Last fall, Facebook's fbFund had a successful grant competition where it shelled out $25,000 in seed funding each to 25 promising Facebook Platform developers. fbFund is following up that effort by starting a Facebook Platform incubator in Palo Alto, Calif., this summer. fbFund will pick 50 finalists out of the applicants and choose "a few lucky start-ups" to get up to $100,000 in funding and spend the summer in Palo Alto (Facebook's hometown), participating in tech talks and developing applications.
Those who get to spend the summer in Palo Alto will also have access to an impressive list of mentors, including Facebook itself, Accel Partners, Flixster, Founders Fund, RockYou, SGN, Slide, Tapulous, and Zynga. The program lasts from early June through late August and there's no word if there are plans to extend the incubator past the summer.
It sounds like a pretty sweet deal for aspiring Facebook Platform developers who need the funding and mentoring to take their business to the next level. The hope is that it will also spark more interest in developing for Facebook Platform since the iPhone and other platforms have been stealing all the buzz lately.
For the developers out there who are interested in applying for fbFund's incubator, the application is here.
In the middle of May, Yahoo sent out a call to developers to develop customized search results using their SearchMonkey platform. Today, Yahoo announced the availability of Yahoo! Search Gallery. Search Gallery serves as a showcase for custom search add-ons that have been developed, such as Yelp, Last.fm, and LinkedIn.
Yahoo has a great concept here and one that could greatly improve the search experience for users. I was genuinely excited that customized results from sites that I frequent would magically find their way into my regular searches. While I still think that this is a good idea, the actual implementation needs some work.
Searching for restaurants, names, and other things that you would expect to throw back customized search results often does not. In the case of a search for my name, the LinkedIn entry was thrown in at the bottom of the page. Since I had explicitly told Yahoo Search that I want information from LinkedIn to show up in my searches, I would expect them to be given "above the fold" priority.
The current implementation requires you to manipulate your searches to get any customized results, in many cases.
I had to fool around with it for awhile before it would throw back a customized result for one of my favorite local restaurants, which is absolutely listed on Yelp, and even then it would not give me anything. It was not until I added the word "yelp" to the search that I saw a customized listing and it was a local.yahoo.com one instead of one from Yelp. There are obviously restaurants that custom results work for, but there is no reason why it shouldn't work on any Yelp listed restaurant that comes to mind.
All complaints aside, this technology is definitely something to get excited about, but the implementation (whether on Yahoo's end or the 3rd party developer's end) is just not there quite yet. Look for this to make a big impact when they finally get it right.
I think we all saw this one coming. The hottest social aggregator out there today, FriendFeed, has launched an application programming interface, paving the way for third-party applications using its service. Full documentation for the API is available on Google Code.
This is certainly an important step for FriendFeed. The closely related service, Twitter, has benefited greatly from providing support for third-party developers, so FriendFeed should see a similar bump from the introduction of its API.
FriendFeed's API currently offers PHP and Python libraries, with support for OAuth apparently on the way. In making the API, FriendFeed also took feedback from some developer influentials, such as Dave Winer.
To give some examples of what its API can do, the FriendFeeders told us, "You can develop a FriendFeed interface for a mobile phone, build a FriendFeed widget for your blog, or develop an application that makes it easy to post photos to your feed from your iPhone."
It's going to be very interesting to see what developers can do with this API, given the wealth of quality data that FriendFeed brings together.
The source code will be released under Microsoft's Reference License. This means that you can only use the source as a reference for debugging, maintaining or enhancing your applications. You cannot modify or distribute the code for any purpose. This happens to be the most restricted shared-source license that Microsoft has. This announcement confirms that .Net is going to be shared source, not to be confused with open source.
In addition to releasing the .Net libraries, Microsoft will also be integrating debugging support for .Net in Visual Studio 2008. According to the announcement, "You'll be able to configure the .Net Framework symbols to be downloaded all in one shot, or manually retrieved on demand."
Even though the code isn't completely open source, this is still a big step toward openness for Microsoft. Even though a lot of .Net developers will argue that this release is long overdue, I'm sure that the developer community will benefit from the availability of the code. This certainly puts Microsoft one step closer to going open source and that's refreshing to see. However, whether Microsoft will ever take that plunge remains to be seen.
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