Happy anniversary! Plus June in review

The beginning of July 2011 marks the one year anniversary of my contributing to the PayPal X DevZone.  Thank you for reading my writing along the way!

I hope you’ve had as much fun reading as I’ve had writing.  I’ve certainly learned a lot from you.  I really appreciate all the comments you’ve sent my way including your requests, suggestions, and feedback.  I hope you’ll continue to ping me as we go, “early and often” as they say.  Here’s to the coming year’s opportunities for all of us working together on the PayPal X Platform!

While I celebrate, perhaps you’d like to take a look back at some of the important and interesting PayPal and payments related developments from June?  (Or for anytime throughout the last year via the month-by-month links near the bottom of the complete post on the PayPal X Developer Network.)

First up, PayPal published the first four parts of my article series on “Alternative Payment Systems”.  In parts one through four I compared the PayPal X Platform and PayPal technologies to offerings from Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Dwolla.  Watch for a fifth installment on Square and Intuit GoPayment to be followed by a final, sixth article summarizing and cross-comparing all of the payment systems discussed in the series.

My DevZone blog posts from June included:

• PayPal appears to have scheduled Mobile Checkout, the predecessor to Mobile Express Checkout (MEC), for end-of-life as of September 1st, 2011.
• LinkedIn added “Jobs” and “Companies” APIs to its set of developer offerings (more useful stuff for your social network programming toolkit).
• Doing Facebook development? Check out the unofficial Facebook Graph API Explorer as an alternative (or supplement) to Apigee’s Facebook console.
• The AT&T Code Scanner may be the best iPhone QR scanner available, and it also handles Data Matrix and UPC codes.  Read my review here.
• What is X.commerce? Learn all about the merger of the PayPalX, eBay, and Magento developer communities here.
• PayPal X MEC increased Crutchfield’s mobile conversion 33.7%! Learn how you might get a similar bump.
• We’re seeing massive PayPal user and mobile payments growth (great opportunities for PayPal developers!).
• Would you like to read about Magento, Google App Inventor for Android development, the PayPal X Platform in local apps, or something else?  Click here to read about and take a one question survey giving me your feedback on what I should write about next.

Click here to read the complete post on the PayPal X Developer Network including links to other developer related news and previous months’ review posts.