This past Saturday we collaborated with Heroku and Twilio to put on Social App Workshop, an all-day hacker event in San Francisco focusing on people building applications with the Facebook and Twitter APIs. Over 130 developers gathered early in the morning to hack, learn and collaborate. 

We heard some cool presentations and Twitter launched their bridge code for the @Anywhere service! Documentation is coming soon but you can check out some of it here. The Twitter team had been up working on it until 1:00 am the night before! 

Here's some top trends from the event: 

1. Simplicity is everything

Presentations by Oren Teich of Heroku on cloud services and hacker advocate Abraham Williams on minimalism in feature design shared a common theme: simplicity is key - both for applications and the infrastructure, tools and languages that are used to build them. With the immediacy of social tech, increasing mobility, and intense app competition, fast and easy is the new imperative. 

"Make it as easy to use as possible. Then make it easier." - Oren Teich

"Users are lazy…. Make your web app like AAA - only there when you need it" - Abraham Williams 

2. Innovate Faster

A big buzz topic during afternoon coding was the need for speed- and languages, cloud services and developer tools that let people build and deploy applications quick. As presentations on the Twitter API by Matt Harris and the Facebook API by Matt Kelly showed, simple, logical APIs with easy-to-understand structures are a critical element for fast innovation. API providers who align with developers' mission to build-and-deploy in lightspeed are more likely to succeed.  

3.  The Mashup New School 

The concept of "mashups" that combine services and APIs from multiple sources has been around for awhile- but the new school of mashups is all about taking different capabilities from across industries and putting them together to create entirely new functionalities. Take Twilio- which provides an open API for building voice and SMS applications and can bring the world of telephony into your apps. We're seeing more and more industries- health care, 3D, semantic analysis- innovating with APIs and making a whole new school of mashups possible. 

4. Ruby is HOT

Social app developers love Ruby! Tons of attendees were either Ruby experts or trying to learn- there was even a "Ruby N00bs" informal group that got together in the afternoon to collaborate on getting up and running. Developers like Ruby because it lets them build fast- especially when combined with cloud platforms like Heroku. 

Thanks to everyone who participated! You can see more pictures on Flickr and we hope to see you at an event soon. In the Bay area and have ideas on developer events? Shoot us an @ sign on Twitter. 

We're psyched to be working with Heroku and Twilio to organize an an all-day hackfest in San Francisco for developers building applications on the Facebook and Twitter APIs.

Social App Workshop is a one-day coding event for new and experienced developers building social apps. We'll have speakers from the Twitter and Facebook platforms- including Matt Harris from Twitter- and food, drinks, lots of coding time, plus lightning talks from experts on strategies, tools and tactics for creating awesome apps. It'll be at Heroku's new offices in SOMA and we'll be breaking them in!

If you are a new or experienced Twitter or Facebook developer and you'll be around downtown San Francisco on Saturday, July 24, you should come and hang out- it's free and a good chance to learn new things, do some networking and build something cool. Check out the website at http://www.socialappworkshop.com or follow the event on Twitter- http://www.twitter.com/appworkshop. 

If you are a new or experienced Twitter or Facebook developer and you'll be around downtown San Francisco on Saturday, July 24, you should come and hang out- it's free and a good chance to learn new things, do some networking and build something cool. Check out the website at http://www.socialappworkshop.com or follow the event on Twitter- http://www.twitter.com/appworkshop. 

If you are a new or experienced Twitter or Facebook developer and you'll be around downtown San Francisco on Saturday, July 24, you should come and hang out- it's free and a good chance to learn new things, do some networking and build something cool. Check out the website at socialappworkshop.com or follow the event on Twitter- twitter.com/appworkshop. 

Every now and then at Apigee we run into an API that is so brilliant, so elegantly inventive; an API that elevates mankind, changes the way we see the world, and renews our obsession with making a better way to API. 

The Echo Nest Remix API is an internet synthesizer API. It lets you do amazing things with music and video, like write remix programs, sync videos to songs, mashup audio tracks and more. It's currently available as an open source SDK for Python- more languages soon- and is easy to install on OSX, Windows and Linux/Source.

We've had some fun this morning playing with different implementations of the API; like cowbell-ifying Led Zeppelin's Babe I'm Gonna Leave You with http://morecowbell.dj/ and listening to samples from "The Swinger", which takes each beat, time-stretching the first half while time-shrinking the second half to make swing from any song you can think of. 

We also like how the Remix API provides a list of example implementations to inspire and help people learn- great best-practice for API providers.

See any mind-blowing APIs we should know about? Leave a comment or tweet at us: www.twitter.com/apigee

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.