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Facebook has just announced the launch of a new Create Application API, which makes it easier than ever for users to build secondary apps based off of another app. It sounds like a good idea at first, but it comes with one nasty consequence: those viral and sometimes incredibly annoying quiz applications are going to become more popular than ever. Fortunately Facebook has had the foresight to release the new API with a complimentary new feature — you’ll now be able to block the parent application of any of these quizzes, which means you can hide many of them from your News Feed with one click of the ‘Hide’ button.

For those who haven’t tried out one of these quiz apps, here’s a refresher. There are a number of very popular quiz generators on Facebook that let people create their own, secondary applications that they can share with their friends. But actually going through the process has been a bit tricky — users had to deal with Facebook’s developer app and API keys, which is hardly familiar territory for the vast majority of Facebook users (though many made it through the process anyway). The new API eliminates much of this hassle, allowing quiz makers to automate the application creation process. And that means we’re going to be seeing lots more quizzes.

Of course, many of us aren’t exactly keen on seeing countless quizzes filling up our News Feed. This wouldn’t be a problem if they acted the same way as most applications do — after all, you can hide any application from your News Feed. But because each quiz is treated as a unique app, you have to manually hide each new quiz that one of your friends makes. At least, until now.

Now you’ll be able to block all quizzes from the parent Quiz Generator applications, which means you’ll be able to hide many of them at once without having to deal with them again. It will be interesting to se what the net effect on the quiz makers will be: they’ll be easier to use than ever, but it’s also much easier to ignore them.

Aside from its importance to Quiz Makers, the new API has plenty of other uses. Developers on Facebook will now more easily be able to offer self-serve custom app generators (for example, you could build an application that sports teams could use to build their own branded applications). The API can also be used by services like Disqus to further streamline integrating Facebook Connect on sites outside of Facebook.

Photo by alexanderdrachmann.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Google Wave – the much anticipated communication and collaboration platform that debuts later this month – is the fact that Waves can be embedded anywhere on the Web.

Waves, in case you’re not familiar, are essentially individual threaded conversations that take place within Google Wave. So, when we’re talking about an embeddable Wave, it means a conversation that can be placed on other websites, with the same functionality as it would have within Wave itself.

Since some developers already have access to Google Wave, we’re now able to show you what this functionality looks like – and how you may be seeing it in the future – via a WordPress plugin that has already been built for easily embedding Waves in blog posts.

Embeddable Waves

You’ll only be able to see the embed in action if you have a dev account for Wave, so here’s a screenshot of what the end result looks like, via a post on Mastering Wave:

It might not be much to see yet, but here are a few key things not readily apparent: (1) it’s editable, meaning the audience you’re sharing the embed with can make changes (2) it’s drag and drop, so that same audience can also easily add content (3) it can be played back, so you can see how the Wave has evolved over time. Taking all of these features into consideration, you can see why we think it’s possible Wave could become a new type of commenting system for the Web.

Google Wave WordPress Plugin

And that brings us back to the WordPress plugin, dubbed Wavr. Once installed, the plugin lets you easily add Waves to any WordPress blog post with the simple syntax – [wave id="wave-id"] – where “wave-id” is simply the unique ID number given to each Wave. There are also some simple options for editing the Wave’s appearance, like background and text colors. The plugin was built using the Google Wave Embed API.

The simplicity of the plugin and the way it extends the functionality of Wave to third-party websites is a great example of what might be to come with Google Wave. It’s not just a shiny new interface for Gmail, but a whole new way of envisioning communication on the Web. Is the world ready for it? That’s a question we’ve been asking, and probably the main reason Google is being so deliberate with the rollout.

Starting on September 30th, 100,000 users will get access, and how they use it will dictate a lot about the product’s future and how we might see it evolve. Developers are clearly pretty stoked about it though – Wavr joins a growing number of extensions and apps that have already been built for the platform pre-launch, which you can check out in the Wave Samples Gallery.

Google Wave Resources

Tags: Google, Google Wave, Wordpress, wordpress plugins

Foursquare has been all the rage in the early adopter mobile space the past several months. And it has been peeking outside of the early adopter crowd with things such as local bars offering promotions for Foursquare usage. But it has still been held back a bit by the fact that it has only had an iPhone app and a somewhat clunky mobile web interface. And Foursquare understood that, so it called for developers to help build its app for the other mobile platforms. Today, the first of those is ready to go: Foursquare for Android.

Work on the project started back in April and was mainly coded by Joe LaPenna and Chris Brummel in their spare time. It started as a project to first reverse engineer the iPhone API, and then migrate to Android using Foursquare’s beta API, LaPenna tells us. After a few months of work, the duo and Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai (who has been managing it from the service’s side) feels its now feature-complete and ready for distribution.

Users who have played with the iPhone version should feel at home with this app. But it has a few features that the iPhone version doesn’t, such as integrated maps and a one-click check-in process. Other areas like the friends check-in list and the page to display your badges are largely the same as the iPhone version, but the app has the distinctive Android look and feel.

One advantage the Android platform has over the iPhone is that applications can run in the background. But Foursquare for Android chooses not to take advantage of that, and instead opts for speed and better battery life. “No “location aware” always-on background services or application bloat to drain your battery over the course of the night,” is how they phrase it. Since Foursquare is all about manually checking-in places, that makes sense.

With the app now complete, the next revisions will focus on performance and UI, LaPenna says. But there are also some new features that both they and Foursquare have planned. “We of course plan on adding features to the app but we’re not sure what order we’re going to tackle them in,” LaPenna says.

Having another mobile application for Foursquare should certainly help with its adoption. And Android is especially key since a lot of geeky early adopters have Android phones. There is also work being done on a BlackBerry app and a Windows Mobile app. The latter I’ve seen in action, as my friend Anand Iyer has been working on it. It has a few great features also not found on the iPhone app including the ability to ping you if three of your friends check-in somewhere that you are not. And placing your friends on an actual map to show where they are (think Latitude).

One really nice thing about the new Android app is that it’s open-source. LaPenna and Brummel have already had plenty of others help in building it. You can find out more about it on the Google Code page for the project. They’ve also written up some documentation for first-time Foursquare Android users.

The Android Foursquare app is available in the Android Market right now for free, or you can grab the app from the Google Code page and install it yourself.

Update: DailyFinance published some other interesting information today in a profile of Foursquare. The most interesting part is that Foursquare is preparing to announce a round of seed funding. We’ve heard that as well from a couple sources. From what we hear, the company is actually looking for less money than some investors are offering.

Look for a low seven figure seed round to be announced in the coming weeks. And one name that is continually thrown around as being involved is Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson. And where he is putting money, you can often find Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet close by as well. Nothing confirmed yet, that’s just what we’re hearing.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

For years, PayPal had no rival in the online payments industry. Then, in 2007, Amazon launched its Amazon Payments, which not only gave PayPal a rival with real muscle, but was considered friendlier and more open to third party developers, thus why many apps utilized Amazon Payments instead of PayPal. And let’s not forget about Google Checkout, which also competes in the space.

However, Paypal is taking a swing back at the competition today, revealing PayPal X and Adaptive Payments, a new initiative that allow third party developers to utilize PayPal in completely new ways. Prepare yourself for split payments, payment aggregation, and PayPal on other websites.

The Basics of Paypal X

PayPal is essentially opening up its platform to developers so that they can build new products off of PayPal. This is called PayPal X. The first part of this new initiative is PayPal Adaptive Payments, which refers to the new APIs (application programming interfaces) that will help developers do new things with PayPal.

All of the developer-related information will be placed on PayPal’s one-character domain, X.com. Here are some of the things that are now possible:

- Send Money: Peer-to-peer payments can and will happen on multiple platforms, not just on PayPal.com

- Split Payments: You can now split payments among many recipients via the Platform. For example, if you need to pay multiple people a commission on the sale, you can send just one payment instead of four or five.

- Payment Preapproval: Once you log into a system and confirm prepayments, the API will automatically transfer funds based on pre-set specifications.

- Payment Aggregation: To reduce the costs of payment transactions, users can soon aggregate multiple payments into one lump transaction. Amazon Payments already offers this.

This could be good news for a lot of smaller firms and third-party developers. Let’s take TwitPay as an example. TwitPay allows users to send and receive micropayments via Twitter. It is run on PayPal, and in fact is one of the first apps utilizing the Adaptive Payment platform (and probably the reason they switched from Amazon Payments). The new API lets you do things like send payments right on Twitpay.me (and hopefully soon split payments).

PayPal Adaptive Payments doesn’t come out to all developers and users until November, but expect to see more websites utilizing the new PayPal X very, very soon.

Tags: ebay, paypal