Today, Facebook announced that it’s launching the local currency payments API for all game developers, and that on September 12, it will no longer support Facebook Credits. They’re giving developers 90 days to migrate to local currency payments.

Facebook will also be deprecating Payer Promotions for Facebook Credits in favor of support for Payer Promotions for local currency. This will take place in the coming months. They’ll also deprecate Facebook-sponsored support for TrialPay offers, but TrialPay will continue to support these for Facebook its developers by offering a direct integration solution.

With the new local currency payments API, developers can set prices for in-game items by market, cache static prices with Facebook, and “realize additional reduced latency as a result of fewer server requests for payment completion, like the second server request to confirm order fulfillment and real-time updates to confirm the transaction.”

“We strongly encourage you to start the process now to ensure you have adequate time to integrate local currency pricing and to optimize your app’s payment experience, performance, and pricing,” says Facebook’s Yongyan Liú.

The company encourages developers to consider international pricing, in-game currency, mobile specific stores, and A/B testing.

Documentation is available here.

Last year, Google relaunched Google Earth Builder as Google Maps Engine.

“Maps Engine lets organizations use Google’s fast and reliable cloud infrastructure to layer their data on top of a Google Map and share their custom-made Google Maps with employees, customers or the public-at-large,” a Google spokesperson said in an email. “The API provides direct access to Maps Engine for reading and editing spatial data hosted in the cloud and now organizations can use the API to develop on any platform and build applications like store locators, crowdsourced maps or crisis-response maps.”

“With the API, organizations can develop on any platform – web, Android, iOS and server-to-server – and build applications like store locators, crowdsourced maps or crisis-response maps,” says Google Maps for Business product manager Jen Kovnats. “For example, FedEx.com uses the API to query its more than 50,000 retail locations and IRIS creates applications for utilities to track underground pipelines.”

“Using Google Maps, and more specifically Google Maps Engine, allowed us to completely re-imagine FedEx.com,” says FedEx IT Manager Pat Doyle. “We turned to Maps Engine because it gave us a powerful platform to build and share our own FedEx maps. By integrating features that so many people use everyday, like Google Street View and driving directions, FedEx.com visitors can easily find the nearest FedEx.”

A developer’s guide for the API is available here.

“By utilizing our multi-armed bandit approach, you can maximize results by efficiently determining which assets on your site perform best to offer an improved experience for users,” says Russell Ketchum from Google’s Analytics team. “Multi-armed bandit experiments are powerful and efficient tools and with the new Content Experiments API, you can get even more from them.”

“The Content Experiments API allows you to pick and choose from all the testing functionality Google Analytics has to offer and to combine it into powerful solutions that best fit your particular needs,” adds Ketchum.

This includes testing changes to content without redirects, testing items sever-side (like the result set of a database query), testing with your own variation selection logic and using Google Analytics for reporting, and testing in non-web environments using measurement protocol.

You can find documentation for the API here.

Google launched Content Experiments in Google Analytics about a year ago, replacing Google Website Optimizer.

Much like Apple’s Game Center or Xbox Live, Google Play game services adds a number of features to Android or iOS games that users expect, and developers have been wanting to implement. What’s unique about Google Play game services is that it’s not exclusive to Android, as it can be integrated into iOS games via a native SDK for iPhone and iPad.

So, what does Google Play game services offer to developers and users? Here’s the full list:

Google has also enlisted the help of developers to make sure that some of the most popular games on the Android platform are already using Google Play game services. Some of those games include World of Goo, Super Stickman Golf 2, Beach Buggy Blitz, Kingdom Rush, Eternity Warriors 2 and Osmos.

For more information on all things Google and gaming, check out Google’s game developer portal.

1. Checkout Button
2. Sign in or Guest
3. Billing name
4. Credit Card Type
5. Cred Card Number
6. Expiration – MM
7. Expiration – YY
8. Credit Card CSC
9. Billing Address
10. Billing City
11. Billing State
12. Billing Zip
13. Billing Country
14. Shipping Address
15. Shipping City
16. Shipping State
17. Shipping Zip
18. Shipping Country
19. Shipping telephone
20. Contact Email
21. Submit

So yeah, it’s easy to see where Google’s model could be a bit more helpful.

The Verge, liveblogging the event, says, “BIg play from Google to take its payment service to mobile in a subtle way.”

Update: Google has put a blog post out shedding more light on this announcement, which is an invitation to developers in the U.S. to sign up for the Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API.

Google’s Prakash Hariramani explains, “The Instant Buy API is designed for merchants and developers selling physical goods and services, who already have a payment processor and are looking to simplify the checkout experience for their customers. Developers selling digital goods within their apps will continue to use Google Play In-app Billing, which offers full payment processing capability, including support for carrier billing and gift cards.”

More at the blog.

“Glass is a very ‘right now’ device,” he says. “So when you deliver data to the user, you want to do it in the moment, and keep it up to date.” It should matter to them based on what they’re doing right now, he says.

Other tips include staying out of the user’s way (it will be interesting to see if Facebook Home makes its way to Glass) and “avoiding the unexpected”.

He shares something they’ve been working on with the New York Times, which shows headlines over top of photos (actually not unlike status updates on Facebook Home), and lets you click to have the article read aloud.

He also shares an email exchange and a look at Evernote and Skitch.

Give it a watch:

Adobe shared some early results, as its Media Optimizer tool (which manages over $2 billion in annual ad spend) utilizes the API. The company worked with a few of its customers, including Levi Strauss and Threadless as well as its own Adobe account, and shared these results:

• By using granular targeting, testing different bid levels and segmenting campaigns by regions, Media Optimizer was able to increase the follower base (number of followers on Twitter) by 63%
• Adobe saw the total Cost Per Follow (CPF) decrease by close to 60% or approximately $2.00
• Prior to the campaign Adobe saw steady organic growth at around two dozen followers per day. With Promoted Accounts Adobe saw the growth rate spike dramatically to an average of over 400 new followers per day
• Since the completion of the campaign Adobe saw its follower growth revert to a new, higher baseline of about 115 followers per day. Postings and promotions have not changed significantly, which indicates a possible ongoing benefit of Twitter’s Promoted Accounts and new followers being highly engaged with the brand

“Our customers have been asking us to include Twitter in the Media Optimizer solution,” says David Karnstedt, Senior Vice President, Media and Ad Solutions at Adobe. “Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts are important assets in creating a holistic digital marketing campaign. The performance gains Media Optimizer produced during our beta period, such as lowering cost-per-follow by 60%, are indicative of the value we offer our customers for their Twitter campaigns.”

The company discusses its early campaign results more here.

HootSuite is offering a new integration for Twitter, providing customers with amplification of owned into paid media, agency collaboration, real-time social campaigning, and layered social media reporting.

“HootSuite provides our clients with the ability to amplify their owned content, keeping them at the forefront of social advertising opportunities. This process is now a simple and efficient one,” says Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite. “The new integration allows stakeholders in social businesses to instantly buy Promoted Tweets and Accounts from their HootSuite dashboard using our secure, role-based team workflow.”

More on HootSuite’s new integration here.

“Since we launched Promoted Tweets in April 2010, marketers have come to Twitter to reach new audiences and engage with more than 200 million active Twitter users on the web, on mobile devices, and on tablets,” says Twitter revenue product manager April Underwood. “As interest in Twitter has grown, our focus has been on delivering better ads for users, not more ads. We believe our system is working well because users like the ads experience on Twitter. Our system rewards marketers for being good, not for being loud. And this approach encourages ads that are engaging, relevant and useful.”

“Towards this goal, we’re always working on ways to make it easier to manage campaigns and get more value out of advertising with us,” she adds. “One important step is to enable a diverse group of companies that can integrate seamlessly with our ads platform.”

Twitter says marketers will be able to work with Twitter’s set of partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns and integrate them into cross-channel advertising strategies.

“Equally important, users will continue to see the most relevant Promoted Tweets from advertisers,” notes Underwood. “With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale.”

You can apply to join the partner program here.

Twitter says that in the coming months it will also start certifying ads products that integrate with the API, and that this is just the start of its efforts in this realm.

There will be two levels of API access once the changes take effect: basic and standard. The former will be the default, allowing for up to 10,000 operations per day. The latter will be available to qualified developers with no daily limit on operations. Neither option comes with a charge.

“If you have an approved AdWords API token and plan to execute fewer than 10,000 operations per day, there’s no action needed. You’re covered with basic access,” says AdWords product manager S. Srikanth Belwadi.

“Based on your history with the AdWords API and details you’ve shared with us, you might be pre-qualified for standard access,” says Belwadi. “If so, we will contact you within the next week and let you know. Please keep your contact email address up-to-date in the My Client Center (MCC) account associated with your developer token. If you haven’t been contacted or if you haven’t applied for standard access by February 28th 2013, your token will only have basic access starting March 1st 2013.”

If you think you need standard access, you can apply for it here.

There’s an FAQ section in Google’s help center further discussing the changes here.

In fact, Facebook has been putting the kibosh on a number of apps it sees as potential competitors when it comes to API access, as Josh Constine at TechCrunch reports, citing Twitter’s new Vine video app and Voxer as other casualties, as both were cut off from Facebook’s Find Friends API, which lets apps give users access to their Facebook friends.

Facebook’s Platform policy says, “Competing social networks: (a) You may not use Facebook Platform to export user data into a competing social network without our permission; (b) Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social network.”

It also says, “You must not include data obtained from us in any search engine or directory without our written permission.” Constine shares a statement it receive from Yandex before Facebook even blocked its access:

We note that Yandex is not in violation of Facebook Platform Policies providing for restriction to use data obtained from Facebook in a search engine or directory for the reason that Wonder is not a search engine or a directory. Our application is a personal assistant that helps browse and organize information that is exclusively available to and associated with relevant account of the relevant user in various social networks and services.

On the contrary, [a] search engine is conventionally understood as an information location tool which automatically indexes tens of thousands of publicly available websites, fetches information with unrestricted access and is freely accessible to any Internet user. In addition, we would like to note that Wonder requests [a] user for specific permission to access each portion of information available to the user through a social network or services and never accesses information or data which is beyond the consent, availability for or extent of permission expressly granted by the application user. It is further to be noted, that the application does not perform any automated operations, unless these are specifically permitted by the user.

Clearly, Yandex saw this as a potential problem, and launched anyway, but based on the nature of the app, and how it is coinciding with the roll-out of Facebook’s own Graph Search, it’s no surprise that Facebook would view it as a competitor.

The companies are reportedly in talks about how to proceed with the app, but if Facebook doesn’t budge, it’s not going to make Wonder nearly as attractive to users as it may have been otherwise (and the jury was still out on that anyway). Apparently, Wonder can still operate with the other aforementioned networks’ data (for now), and that even includes Facebook’s Instagram. The real social data, as we all know, however, is in Facebook itself.