“With this attribute, web developers can drive conversions on their sites by marking their forms for auto-completion without changing the user interface or the backend,” says Google software engineer Ilya Sherman.

In a proposal for the attribute, it says:

Autofill agents save users’ time, and help site authors convert users in purchase and registration flows. Autofill works best when site authors are able to directly provide hints to autofill agents as to what data belongs in each field.
…

We believe that website authors have strong incentive to facilitate autofill on their forms to help convert users in purchase and registration flows. Additionally, this assists users by streamlining their experience.

As an example, Google shows this:

<input type=”text” name=”field1” x-autocompletetype=”email” />

“We’ve been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors,” says Sherman. “Like any early stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the web standards community provides feedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to best support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec. For now, this new attribute is implemented in Chrome as x-autocompletetype to indicate that this is still experimental and not yet a standard, similar to the webkitspeech attribute we released last summer.”

The proposal for the attribute can be read in its entirety here.

“Developers looking for a blog search API often find the APIs that do exist are providing a variation of a web index,” says Rahul Hampole with the Yahoo Search BOSS team. “We decided to take a different approach. Yahoo! developed a custom blog index where the relevancy is specifically tuned for blogs. This allows us to provide you a wealth of data such as the provider, the author, date of post and in certain cases, contextually relevant terms associated with the article.”

“By their very nature, web indices used for blog search cannot provide the complex functionality that developers demand,” explains Hampole. “For example, try finding a commercial API that will give you all the blog articles written on ‘Yahoo’ in the last week sorted by date. Yes, I know, I couldn’t find one either. Developers can now make that exact query on BOSS and build a rich powerful application. As always, BOSS developers get maximum flexibility on the display of this data.”

Yahoo has set the pricing at ten cents per 1,000 queries. Users can apply to show advertising when they sign up, and those who have already signed up for BOSS can use Blog Search immediately.

Yahoo says it has hundreds of developer sites using BOSS for millions of queries each day. ” We have seen fascinating applications in social, mobile and on the web that are using the service,” says Hampole. “Our goal is to nurture and grow this ecosystem by continuing to add new services and helping you monetize your offering.”

He says the team’s next goal is to “shake things up in mobile,” adding that they’re not planning on a BOSS OS.

Earlier this year, Yahoo launched BOSS v2, which brought a number of new things to the table (including Yahoo Search advertising).

WebMatrix brings together a Web server, a database, and programming frameworks, letting users code, test, and deploy both deploy both ASP.NET and PHP applications side by side. It also includes built-in SEO features. 

Users can run an SEO report and find how to make their sites more visible to search engines. Microsoft says the product "provides clear guidance on how to make your site better, and even offers to take you right to the file in your site you need to fix."

The tool lets users create sites using code provided through templates or using existing free open source Web apps like WordPress, Joomla, DotNetNuke or Umbraco. Microsoft says nearly 40 open source application partners are supporting WebMatrix.

"Our Web platform offers a complete ecosystem of products, partners and technologies all aimed at helping developers succeed on the Web," says S. Somasegar, SVP of the Developer Division at Microsoft. "Every day, more people are looking to build, publish and manage a website, and now, with WebMatrix, we provide developers of all skill levels with a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use solution to get their sites online."

According to the 2010 numbers from Royal Pingdom, there were 255 million websites as of December, with 21.4 million added in 2010. As of June, there were 1.97 billion Internet users worldwide.

WebMatrix is available in nine languages so far.

Now, Salesforce has announced that it is acquiring Heroku for about $212 million. Heroku is a cloud application platform powered by Ruby. In fact, according to Salesforce, it’s the fastest growing platform of its type. 

The acquisition would make perfect sense for the company given its increased focus on social cloud-based enterprise apps. The platform powers over 106,000 social and mobile cloud apps. In fact, the company claims that developers added 2,600 new apps to the platform last week alone. 

The company points out that there are over a million developers developing on Ruby, and that the language was used to write things like Groupon, Hulu, and Twitter. 

"The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. "Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."

"We have a service that developers really love, and salesforce.com has the trust and credibility the most demanding customers expect," added Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian. "Together, we will provide the best place to run and deploy Cloud 2 apps. We believe this is the winning combination to bring cloud application platforms into the mainstream of the enterprise."

The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of January, and is subject to customary closing conditions.

As MG Siegler (who first reported the news) points out, the company is known for its Google Web Toolkit designer, which is likely the reason for the acquisition.

Instantiations greets its site visitors with the following message:

No word yet from Google on this. Perhaps they’re waiting until tomorrow to announce it along with the reported Slide acquisition. You have to wonder if any other acquisition announcements are in store from the company.

The price tag on Instantiations is as of yet unknown.

But first, Warden’s story. Read the whole thing in his words here for more context about what he wanted to do with the data, but to make a long story short, he was building a tool to bring data from email and various social networks into one place to make it easier for users to manage their contacts, and he crawled Facebook. He says he checked Facebook’s robot.txt, and that "they welcome the web crawlers that search engines use to gather their data," so he wrote his own. He was able to obtain data like which pages people were fans of and links to a few of their friends. He created a map showing how different countries, states and cities were connected to each other and released it so that others could use the information. Once Facebook caught wind of this, they threatened legal action. Warden writes:

Their contention was robots.txt had no legal force and they could sue anyone for accessing their site even if they scrupulously obeyed the instructions it contained. The only legal way to access any web site with a crawler was to obtain prior written permission.

Obviously this isn’t the way the web has worked for the last 16 years since robots.txt was introduced, but my lawyer advised me that it had never been tested in court, and the legal costs alone of being a test case would bankrupt me. With that in mind, I spent the next few weeks negotiating a final agreement with their attorney. They were quite accommodating on the details, such as allowing my blog post to remain up, and initially I was hopeful that they were interested in a supervised release of the data set with privacy safeguards. Unfortunately it became clear towards the end that they wanted the whole set destroyed.

Facebook Public Policy Communications Manager Andrew Noyes tells WebProNews, "Pete Warden aggregated a large amount of data from over 200 million users without our permission, in violation of our terms. He also publicly stated he intended to make that raw data freely available to others. Warden was extremely cooperative with Facebook from the moment we contacted him and he abandoned his plans."

"We have, and will continue to, act to enforce our terms of service where appropriate," adds Noyes.

Noyes pointed to Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which states that "You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission." That’s under the safety section, by the way.

"I’m bummed that Facebook are taking a legal position that would cripple the web if it was adopted (how many people would Google need to hire to write letters to every single website they crawled?), concludes Warden. "And a bit frustrated that people don’t understand that the data I was planning to release is already in the hands of lots of commercial marketing firms, but mostly I’m just looking forward to leaving the massive distraction of a legal threat behind and getting on with building my startup."

Hearing some of what both parties have to say on the issue, what are your thoughts? Discuss here.

If we hear back from Warden or if Facebook offers us more insight into the situation, which I’m told may still happen, I’ll update this article.

The reason Mozilla says it decided to start this directory is simply because there isn’t one like it. "There’s no central index of these tools," the company says in a blog post.

"As we’ve explored different tools we could create here as part of the Developer Tools Lab, we’ve come to the opinion that in addition to creating new tools, one of the best things we could do is help developers understand the broad universe of tools that already exist and expose some of the fantastic and amazing work that’s being done," says Mozilla’s Ben Galbraith of the Developer Tools Team.

With the Open Web Tools Directory, you can search through the following categories:

- Design
- Code
- Debug
- Test
- Deploy
- Docs

To view the directory, a modern browser with canvas is required. Galbraith suggests Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2, or Opera 9.

Of course to truly build a comprehensive directory of open web tools, Mozilla needs help from developers, and is calling for submissions. Submissions will be reviewed on a regular basis. They will not go live immediately.

The directory is clearly a work in progress, not just in terms of its contents, but also interface. Mozilla says it is working to add social elements that will allow users to comment and vote on the tools they like best. They are also working on a more accessible version that does not require a browser with canvas support.

"People are now expecting the same richness and ease of use in their workplace applications that they have in their daily Web experiences, but companies today are faced with strained development resources and less time to create intuitive applications," said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. "The new Adobe Flash Platform tools help solve this challenge by reducing time to market for generating compelling applications and content. Using Adobe Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst, developers and designers can now work together more productively to create rich experiences that employees, customers and partners expect."

SAP is one company that is certainly excited about the releases. "With the arrival of the ‘digital generation’ in the workplace, workers expect a new approach to the enterprise and want to consume business applications like they do with other tools on the Internet," says Herve Couturier, executive vice president, R&D NetWeaver and Business Objects, SAP.

"The adoption of the Adobe Flash Platform, particularly with the use of Adobe Flash Builder, has helped SAP create even better user interfaces and interactive content for our next-generation applications, like our new SAP BusinessObjects Explorer," he adds.

The releases definitely have some designers and developers excited. Here’s a sample of some enthusiasm on Twitter:

Resources that those interested in the releases may want to consider checking out include:

- Beta videos
- What’s new in Flash Builder
- What’s new in the SDK

The releases are available for download at Adobe Labs. If you’ve downloaded any of them, share your thoughts on them in the comments below.

Web developers with a need for a more musical experience on their sites may want to check out the latest service being made available by Yahoo.

The Yahoo Music API debuted on the company’s Developer Network, Yahoo announced today:

The Yahoo! Music API gives developers access to the Yahoo! Music catalog of artists, albums, tracks, videos, ratings and more. It provides numerous ways to browse the catalog: through charts, search, similarities, genres, artists, and user recommendations and ratings. Adding content to your site becomes simple when using our API and video player.

A site developer could use this API to build an application with personalized features. Registered users could place their ratings and recommendations under unique profiles. An application could use that information to show visitors what its members think about a given song or artist.

The Music API is the latest in a string of such access to data Yahoo continues to make available. Yahoo opened its biggest index, search, through its SearchMonkey developer tool earlier in 2008.

The debut version of the Google Webmaster Tools API supports the following features:

Managing Websites:

1. Retrieve a list of your sites in Webmaster Tools.
2. Add your sites to Webmaster Tools.
3. Verify your sites in Webmaster Tools.
4. Remove your sites from Webmaster Tools.

Working with Sitemaps:

1. Retrieve a list of your submitted Sitemaps.
2. Add Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools.
3. Remove Sitemaps from Webmaster Tools.

As of now, the Webmaster Tools API offers a limited subset of all the functionality that Webmaster Tools provide. However, as this is the initial phase of the Webmaster Tools API, there are going to be a lot of updates and improvements for certain.

For all those Webmasters who are interested in this tool and would like to make the best out of it, here is the link to Developer’s Guide for the Webmaster Tools Data API. Check out the guide and get on with more improvisations.

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