In my last post I introduced the the Facebook platform and APIs as part of my ongoing series on mobile, social, and local APIs. We discussed the history of Facebook’s third party API efforts and their newfound focus on the One True Web Path.
This time, we’re going to dive into one of the technical details of the Facebook platform, namely their social plugins. While these aren’t strictly speaking APIs, they are nonetheless useful tools for enabling your visitors and customers to better integrate your content into their lives and interests.
These plugins compliment the open graph and programmatic APIs we’ll discuss in later posts of this series. Implemented correctly, with minimal intrusiveness for your site’s users, social plugins can round out your site’s presence in the social space (or at least the Facebook-centered portion of that space).
Click here to read the rest of the PayPal X Developer Network post including example code for embedding social plugins in your site. Also links to a bit.ly bundle of all the resources discussed in the post.
You don’t have to be a space fan, or a NASA fan, or a Carl Sagan fan, or anything else but human to love this. Thank you to everyone involved with its creation. Now, let’s boldly go!
As I noted in the first post of my new series on third party APIs, there has been an explosion in the number of web APIs available for our use. We’re now in the thousands of publicly available APIs, and the number continues to rise so fast that it’s hard to keep up with what’s important and what isn’t.
I asked for your input on which APIs you’d like to see discussed (click here to fill out the very short survey if you haven’t already). Readers have started to speak, and one obvious request that lines up well with PayPal’s push around Mobile + Social + Local (MoSoLo) is the Facebook platform and its APIs.
Here’s a brief history of Facebook’s developer efforts:
Facebook made their initial API launch in 2006. These APIs were primarily meant to be used by developers to write applications running outside of Facebook that could tie into a limited set of Facebook data. It was a start, but there was much to still be desired. In 2007, they announced the Facebook Platform which allowed developers to write applications to run within Facebook’s site itself. More access to Facebook data, but also much more closely tied into Facebook via their proprietary platform. One step forward, two steps back.
After several years of inward-focused efforts and plenty of criticisms of its walled garden approach, Facebook appears to have finally drunk the open Web beverage. Last spring they announced a major revision to their API set and approach. They stated their intention to open up to external applications having robust access to Facebook data and features via their new social plugins, Open Graph protocol, and Facebook Graph API. Click here to read an analysis of the 2010 launch from ProgrammableWeb.
Click here to read the rest of the PayPal X Developer Network post including a discussion of the key point of Facebook’s new approach. Also links to a bit.ly bundle of all the resources discussed in the post.
My PayPal X DevZone writing:
- Accelerate development using the @Apigee API console http://bit.ly/hhzqqM focuses on @PayPalX (see also http://bit.ly/hFWG7p) #
- Facebook or Twitter? Foursquare or SimpleGeo? goo.gl or bit.ly? Sound off: http://bit.ly/gpp9uv #
Wireless and mobility:
- Tips on using the SQLite database in #Android http://bit.ly/frzDgx from Ethan Winograd on the @PayPalX DevZone #
- Why iPad, or rather its iTunes sales model, is proving a bitter pill for magazine publishers http://nyti.ms/g9udLl #
- Ethan Winograd closes his #Android eBook store @PayPalX article series with some REST, PHP, JSON, and Java http://bit.ly/fvPJQi #
- 10 tips for #Android app development http://oreil.ly/fZijoQ (there are some *really* great tips in here, worth perusing) #
- New Starbucks mobile payments http://on.mash.to/e13fJw tested as fastest way to pay; fast -> happy customers -> repeat business! @PayPalX #
- Dual and soon quad core chips in phones http://on.mash.to/fwc24D = mobile homerun for @NVIDIA! #
- Eric Schmidt, (soon to be ex-)CEO of Google, on preparing for the Big Mobile Revolution http://bit.ly/gZmMn6 via @HarvardBiz #
- “We must attend to the development of mobile money.” -Eric Schmidt, excerpted from http://bit.ly/gZmMn6 #
- Analysis of Eric Schmidt’s comments on the Big Mobile Revolution and Google’s top three priorities for 2011 http://bit.ly/fB2s2K #
- The @Starbucks Card Mobile app http://bit.ly/eoAFcu is another great use of @PayPalX Mobile Express Checkout http://bit.ly/e6F4Kk #
- Ideas for making printed communications more productive with QR codes http://bit.ly/hbadPV (another crossover a la http://bit.ly/hiBNcx) #
Big data:
- Best HTTPS RSS feed aggregation + sorting option I’ve found so far is YQL http://yhoo.it/fb9Qsn via Yahoo Pipes http://bit.ly/h7APpG #
- The problem with the YQL->Pipes solution: Only getting 10 items per RSS feed being munged. Need all the items since the feeds launched. #
APIs:
- Wow: @Apigee reports 16 billion API calls per month and expects 5x that many by the end of 2011 http://rww.to/i96JoL (note telco influence) #
- “Wide open space” for exploring the implementation aspects of REST http://bit.ly/eTR3wA (need to do a little browsing here sometime) #
- Reading this portion of implementing-rest http://bit.ly/gWuumP right now, for a project I’m working on (thank goodness for Javadocs + wikis) #
- Made me smile on a day of coding and hackery: API Disasters http://bit.ly/eJ2y3L #
Web development and site stuff:
- Quora: What is the optimum way to cache static content in WordPress? Answer: http://qr.ae/AufV #
- Using Apache RedirectMatch http://bit.ly/h5GagD to 301 folks from old URLs to where they should go now (if only it were that easy offline!) #
- Google launching Groupon competitor http://on.mash.to/ftwOjJ via @mashable (+ analysis here http://on.mash.to/eFgA4C) #GoogleCheckout #
- Excellent jQuery intro from my friend and former Sun colleague Dr. Doris Chen http://bit.ly/gGDDCo #Ajax #
- More beginning jQuery info http://bit.ly/dMiMVC this time from @amberweinberg #
- I am *loving* Trunk.ly tools http://bit.ly/ffNaKL and export http://bit.ly/ihaWno need to investigate their REST API http://bit.ly/ee8m73 #
- You can search links I’m sharing across my various blogs and Twitter via Trunk.ly: http://bit.ly/hVkLB5 #
- More on Trunk.ly http://bit.ly/gAAA6b from @webworkerdaily #
- Cloud9 http://bit.ly/f2ia2o has a sweat online JavaScript IDE http://bit.ly/hZoND5 automagically tied into github #
Personal:
- My wife on @GeekMomBlog rocking the geekiest Disney princess http://bit.ly/ez4fHX and fighting cancer with cupcakes http://bit.ly/h1SLx3 #
Running updates:
- Ran 6.66 miles in 1 hour and 6 mins and 8 secs and felt great. 10k+ capping off the midpoint of my training for the … http://bit.ly/hu6NUf #
- Ran 4.52 miles in 43 mins. Broke out my new @TheNorthFace running hoodie to fight the bitter wind. Monkey thumbs + … http://bit.ly/efPJBr #
- Ran 3 miles in 32 mins and felt great. Split paces 8:31, 8:16, 7:40, 8:07, 8:13, 8:22, 8:14, 7:22. Plus sleet for ad… http://bit.ly/fHX2DI #
- Ran 3.15 miles in 35 mins and felt great. Slow pace as I skidded and scooted around on the ice and snow. Slippery fun! http://bit.ly/fLYoZj #
- Used this as motivation today: “There is no such thing as bad weather, only weak people.” -Bill Bowerman via http://bit.ly/ftulP6 @iRunFar #
- Ran 4.01 miles in 36 mins and felt great. Mile splits 9:38, 9:16, 9:12, and 8:47. http://bit.ly/hdCcv4 #
My recent post on Intuit giving away free mobile credit card readers for smartphones has received a decent amount of reader comments via back-channel discussion. My mention of PayPal Mobile SMS payments near the bottom of the post seemed to draw particular attention.
One of my readers, Peter Mancini (a former colleague from my days at Digital Reasoning Systems), brought up some good points about mobile card readers versus paying with a hardware or software based mobile wallet.
Pete noted the widespread adoption of credit cards, the ease of losing a device and the user unfriendliness of locking up a phone with passwords, and the known wireless hacks that have accumulated through the years. In his words:
The point of the card reader is that it’s the most likely form of payment people are going to have on them at most non-online venues. I know too much about hacking to ever keep vital payment information available on my easily losable smartphone. I don’t want to make it so I have to tightly lock up the phone with passwords. It already is a pain that I have to swipe it to unlock the screen every time. Also, I’ve seen Bluetooth hacking in action so I wouldn’t trust it anyway to keep my payment information secure.
Click here to read how I addressed his points on the complete PayPal X Developer Network blog post. You can also access all of the links referenced in the post by visiting this bit.ly bundle.
It seems these days that every service provider must offer a developer API for their services if they are to attract partners. This rise of the API economy has been well documented and discussed for some time. What may be a bit more lacking than APIs themselves, however, are tools to make API usage simpler for the average third party developer. Apigee is a company bent on changing that.
I briefly introduced Apigee’s PayPal API Console in a recent PayPal DevZone blog post. There’s much more to be said and shown with the console, however, so let’s explore!
What is the Apigee PayPal API Console?
First up, let’s briefly revisit just what the console is and the kinds of things you can do with it.
Apigee announced their free PayPal API console at the Innovate 2010 conference. They noted in their announcement:
The API Console provides a really easy way to learn, debug, and test the APIs by allowing you to view request and response pairs, drill into errors, and share code snapshots with others.
PayPal Senior Director Damon Hougland provided his own description in a post on The PayPal Blog:
If you’re like me and want to play with APIs before actually writing code, I think you’ll really like what our friends at Apigee.com have just built. They’ve released a new API console that provides a great way for PayPal X developers to send and receive API calls…using various input parameters to see how APIs work and interact
Key point: You use the console to send test requests and it then displays the PayPal development sandbox responses back to you.
The console is in effect a sort of browser based cURL for Web API programmers. As such the console lets you very rapidly explore APIs and test out ideas before you code them into your application. (By the way, if you are interested in seeing how cURL itself can be used to make PayPal API calls, refer to Travis Robertson‘s post “Chained Payments Using NVP and CURL in 4 Easy Steps“.)
You can get a good feel for what the console enables you to do and how to use it from this Apigee video demo:
Click here to read the rest of the article including the APIs available to you, how to use the console, and linking multiple calls together on the PayPal X Developer Network.
[This was my most popular X.com item last year.]
PayPal has been around for more than a decade now (see the article “A Brief History of Micropayments” for more details on the evolution of finance and electronic transactions including the early history of PayPal), but its PayPal X APIs were launched to the developer community as recently as November 2009. The PayPal X APIs are proving to be a very big deal, however, in that they open up the power of PayPal’s payment processing system to developers everywhere the PayPal network operates. As of this writing that’s 190 countries, in 24 currencies, enabling truly global reach for your applications.
The X APIs and tools provide developers with the ability to directly integrate PayPal-based financial transactions into their own applications. Whereas the previously available PayPal API required that a developer’s application take the user directly to PayPal’s own Web site at a given point in the transaction process, the new X APIs enable developers to build most PayPal functionality directly into their own Web, desktop, or mobile applications. This provides much greater flexibility in the appearance and behavior of PayPal-enabled applications while still providing the standard PayPal transaction processing security and features.
PayPal X uses Web form operations and supports both REST and SOAP API calls. PayPal X’s REST implementation in turn accepts JSON, name-value pair (NVP), and XML requests and/or responses (you can mix and match your formats even within one request-response pairing if you like, i.e. JSON request with an XML response). From here on I will assume you are familiar with all of the terminology in this paragraph; please click through the links and learn more about any areas with which you aren’t already comfortable.
Please note that you will need a PayPal X developer login to access many of the resources listed in this article. You will also need to use your login to setup and access API credentials (I’ll provide more details on this in a future article on getting started developing with PayPal X). If you don’t already have a developer login, you will need to create one via the Register button on the PayPal X Developer Network homepage. You are also required to have a PayPal user account in order to create your developer account; you may opt to link your developer account to a pre-existing PayPal user account, or to create a new user account. You will also need to review and agree to the PayPal X Developer Agreement as part of the developer account creation process.
Once you have a developer login, you are ready to proceed with learning about each of the areas of the X APIs and related technologies. This article will provide an overview of the PayPal X platform including:
- PayPal merchant operations
- Creating and manipulating PayPal accounts
- Web-based payments
- Processing credit card transactions
- Express checkout
- Moving money
- Fraud management and filtering
- Mobile checkout and payments
Click here to read the complete article on the PayPal X Developer Network.
[This was my second most popular X.com item last year.]
PayPal was not the first service that could handle micropayments, but it may just be the best. It is certainly one of the most fairly priced and widely available.
This article examines the development of electronic financial transactions starting from the inception of credit card networks up through today’s multi-billion dollar online commerce and payment systems. I will discuss how we got to this point and what we might expect to see in the next few years.
Read on to learn about what micropayments are and how you can take advantage of PayPal to handle them easily and inexpensively.
Click here to read the complete article on the PayPal X Developer Network.
My PayPal X DevZone writing:
- My latest @PayPalX post on mobile card readers http://bit.ly/dQR8HB just so happens to be my 1,000th BillDay dot com blog post. w00t! #
- FYI here's a bundle of all the resources linked to from my mobile card reader @PayPalX post: http://bit.ly/bundles/billday/3 #
- When you read my @PayPalX post "Which APIs matter to you?" http://bit.ly/hFWG7p please respond here: http://bit.ly/gpp9uv #
- More on mobile card readers from @Radar http://oreil.ly/gbhMbc and @FortuneMagazine http://bit.ly/g7sjPV (follow-up to http://bit.ly/dQR8HB) #
Wireless and mobility:
- Boom! iPhone on Verizon is official http://on.mash.to/edFJwb via @mashable #
- What's to come from next gen Android devices in 2011 http://bit.ly/fwexQe by @swebster77 on @cnet #
- Follow the Amazon Appstore developer blog http://bit.ly/dJOGRF and tweets @amznappstoredev for news on their soon to launch #Android store #
- Handy #Android emulator switches http://bit.ly/igCDi4 from @PayPalX DevZone blog #
Big data:
- Mining Wikipedia with Hadoop and Pig for natural language processing http://bit.ly/gmGSIb #
- How Twitter uses NoSQL http://rww.to/gihkB2 and Big Data tools to understand its petabytes, via @rww #
- As @acroll points out, it's not about who owns your data, it's about who analyzes it http://on.mash.to/heNY8x via @mashable #StrataConf #
APIs:
- Google adds API for URL shortener and link analytics http://bit.ly/ehoWtS via @programmableweb #
- Why every brand needs an open API http://on.mash.to/dXfXRr is well explained by @adamkleinberg on @mashable #
Web development and site stuff:
- Spot on: The web is a *customer service* medium http://bit.ly/hNumBV (addresses "Why wasn't I consulted?") #
- To read: "Dive into HTML 5" free at http://bit.ly/ijwt3T (learn more from the author's blog here http://bit.ly/hATrOD ) #
- I'm actively updating my menu of services http://bit.ly/hWwQqc Requests or suggestions? +1.918.994.2112 #
- PostRank is proving to be an interesting way to slice and dice site analytics http://bit.ly/iflvNq #
- Anatomy of a WordPress theme http://bit.ly/eRCdvL aka which file(s) to tweak, via @mashable http://on.mash.to/fWXNB7 #
- 3 more Google Analytics tips http://bit.ly/egO85f from @gigaom #
- Responsive web design http://bit.ly/ffBZwr what it is and how to use it via @smashingmag #
- Google Labs tools for web developers http://oreil.ly/gsXSYR #
- Quick insights from Google Analytics navigation summary pages http://bit.ly/hsmWsd #
Personal things:
- Created an About dot me page http://bit.ly/ieAj42 just for fun (and yes, that background is one of my pics) #
- From my wife: Muppet eyes http://bit.ly/gDrIfu Katie's book http://bit.ly/f6EUGY and stuff our kids won't know http://bit.ly/gMVXip #
- My wife's "The Princess Knight" review on @GeekMomBlog has been cross-posted to @WiredGeekDad http://bit.ly/gHI7H1 very nice! #
- There's some actionable info in this online employment report http://bit.ly/hyZK9D from @oDesk (skills to focus upon, for instance) #
My running odyssey continues:
- Finishers certificates for @Route66Marathon full & half are now online; here's mine http://bit.ly/f8SoJG #
- My 2010 Year End running report from @dailymile http://bit.ly/hwWS9U captures the stats from mid-Feb onwards #
- My winter haiku: It is cold outside. / If it is snowing, why go? / Need to suffer a little. (if you're a runner, you understand) http://bit.ly/fa1ulO #
- Ran 5.37 miles in 51 mins and felt great. Felt great to run after too much cold and work lately! http://bit.ly/ifwlzd #
- Ran 5.27 miles in 50 mins and felt great. Easy sunset run, mile split paces 9:55, 9:30, 9:35, 9:30, and 9:18. http://bit.ly/gIiqih #
My friend and former Digital Reasoning Systems colleague Peter Mancini, now the Principal at Nectarine Imp LLC, has put together an eighteen slide presentation introducing WordPress plugins and their use. It includes a section on creating your own, too. If you’re new to WP or want to patch any holes you might have in your WP plugin knowledge, I’d recommend it.
From Peter’s announcement of the posting of his slides:
WordPress is software for organizing blog posts, documents, multi-media and hyperlinks. This presentation is the one I gave 11 January 2011 to discuss the technology used to extend the system. As of this writing WordPress is at version 3 and has 12,000+ plugins available for it. The process of managing plugins is not difficult and the act of creating new ones, while challenging in some respects, is fairly straightforward if you know what you are looking for.
Click here to access the PDF slides with speaker notes for the presentation.
BillDay.com 