Julia Ferraioli runs developer relations for Google Compute Engine, the new cloud play the company has in limited beta. I caught up with Julia at the Strata Conference yesterday to talk about her job and the change she and her colleagues are seeing in the Google developer community as more people use the cloud to build apps.

In particular she says developers use social technologies to develop apps more than ever before. Google itself does Google Hangouts to show how to use services available to developers. She said Google is scaling its online resources as the developer community scales, as well.

Ferraioli says that Google Compute Engine has a project level structure so people can work on teams. More and more, development will be collaborative and Google is thinking about that as it builds services that cater to the developer community.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zynga.com is no longer an extension of the Facebook platform, according to an SEC document filed today.

Originally, Zynga’s games platform featured an extremely deep integration with the Facebook platform that appeared to be born of the developer’s privileged relationship with Facebook. Zynga.com previously supported Facebook ads and Facebook payments in a deal unlike anything any other developer had enjoyed. As of March 2013, however, Zynga is relegated to using the standard terms of service that every other developer agrees to when integrating Facebook with their own sites.

With the new agreement, Zynga is losing some (but not all) of its exclusivity with Facebook. As the developer struggles with falling stock prices and decreasing returns on investment in blockbuster social games, losing some protection from Facebook might cause stock to dip even lower. Zynga closed today at $2.62 and is now at $2.35 in after-hours trading. Facebook is also slightly down in after-hours, but still trading higher than the company has been since July.

Effective on March 31, 2013, Facebook will no longer guarantee Zynga certain web or mobile growth targets in exchange for continuing to invest in games on the platform. Facebook also will no longer be prohibited from developing its own games, however, it’s unlikely that the social network would get into the game development business any time in the near future. The company has generally taken the position of being a platform rather than producing its own content.

“We’re not in the business of building games and we have no plans to do so,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We’re focused on being the platform where games and apps are built.”

Continue reading on our sister site, Inside Social Games.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Andy Liu, CEO of BuddyTV Guide, a channel guide app available on iOS, Android and Google TV.

There is no debating that consumer adoption of Google TV is extremely disappointing.

Logitech has dropped out of the business, several online publications including this one have declared the platform dead. While some new OEMs like Vizio, Sony, and LG have launched new devices with Google TV, it’s not clear that any meaningful customer adoption will come as a result of these deals.

I believe there is one big reason it hasn’t taken off. It’s that Google TV is straddling a dual-strategic approach when it needs to pick one strategy and double down on it.

Google TV needs to be building a platform that embraces a strong developer ecosystem or it needs to close it down and focus on a closed ecosystem like Apple TV and iterate until it has the right consumer product not both.

The problem with Google TV is that it claims that it is a developer friendly platform and embraces the developer community.  It does not. Time and time again, Google TV has chosen the route of straddling between building their own apps and trying to engage the developer community to build a killer app for its platform.

For example, there are over 90 second screen startups building apps that could be an extremely compelling use case for Google TV users. Instead of pushing 3^rd parties to succeed, Google TV has taken the approach of building its own second screen app without being very transparent with its partners about its intention of building its own.

There is an inherent disadvantage for a 3^rd party to build a second screen app, when there will be one that exists native and developed by Google. This is an extremely dangerous position to take with the development community as it takes real investment by companies to build for this nascent platform.

Companies will quickly realize that anything successful will be copied by Google TV and relegated to second class status as Google TV promotes its own apps ahead of those by 3^rd parties. Instead of having potentially 90 companies innovating and building compelling second screen apps on the Google TV platform to find a killer use case, Google TV has taken a poor short-term approach of competing against its own developer community.

Google TV in their v2 OTA update last year launched an app called TV & Movies, it’s native to the platform and pre-installed with every install of the update. This update was in direct competition with first screen apps like BuddyTV Guide which Google TV had early versions of internally. While disappointing, it would have been nice to know that Google TV was developing TV & Movies in advance, so we could have built another app focusing on areas that would be complementary to TV & Movies. Instead, we invested a ton of resources to build on a nascent platform only to see a very similar app on Google TV.

Most recently, TV & Movies have updated the app to include favorite channels, one of the most popular features on BuddyTV Guide. As a third party developer on the platform, we have significantly reduced our investment in the first screen app primarily due to the lack of support from Google TV to promote third party apps and the lack of transparency regarding its roadmap that may be competitive to third parties.

Strategically, Google TV needs to pick a strategy and focus on it exclusively.  If it is to build a developer ecosystem which allows thousands of developers the ability to innovate and to find that killer app or two, then Google TV needs to re-think its product roadmap to enable developers to be successful. Focus on building great developer tools and listen to the developer community.

If Google TV must compete against a 3^rd party developer since it is a “core” feature, then be transparent and work with the 3^rd party to cover other white space that might be compelling. Google TV’s platform could focus on in-app purchases, subscription services, developer tools, developer outreach, OEM relationship building, and design resources for 3^rd parties would be a great start. Work with developers to develop marketing strategies to get app adoption. Build momentum with the developer community such that more developers come on board. Be transparent about what’s working and what’s not. Help developers avoid pitfalls and use cases that work and don’t work. Identify customer holes for 3^rd parties to tackle before they become impediments to adoption. Focus on becoming a real partner for developers.

Or, conversely, shut down the developer ecosystem to get the product right. It’s ok to focus on getting the product right and iterate until there is critical mass before going back to the developer community. Build great apps and find the killer app internally. This, in itself, is a great strategy as well since the developer ecosystem won’t be wasting time potentially competing against Google TV and can wait until there is real market traction to go after.

We want Google TV to succeed. I’ve been a long-term user of Google TV and it’s a good product with a good vision. However, I bought a Google TV for my parents a while ago and it’s still gathering dust –- the product is just not ready for mass consumer adoption. Google TV needs a killer use case and either they need to enable developers to find it or they should focus all their energy on finding it themselves. The success of Google TV is good for consumers and developers; it’s disruptive and will force the TV ecosystem to evolve quicker. I know we’ll be watching closely with anxious anticipation that Google TV will eventually get it right.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Windows Phone 7 is an excellent new mobile operating system — there’s no doubt about that. But every rose has its thorn, and on Windows Phone it’s a lack of apps. Luckily, the Marketplace seems to be growing at a rapid pace, today topping 80,000 apps.

The platform has been slowly but steadily picking up steam, topping 50,000 apps in December, 60,000 in January, and 70,000 in March. All About Windows Phone claims that the Marketplace is growing at a rate of 340 published apps per day.

It’s only fair to note that the total number of published items (which would be that 80,000 figure) isn’t the same as the number of total apps available to users. This is because Microsoft removes some of the applications or the developer withdraws them, or simply because not all apps function across every market.

The U.S., for example, only has access to about 69,123.

Still, it would seem that the Windows Phone Marketplace is growing at a steady pace, which is good news for anyone considering the Lumia 900, set to go on sale this weekend.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

iOS devices are generally very accessible for most people. But for felines? Apparently so according to the video recently tweeted by Halfbrick Studios, the developer of Fruit Ninja. It’s clear within seconds of the video starting that the cat has done this before. This cat slashes fruit like a boss.

As UberGizmo notes, the cat displays a surprising amount of accuracy and navigates the arcade mode with ease. But Fruit Ninja is one thing. I wanna see this cat slice and dice its way through Infinity Blade II.

Check out this awesome video of a clever kitty playing Fruit Ninja! Could this be the real-life Puss In Boots? bit.ly/sGVXxb

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Less than a day after announcing it was introducing a version of its “Subscribe” button for websites, Facebook has taken the new feature live.

According to a post on the Facebook developer blog, the new button has the same functionality as it does on Facebook, with a subscriber seeing the public posts of the person they subscribed to appear in their News Feed. In addition, the new Subscribe action is also shared to friends of the subscriber, so anyone who sees that update will also be able to Subscribe to someone’s public posts via their News Feed.

The subscribe button is already live on a number of websites such as Absolute Radio, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and Time.com. The HTML5, iframe and XFBML versions of the Subscribe button’s code are now available to everyone on the developer blog post.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Citrix today announced two investments. The company is backing Graymatics, a stealth startup that is building a cloud platform for content-based analysis of video and other digital media, and Gizmox, the developer of the Visual WebGui web, cloud and mobile delivery platform.

The Graymatics investment marks the fourth funding commitment for the Citrix Startup Accelerator, the company’s Silicon Valley-based seed investment initiative, which launched in December 2010. The Gizmox investment is of greater strategic importance to Citrix.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has sent an email to what it calls a “very small percentage of the developer community” informing them their apps are suspected of leaking authentication data to third parties, and that they have 48 hours to fix the leaks or be subject to enforcement. They can become compliant by switching to OAuth 2.0, or by adding an interstitial page the removes the authentication data as a stop gap before the mandatory migration to OAuth 2.0 on September 1st.

However, several developers have posted to the Facebook developers forum that they have checked their apps and found no data leaks. This indicates that a widespread panic may be unnecessary because some that received the warning may not actually be in violation of policy and may not need to make any changes.

The situation appears to be connected to the issue that developers using an older authentication system were purposefully or inadvertently sharing access tokens for user data with third-parties such as ad networks. This violates Facebook’s Platform Policy, though the actual negative impact to users is limited. In response, Facebook accelerated its app security roadmap, mandating a move to OAuth 2.0 which prevents the leak by September 1st, and requiring developers to attain an SSL certificate by October 1st.

Some are reporting the the email is inciting a small-scale panic amongst developers, though we’re seeing more of a state of confusion. Since the email appears to have been sent to developers singled out by Facebook’s automated system, and those that are violating policy may have done so in one of several ways, the notification doesn’t indicate exactly what developers have done wrong. Many suspect they received the message in error, and they aren’t in violation.

Facebook recommends developers use an HTTP proxy or monitor such as Fiddler or Charles to check to see if the HTTP Referrer Header is passing access tokens. If they find they are in fact violating policy, they can switch to OAuth 2.0 early. Those unsure of whether they violate policy should consider this option because they’ll have to migrate to the newer authentication system eventually. However, this may be a considerable amount of work for a relatively soon deadline.

Alternatively, developers can add an interstitial page that clears authentication data as per the Legacy Connect Auth documentation. This should be a quicker solution for those looking to ensure compliance before the deadline. If developers don’t do either and are found to be violating policy after the deadline, their apps may be suspended.

By setting a fast-approaching deadline, Facebook is taking a hard line against developers who are violating policy, either accidentally or willfully. This will send a message that the site is serious about protecting users. However, the short period of time to make changes and the potential that some developers may have received the worrisome message when they haven’t done anything wrong could hurt Facebook’s relations with the developer community.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Intel’s new Thunderbolt interface, which made its debut this morning in an upgrade to Apple’s MacBook Pro line, may be effectively an Apple exclusive for quite some time, according to Intel. At their press release, held shortly after Apple’s update when live, Intel noted that the developer kit for the interface would be provided to other computer manufacturers this spring, and that they didn’t expect OEMs to ship with Thunderbolt until 2012.

It’s not exactly an exclusive, but it’s close. That’s a pretty big coup for Apple — assuming Thunderbolt catches on faster than USB 3.0, and has no problems and plenty of applications. It’s actually a lot to assume, and although Apple is definitely a winner here, there are also some risks involved.

Continue reading on CrunchGear…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It really is kind of amazing that Instagram has shot past two million users in just a few months with only an iPhone app. No Android app, no website, no real third-party support. But starting today, that changes as they’re finally ready to unveil their API. And they already have some pretty nice implementations right off the bat to show what it can do.

Co-founder Kevin Systrom says that it would have been easy enough for them to implement a simple API early on, but they didn’t want to do that (that’s why you may have heard about one developer getting unofficial access shut off). Instead, Instagram decided they wanted to make an API that was both massively scalable and provided a realtime feed of everything going on across the service. Today, they’re unveiling this realtime API for four different elements of Instagram: user photos, tags, locations, and geographies.

Here’s how Instagram describes each:

1) Users of the developer’s application: every time a user of an Instagram-linked application posts a photo, the developer’s application will receive a notification.

2) Tags: An application can track a given tag and receive updates every time a new photo is posted with a given tag.

3) Locations: Every time a new photo is geo-tagged with a specific location, the developer will receive a notification.

4) Geographies: Sometimes individual locations are too specific. For these cases, we suggest subscribing to Geographies. Geographies consist of a latitude and longitude and a radius. This allows developers to subscribe to a given area like Austin or a specific city block of Manhattan.

Once a developer signs up for the API, they can choose which of these to implement. And Instagram has set up a demo site to give an example of what subscribing to certain geographies and getting updates in realtime looks like.

But you can actually see the API in action elsewhere on the web and in apps already. Today, fashion photo sharing service Fancy, food picture sharing service Foodspotting, and cloud storage service Dropbox all have implementations up and running.

A service like Foodspotting taking advantage of Instagram’s API makes a lot of sense. Anyone who uses Instagram will know how many people take pictures of food. And now once they link up to their Foodspotting account, if they simply Instagram a food photo with “#food” or “#foodspotting”, Foodspotting will find it and add it to your feed of food.

The Dropbox integration is interesting because it matches a feature that rival PicPlz has, but was built by an independent developer simply using both the Instagram and Dropbox APIs.

Also launching today is Instagram integration with Momento, the awesome iPhone digital diary app we covered a while back. And coming shortly will be Flipboard and About.me integration as well, Systrom says.

But those are all existing service using the API. A new service, Instagre.at, has also popped up as a great web viewer for Instagram that was built from scratch.

Systrom says that some 2,000 developers have already signed up for access to the API. That should explode starting now. I give it maybe a day until we see the first third-party Android app. One caveat: for now, the API is read-only.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch