Article Surfing Archive

Most individuals have a number of public profiles and blogs. But it can be tedious to make all the connections with all your contacts from one site to another. Enter the Social Graph API, which shows public connections between people. Programmers can use this data to come up with an *add friends* functionality. Publicly available information and relationships from indexed webpages are used for this API. The Google crawler looks for links indicating that a profile is a *friend* or *me*. Open standards like XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) are used to show relationships. Test drive the example apps such as Site Connectivity, My Connections and Parameter Playground.

Geo-coding content is picking up fast. Fire Eagle pinpoints your location for website use via the web or a location-enabled mobile device, enabling sites and services to update your location automatically. At the same time, it gives you flexibility in terms of privacy. You can authorize Fire Eagle to share information to according to the specificity you set, such as latitude/longitude, zip code, city. You can also hide your location, delete stored location information.

It is currently by invitation only for developers, so you will need to leave your email address on the Fire Eagle page to get an invite code.

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference slated on June 9th to 13th at Moscone West, San Francisco, promises to be the place to be for developers of everything Apple. They*re touting Mac OS X Leopard and iPhone OS as development platforms waiting for you to take full advantage of their capabilities. At the WWDC, the engineers behind them will show you what you can do. More than 150 sessions and labs are scheduled over the five days, plus lunchtime talks and the Apple Design Awards, and opportunities to meet fellow developers and IT professionals. Unfortunately, WWDC is sold out for attendees. The good news is that you can purchase session videos on iTunes in due time.

It's impossible to ignore that so much is happening in San Francisco this month that we couldn*t help plugging another event . Here's another one that's more general, but asks the big questions like *where are we going?*. Geared toward tech people, business executives, investors and industry analysts, Supernova brings in the big names from IT and the academe to talk about the future of the industry and the implications of social media. It could be the place to meet the people who could take your garage-based API startup to new heights. Supernova will be held at Mission Bay Conference Center and Wharton West on June 16 to 18.

Microsoft Silverlight is a plug-in for .NET based web applications for the Web that supports AJAX, Visual Basic, C#, IronPython and IronRuby, and works with Expression Studio and Visual Studio. It aims to make HD video, Deep Zoom technology and cost-effective streaming available, and to deliver rich interactive applications (RIAs) that can be monetized. Use Microsoft of third-party tools to develop apps or browse the API library. Windows Live ID and other Windows Live APIs can be used on the Silverlight platform. It is downloadable for free.

Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live is a free hosting and streaming solution for high-quality RIAs with up to 10GB storage and 5 TB bandwidth per year while in beta. Later on, streaming will be free with advertising or for a nominal fee. Silverlight Streaming offers a UI free of branding or restrictions and up to DVD quality streaming.