With APIs, ecommerce has become a new focus of the Silicon tech elite. But any venture requires a terms of service, which can hurt or help the relationship. If the terms appear too flimsy or the reputation of the site is not good, the terms might not lend credibility to the platform.
Think carefully before deploying changes to the terms, and as a developer, carefully review terms before your idea is yanked out from under your feet. [Read more…]
Foursquare over the weekend revoked API right for “Girls Around Me” a social app that allowed visitors to find girls who were within their vicinity.
The app would use Foursquare and Facebook location information to determine the sex of a mobile user and then list any personal information that person made available which was overlaid on a map.
After the app was discovered by John Brownlee at Cult of Mac it went viral however critics soon worried that the app would be used by predators.
While none of the information that was pulled from the Foursquare API violated any terms of service the company chose to proactively remove the program in order to protect female Foursquare users. The issue of morally questionable content has been highlighted in various cases lately, most recently by Tumblr which chose to remove self-harm blogs from its platform.
Apple also apparently felt strongly about the “Girls Around Me” application, removing the program from the Apple App store just hours after the developer lost access to the Foursquare API, of course at that point the application was already useless since it couldn’t pull the location information needed to operate. [Read more…]
Over the course of this column, we’ve talked a great deal about privacy, both legally and ethically, and how it intersects with blogging. We’ve looked at the problems with anonymous blogging, privacy and email and even some of the false privacy-related legal threats a blogger might face.
However, privacy is a very thorny issue, even more so than most areas of law online. The reason is that much of what we think of as privacy law is actually decided on a state level, meaning in the U.S. alone there is effectively 50 interpretations of privacy law. This says nothing, obviously, about the international implications.
But privacy issue for bloggers is about to get a lot thornier than even that, or at least a lot more visible. At its F8 conference, Facebook announced a new API that is going to make it easier for people to share more things with their Facebook friends, including sharing things that they did not decide, at least on an individual level, to put out there.
Combine this with its already-promised new buttons for websites, including “read”. “watch”, etc. and it’s easy to see how the issue of privacy will likely be brought into focus again for bloggers.
So, no matter what you think of the new Facebook features and tools, it’s important to be aware of the potential legal and ethical implications of using them and, to that end, it’s worth taking another look at privacy. [Read more…]
Google is finally letting developers take advantage of the Google+ social networking system, company officials on Thursday revealed the first APIs for the platform.
The API information will be used in the creation of apps and for integrating the social network into existing applications.
In a Google+ post Google Developer Chris Chabot said of the move:
“I’m super excited about how the Google+ project brings the richness and nuance of real-life sharing to software, and today we’re announcing our first step toward bringing this to your apps as well by launching the Google+ public data APIs.”
At this time the API offering only provides users with public data, allowing users to retrieve public posts and public profile data, but not allowing them to send information to the network. [Read more…]
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on Thursday posted a message to Twitter developers, asking them to provide “candid feedback” about the creation of the company’s next generation Twitter API’s and tools.
The move comes after Twitter has been on the prowl against developers, oftentimes shutting them out in an attempt to gain control of their own product base, including the blocking of third-party ads from streams.
In his letter Dorsey says developers have been a key part of the company’s success and ensured them that Twitter will be providing them with the ‘structure, tools, resources and support’ that they need to build their applications for the Twitter platform.
Developers can start discussions in a thread in the Discussions group that will allow developers to share ideas with the entire Twitter team.
Here’s what Dorsey had to say about the future of Twitter, specifically within the iOS system: [Read more…]
