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This week MySpace launched the Developer Services program to make it easier for developers on their API to use cool tools for creating, deploying and managing their apps. Through the new portal, developers get better and discounted access to frameworks, hosting, monetization and mobile tools and analytics. We're excited to be one of the partners along with services like PushButton Engine, Microsoft BizSpark and PayPal. 

The Developer Services program highlights the new business imperative for API providers- building an ecosystem- and the ways partnerships support that goal.   

From Tech to Platform 

An open API isn't just about making a technology available- it's about building a platform. The new web economy means billions of devices, millions upon millions of users and thousands of APIs. When your API is deeply hooked into the fabric of the internet, the developer world and the ongoing evolution of tools, devices and services, it gains both greater immediate value and longevity.  

Developers are going to use your API with other APIs, they're going to use monetization and analytics tools, and they're more and more likely to use cloud services that make it easy to scale their stuff. There's a growing opportunity for API providers to form partnerships that simultaneously simplify and improve the development process while enriching the API ecosystem. 

This approach to community and ecosystem is both philosophy and business strategy- a belief that empowering developers to access the tools they want is beneficial to all; and a model that supports adoption, innovation and ROI. 

One of our favorite new visualizations involves geolocation. Now we provide analytics for where your API requests come from around the world, based on geo-ip lookups. The green dots indicate requests' originating locations, while the sizes of the dots correlate to the number of requests from that location.

While Twitter and other web 2.0 applications have changed public communications, companies have been clamoring for similar messaging systems for internal use. Used by over 1,000 companies and teams, HipChat is a great solution with deep features to help you supercharge your company's communications. You can create chat rooms for meetings, use it on your mobile phone, have a one-on-one chat with anybody in your company, and securely share files. HipChat recently released their very own API, which is well-designed and documented. Here's a quick demo of what makes HipChat great:

Since Garret Heaton of HipChat uses Apigee, we asked him to answer 5 questions for us:

What do you wish your API would do that it doesn't do today?

Garret:Obviously it'd be nice to have support for all the features users have access to when using HipChat: changing room topics, sending invites, uploading files, creating rooms, etc. It'd also be awesome to have a streaming API (and open up full access via XMPP) so users could build bots and other real-time services.

If you could send one message about building your API back in time to yourself, what would it be?

Garret:Keep it simple! The first versions of our API had a more complex interface for passing auth information, desired response format, and entity IDs. Our initial testers were often confused. It's important for new users to be able to test the API easily using cURL.

What insights into your app or other benefits have you gotten from working with Apigee?

Garret:The 'Response Time' data is really helpful for identifying slower requests. It's really nice not having to build this ourselves. The new debug console is also incredibly helpful when you need to see what your exact request/response data looks like.

What new Apigee feature would you most like to see from Apigee?

Garret:I know you're already working on it, but HTTPS support for mapped domains so our users can use HTTPS [NB: It's coming very soon, we promise!]. Also, a way to create a test console for our API. I think our users would find that very helpful.

How would you like to see developers make use of your API once it is exposed?

Garret:It'd be awesome to have plugins for sending HipChat messages available for lots of other software: Capistrano, Nagios, Subversion, Git, Perforce, Trac, Get Satisfaction, CoTweet, and many other cloud-based tools companies are using these days. We're also looking forward to seeing the creative things people will build that we haven't even thought of yet!

If you're looking for a great collaboration tool to improve your internal communications, be sure to check out HipChat. And keep telling us what Apigee features you'd like to see next so we can provide a better service for you!

We all know YouTube is a famous platform for sharing videos. But the advertising that supports YouTube isn't always wanted when you, yourself, are a business who wants to be taken seriously. This is a problem that vzaar solves—hosting professional content and videos for businesses. They provide a professional video platform that allows you to serve high quality videos for your web applications, and many other businesses. Creating videos for your business is a great way to engage with customers and can be an important revenue generating tool. The best part about vzaar is the control they provide, like how your video gets presented and where. They also have a well-documented API that you can use to plug videos right into your application.

Since the CTO of Vzaar, Adrian Sevitz ,uses Apigee, we asked him to share some of his experiences.

 What insights into your app or other benefits have you gotten from working with Apigee?

 Adrian: Both insight into which calls are being accessed, and what the popular API calls are as well as how many hack attempts we get looking for open urls and holes.

 What new Apigee feature would you most like to see from Apigee?

 Adrian: Two things. The first is the ability to limit users by number of calls so we can sell different access limits. The second is to white or blacklist ulrs being access to provide a layer of protection at the api level.

 What mashup, app, or API do you admire?

 Adrian: App wise we love postmark for our emails and spreedly for our billing. Both of them make our life easier. And what could be better than that?

 When your trying to give your business the right impression on a video platform, vzaar is a great way to push your product or service out! Also we want to hear your ideas on www.apigee.com/support so we can provide a better service for all of our users.