It’s official! Developers now have access to Foursquare APIv2, the companies news developer tool which has been in the works for more than 12 months.

Under the new API Foursquare has removed XML calls, which in turn will speed up response times, while they have made OAuth2 available to allow for better security when users connect their Foursquare accounts to third-party services. Also included in the API are new endpoints that allow for badge fetching, venue history and venue popularity.

According to Foursquare:

“The foursquare APIv2 gives you access to all of the data used by the Foursquare mobile applications, and, in some cases, even more. Integrate checking in or viewing checkins into your application, build tools to help users use or visualize their own history, experiment with new ways of displaying badges, leverage our uniquely rich information about venues or do things we haven’t even thought of yet.” read more

Matt Mullengweg (the founder of WordPress and Automattic) recently was able to answer some questions regarding the strength of WordPress at Le Web (one of the leading tech conference in Europe).

While some of the questions answered at Le Web were not surprising (i.e.  his desire for Automattic to avoid being acquired), a few answers regarding revenues for WP.com were.

Are you making money?

We’re focused on growth right now, so we’ve invested a lot in infrastructure and so on. We haven’t been focused on revenues so far, but I can tell you we’re break-even.

How big is the company right now?

We’re about 74 people. In terms of revenues to sustain our growth, I’d say we make a little under $1 million a month from all our services combined.

(TechCrunch: that’s roughly $10 million a year, based on that statement and what we’ve heard from other sources.) (via TechCrunch)

Note: Questions in bold were asked by Alexia Tsotsis

Matt Mullenweg later went on to explain that most of Automattic’s revenues come from selling premium features and hosting services which are apparently generating a nice sum of cash for the company every month.

While it’s good to hear that WordPress has a solid business plan (something Tumblr has yet to discover), what was surprising to this author is the fact that WP.com has not yet become a very lucrative enterprise already, despite boasting superior features when compared against rivals.

Although it’s inevitable that Automattic will eventually become a thriving company (especially after convincing Microsoft to surrender its blog users to WP.com), hopefully freemium and premium services like Akismet and VaultPress, respectively, can help quickly push WP.com deep into the black.

Foursquare on Wednesday passed 5 million users and with that milestone an unknown company has offered to buy the location based service for $140 million.

It wasn’t until April 2010 that Foursquare passed the 1 million user mark, which means in just 8 months they have managed to increase their user base by 5x.

The company also has the advantage of a large lead over their closest competitor Gowalla. Their large lead even led to Gowalla last week adding Facebook integration to their own application.

Foursquare spoke with USA Today and stated that:

“Though there are over 5 million user IDs in the foursquare community, our user IDs don’t necessarily match up to our actual number of user accounts. That said, we do expect to hit 5 million next week.” read more

After reigning supreme as the only blog platform with an official iPad app, it looks like WordPress is finally being challenged upon Steve Jobs “magical” device.

LiveJournal has announced that it has relaunched their iPhone app as a universal app, which means LJ fans can finally blog on their iPads without having to super size the iOS application.

The new version of the LiveJournal iPhone/iPad app supports a full-screen display for the iPad. We’ve also made numerous improvements on the LiveJournal iPhone app.

Here are some of the key enhancements:

Adapted for the iPad (full screen interface)
Ability to view in horizontal mode
Adapted for the iPhone 4
Improved Filter Friends page
View links to other sites with the built-in browser
Spell-check and auto-correct for posts, comments, and messages
Text formatting improvements, including bold, italics, underline, and strikeout
Improved mapping of content
Improved performance and content rendering
Improved application stability with multiple bug fixes (LiveJournal Mobile)

Despite their late entrance upon both the iPhone and iPad, LiveJournal has done a phenomenal job in designing their iOS app to be not only extremely user friendly, but also to allow users to easily create lengthly content while on the go.

The only disadvantage the LiveJournal app has when compared against its WordPress rival is the the former lacks video uploading (a feature WordPress embraced in September).

While it’s good to see LiveJournal finally embracing the iPad, there is no word on whether they will embrace other platforms (like Android and Blackberry), which they will need to do if they want to challenge WordPress’s mobile domination in the future.

Paper.li on Tuesday rolled out Facebook support for their popular Twitter news aggregation service.

The program works much in the same manner as the company’s Twitter option, users start by signing into their Facebook account (pictured above) and then they create their paper.

Papers are created by first, giving them a title, second choosing a keyword (up to 3 words) and finally choosing what language the paper should be created in.

Aggregated information is auto-chosen based on your keywords and is composed only of “searchable” content from Facebook. The search friendly aspect means users you are not friends with will have content in your paper, as long as they have their privacy settings set to allow for public searching of their posts. read more

After declaring to the world that they’ve killed over 20 billion spam comments, Akismet (an anti-spam service for WordPress) has announced a new version of their plugin which will make it easier for bloggers to fight the good fight against spam.

While the service is still free for WordPress users worldwide, Akismet’s latest promo (which highlights their update) seems to cater more towards professional bloggers and business users. read more

In the movie The Social Network Jessie Eisenberg, starring as Facebook CEO/Founder Mark Zuckerberg discovers that his business partner Eduardo Saverin has taken all the money from their business account, Mark becomes angry when he realizes that server payments could be missed, resulting in site downtime, which leads Mark to explain to Eduardo that Facebook is the site that “Never” goes down and that their users expect that type of service. I bring that scene up because the Tumblr team must be kicking themselves after just coming back online from a 24 hour downtime hiatus caused by server issues.

While the exact cause of the issue which occurred during a scheduled maintenance period has not been released, Tumblr team members have mentioned “database cluster issues” as a culprit.

Tumblr does appear to be taking everything in stride, mentioning that downtime is an issue that startups have to deal with when working on a shoestring budget with a small team of tech minded individuals. According to their blog, the upgrade was “more work than our small team was prepared for.” read more

Zynga, makers of Farmville, Mafia Wars and FrontierVille have proven once again why they are the world’s largest social gaming company, announcing record signups for their newest Facebook game Cityville.

Cityville, the first game from Zynga to receive a global roll out attracted more than 290,000 people in the first day of wide release, that numbers compared to their previous record of 116,000 players in one day set by FrontierVille just several short months ago.

As the name would suggest, CityVille places players in charge of building and growing their own cities. The game also marks the first time in which friends can “franchise” businesses on their friends game board, allowing for more “social” interaction among players.

The franchise option is apparently so popular that within the first 24 hours nearly 25% of all players had franchised a business on their friends game boars.

read more

As many of you are very aware of, Tumblr (the micro-blogging platform that put the fear of reblogging into Typepad, WordPress and LiveJournal) has been down for almost 20 hours.

The company has thus far suffered one of the worst outages in social blogging history, worse than most (if not all) of the fail whales that plagued Twitter back in the day.

While Tumblr will eventually resurrect the site back from the brink (as they have plenty of cash to hire extraordinarily engineers and purchase more servers), here are a five things users can do when Tumblr resurrects Tumblr. read more

Students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs were warned by a State Department employee this week that discussing the controversial secret leaking website WikiLeaks on Facebook or Twitter could bar them from future employment options.

The message, sent by an alum of the school stated that:

“engaging in these activities would call into question [a student's] ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.”

Here’s the full email that was sent to students: read more