Todd Sampson

I was totally blown away by a new web hack I saw today by Niall Kennedy.
I have known Niall for a little while now — having met him at several events after moving to San Francisco last year. I always knew that Niall was incredibly smart. But I didn’t realize what an evil-genius [...]

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A few days ago I posed about the trend I noticed at Google of using APIs as a way to release new products — the API-as-Product-Launch I have started calling it.
As I wrote in the previous post, I think that the API-as-Product-Launch is a very promising strategy for tech companies to look into. It [...]

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Congrats to the Thingfo team. Grissy and co. were able to take Thingfo live ahead of the planned Tuesday launch. An early launch!! That NEVER happens with web applications. Check out Thingfo and Kristen’s early Thingfo review on Mashable.
Congrats again guys.  I’m thrilled to see Thingfo get out into the [...]

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Google’s launch of the Social Graph has confirmed it for me — the API is becoming the product; or service as the case may be. And, if not the full product, at least the first wave of a product’s release.
Back in the day, and still today at many overly-large companies, there was the massive [...]

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Mike “Grissy” Grishaver, former Yahoo! and programming wiz extraordinaire, told Eric and I over coffee at Philz yesterday that he was taking his new app Thingfo live next week. When pressed for a release time, he committed to 1pm on Tuesday.
Congrats Grissy. Can’t wait to see Thingfo running in the wild.

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For today’s lession in Bad UI 101, I bring you the trading site Scottrade.com.  While crying over my portfolio today, I saw something that made me (almost) sadder:

This is the Intarwebs people.  We haves the hyperlinks.  Let’s use them.  Instead of a 4-step map to an adventure across the site - which you can’t take [...]

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My man Kent Brewster has already worked some of his magic and pushed the first MyBlogLog API mashup into the wild.  I am in total awe of his skills, not to mention his passion. Check it out!
Thanks Kent!

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MyBlogLog has rolled out its long overdue API as an invite only beta. W00t!
It has some pretty cool features, if I do say so myself:

Get all the websites associated with a particular tag
Get all the members’ contacts on MyBlogLog
Lookup by ID on a service such as flickr or twitter and find profile on MyBlogLog
Get member [...]

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I’m not talking about Adobe’s design software monopoly. (Which they do seem to have.) Or their stock going through the roof. (Like the old Microsoft.) Or even the fact that the software itself is insanely expensive. (No need to comment here.) I am talking about the applications themselves.
I just [...]

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