API: Three Letters That Change Life, the Universe and Even Detroit

Sam Ramji met AT&T chief technology officer John Donovan on a speed date — or at least the tech world equivalent of a speed date.

In 2009, some big-name venture capitalists arranged for lightning-fast meetings between AT&T’s top brass and the brains behind various Silicon Valley startups, including Ramji’s new venture: Apigee, a company that builds and operates APIs. That’s tech-world speak for the software that lets things like Facebook, Google and Twitter talk to all those applications on your iPhone.

Apigee helps companies connect themselves to as many applications as possible — and ultimately reinvent the way they do business — but Ramji wasn’t sure he could help AT&T. Or at least, that’s what he said. According to Donovan, when Ramji showed up for their speed date, he played hard-to-get. “You guys don’t move fast enough to play in our game,” he told Donovan.

Just a few years ago, that may have been true. But today, it’s not. AT&T ended up joining forces with Apigee, building APIs that let outside software developers build phone and tablet applications that do everything from sending text messages across the AT&T cellular network to charging payments straight to a user’s monthly AT&T bill. By December of last year, the telecom giant was handling 4.6 billion API calls a month on its network, and Donovan believes that number will reach 10 billion by the end of 2012. “That’s the same range,” he says, “as the top web companies.”

There was a time when APIs — or Application Programming Interfaces — were just a way of building applications for a desktop operating system like Microsoft Windows. But in the age of the internet, they have the power to plug applications into, well, almost anything. They’ve already transformed websites like Google and Facebook and Twitter into services that talk to a world of other applications, across PCs as well as mobile phones. But that’s small potatoes. They’re also breathing new life into old-world operations, including mobile carriers like AT&T and even auto makers like General Motors. In January, GM — another Apigee partner — said it would offer APIs for OnStar, the communications service it builds into cars.

“Companies are really changing the way they develop their products and deliver their products,” says Ted Shelton, a former software developer and chief strategy officer at Borland Software who is now a managing director at management consultant PwC, where he helps companies build APIs too. “We’re seeing [API efforts] in virtually every industry. We’ve done work in healthcare, in finance, manufacturing, shipping and logistics, automotive. Whether you’re a company that serves consumers or other businesses, there is an enormous need to expose both data and business processes in ways that others can make use of it.” Read More

Mark Zuckerberg's Letter to Prospective Facebook Investors

As part of Facebook’s S1 filing, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to prospective shareholders.

In the letter Zuckberberg says that the company “was built to accomplish a social mission” and claims, “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

He spends a lot of time talking about a word that I’ve never seen in an S1 filing — at least not in a positive light. “‘Hacker,” he wrote, “has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.” As you scroll down and read his letter, you’ll see he has a lot to say about the “Hacker Way.”

Usage stats

Later in the filing, Facebook disclosed:

• It had 845 million  active users as of the end of last year, an increase of 39% over the previous year.
• More than half (483 million) of those users were active on a daily basis, compared to 327 million at the end of 2010.
• During December, 2011, it had on average 360 million users who were active on at least six out of the last seven days.
• There were more than 100 billion friend connections as of the end of 2011
• On average, more than 250 photos were uploaded each day.  Finally, users generated an aveage of 2.7 billion “Likes” and comments per day during the last three months of 2011.
• “Platform developers” (mostly app creators) received more than $1.48 billion from transactions through the service.

Here is the full text of Zuckerberg’s letter:

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together. Read More

Google's Fight For The Future Web And What It Means For Brands

This article is by Jason Weaver, CEO of Shoutlet, an enterprise social-management software company he founded. He has been involved in social-media strategy development since its inception, for brands that include Disney, SC Johnson, and eBay.

Google+ doesn’t want to become Facebook.

Instead, Google is betting it can become the platform that powers the entire web itself.

The future Internet will not just be driven by social; all things “social” will be what users experience as the web. The release of Google+ is a tactical move in a larger war for this future web – one that Facebook is arguably currently winning. Google, however, is readying its battalions.

Google’s behemoth of a footprint includes the world’s most widely used search engine, a ubiquitous paid search and display platform, the largest video-sharing site in the U.S. and a store of robust, free tools that millions access daily. Google+ is the social glue that will pull the Google forces together to race to become the next Internet – one with social permeating from every action taken by users online. Those forces individually are impressive, but when fully integrated, give Google visibility, integration, and convenience that will be unrivaled. The potential integration of Google+ into Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Reader, and other user tools is ridiculously impressive. It’s a gathering storm that could take control of the future web. Read More

Inside a Facebook Hackathon

Inside the kickoff to a Facebook Hackathon, and engineer Pedram Kiyani tells GigaOM about why Hackathons are important.

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Facebook Reaches 300 Million Active Mobile App Users

Facebook via mobile apps has become a massive platform unto itself, according to the latest calculations from UK analyst Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis. Using Facebook figures and its own models, the company believes that more than 300 million people were accessing Facebook via their smartphone apps this month.

Facebook itself declared in September that more than 350 million of its 800 million users were connecting to the service over mobile handsets, although that included mobile Web and feature phone access. Facebook does not say what share of users are now mobile-only.

According to Evans’ take on usage on Dec. 27, just over 100 million iPhone and iPod Touch owners are accessing Facebook monthly through their apps, with 87.8 million coming from Android phones. On a daily basis, however, the Google operating system edges out iPhone/iPod Touch, with 59.7 million Facebook app users vs. 58.4 million for Apple handhelds.

In all, he estimates that 30% of all Facebook members are using smartphone apps to log in. 

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