developers

The arms race between Facebook and Twitter or social media supremacy has its good and bad moments. The good is that all of this ‘one-upsmanship’ should eventually lead to better tools for social media users. The bad news is that we have to hear about every time someone at one of these two companies has a thought.

eBay has announced it is beta testing its subscription-based Selling Manager service platform that allows third party developers to embed their applications at My eBay where professional sellers manage their business. The platform is used by 270,000 online sellers in the U.S. to manage their business. eBay says it will no longer charge for its Selling Manager service in an effort to attract third-party developers.

Last month Best Buy announced a new social and API-driven initiative to give its web business a boost. The Best Buy Remix Developer Network comes with an affiliate plan that lets developers earn commissions if the traffic they send to BestBuy.com results in a sale.

Facebook has been encouraging developers to monetize their apps. They've recently gone so far as to create resources to help developers build business models around them. One example of app monetization at work comes from the company Offerpal Media. This is a company that not only utilizes Facebook in its business model, but MySpace and other social networks as it enables both advertisers and developers to monetize apps.

Today Facebook announced "custom tags" for developers for use with FBML (Facebook Markup Language) applications. FBML is the language used to create the Facebook apps you have come to know and love.

Today, Yahoo has gone live with it's "open strategy" or Y!OS, which is Yahoo's way of opening up their products to third party developers in order to attract wider use, and to come up with some useful functionalities that will help them compete better with companies like Google and Microsoft. Y!OS consists of three major components:- Yahoo Social Platform- Yahoo Query Language (YQL)

Netflix has opened its API to third party developers to use within their own applications, and has even authorized commercial use of it. The company is supplying Javascript, REST programming, and Atom feed API components. The API can be used in the following capacities:

Updates to the AdWords API arriving on August 19 mean developers will want to make sure they don't impact the data in their reports.