eBay has announced a number of new services and platform enhancements to help developers extend eBay content. The announcement was made at the eBay Developers Conference in Boston today.
eBay’s platform extension gives its third-party developers a place to build and monetize new applications and put them anywhere from phones, blogs, televisions, Web sites and social networking platforms.
The new services include:
eBay Shopping Web Services: a suite of faster, more responsive APIs that makes searching on eBay up to 16 times faster and allows developers to easily create buying applications
eBay Bidding API: qualified developers can enable bidding on eBay from anywhere
eBay Client Alerts: lightweight, near real-time alerts about platform activity
New JavaScript and Flash Developer Centers: making it easier for JavaScript and Flash developers to access the eBay Web Services platform
New Production Call Plan: access to API calls in the production environment raised from 10,000 per month to 150,000 per month, allowing new developers to rapidly scale up their applications
“eBay’s developer community plays an important role as we pursue our mission to help people all over the world connect through commerce,” said John Donahoe, president of eBay Marketplaces.
“The innovative applications being created by developers help entrepreneurial sellers use our platforms to grow their businesses, thereby expanding the economic opportunity to a wider audience than ever possible.”
Other eBay companies also made announcements that extend their platform. They include:
PayPal introduced a new suite of APIs, including Mobile Checkout, which allows developers to integrate any mobile website with the PayPal checkout process.
Skype Extras: Skype Extras are plug-ins written by independent third-party developers that let users expand Skype functionality and enrich their Skype conversations
Shopping.com announced plans for a re-architected API that will be available in Q3 2007, which will have a new easy-to-use interface, detailed documentation, and tools for faster implementations.
