured, and new types of products (like Wolfram|Alpha) will make use of structured data in ways we perhaps can't imagine right now. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data

Back in the fall, we told you about NYC's BigApps competition , which encouraged technological innovation to benefit government and civic engagement. Public voting for the submitted applications opened this week. One of the submissions to come out of this competition is Blocks and Lots , an interesting app and API that essentially expose all the property records - more than 5 million records, total - for New York City. For site owners, there's a customizable widget that can be embedded in just about any kind of site. Sponsor Blocks and Lots' API allows developers to integrate detailed property information into any web or mobile application. Sample code is available in PHP and JavaScript. Blocks and Lots comes from BlankSlate, an NYC startup offering a web platform and set of read/write APIs for making, sharing, monetizing, and monitoring web apps. The company provides capabilities such as data, file, user and payment management through REST APIs. Using the same platform, BlankSlate was able to gather the city's data files from 45 file sources from three different city agencies, import them and instantly export APIs. This process took just a few days. For example, you can use the Blocks and Lots widget to dig into the property valuation for Ellis Island, which is apparently worth about as much as Zynga these days. In the near future, Blocks and Lots will add location-aware iPhone and Android apps (i.e., the user's mobile device will automatically retrieve property data depending on where the user it), and enabling the writable APIs to add user-generated content to the city's data (e.g., photos, documents or text). To vote for Blocks and Lots - or any of the other apps submitted in the BigApps competition - check out the app gallery and voting rules . Discuss

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5 Million NYC Property Records Available Via Startup's API