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The much-awaited Application Programming Interface (API) for movie site Netflix will launch tomorrow, according to an email from the company. As HackingNetflix found out last week, the launch event will occur at the AJAX Experience conference. Details are listed below. It looks pretty good, but there are some major limitations, too.

Millions of people love movies via Netflix, making this API an opportunity for all kinds of developers to add well-known value to any other application.

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The company says the API will allow access to data for 100,000 movie and TV episode titles on DVD as well as Netflix account access on a user's behalf.

Presumably this does not mean that 3rd party applications will be able to pull in the streaming content available on the Netflix site, but rather that they'll be able to make user data portable for offering personalized content on their applications based on a user's Netflix activities. Users will still have to visit the Netflix site itself or to one of the big integration partners like LG or Xbox in order to watch streams. Last week Netflix cut deals with the Disney Channel and CBS to put nearly 100 of their shows on the Netflix site. You vibrating hamster Facebook app will not be able to show your users their favorite Netflix video inside the hamster, though, you just get to interact with their list of favorites content as data.

Update: Now that the API is live, we see that our assumption here was wrong. As reader Dave Jeyes points out in comments, the documentation includes code for a play button and a media player. Cool!

It also appears that this is a read-only API, meaning that movies cannot be requested or other account information changed, from inside of 3rd party applications. We presume there will be affiliate links made available so that users can click through and developers can make some profit.

Update: It turns out our hunch was wrong about read-only. In an email response to the question, the company says: "Write capabilities: yes. We wanted to enable full movie queue management, so there are write capabilities in that a user can add movies to their queue, reorder their queue, and remove movies. Ratings can also be written, i.e. a user can rate a movie using the API."

Speaking of developer profit, commercial use of the API will be accepted. Netflix says, for example, that developers can sell an app in the iPhone app store that uses the Netflix API. That's great, there are far too many commercially desirable APIs around the web for which commercial use is prohibited.

The API includes access to data via REST API, a Javascript API, and ATOM feeds. No JSON, which we suspect will disappoint some developers.

User authentication will occur using OAuth, the open standard we and others have been cheering for and the protocol now used for all the Google Data APIs.

So the good news is that Netflix is using standards based authentication, making it very easy to develop against, is allowing commercial use and is finally launching the interface. The bad news appears to be that it's user-data only and appears to be read only. We'll update this post if we get any more details from the company before launch tomorrow. Update:Now that we've seen more information about the API, it appears that there is no bad news. This is great stuff.

The API will be available at http://developer.netflix.com by self sign-up tomorrow. That site is currently password protected.

If you're a user of the analytics service SiteMeter, you will now see a better interface when you check your site's statistics. The site redesign provides a host of new features for users that could cause users of Google Analytics to do a double-take. Here's a closer look at what users can expect from the upgrades SiteMeter has made.

UPDATE: Turns out the new design wasn't so great after all. SiteMeter has implemented an immediate rollback to the old design!

Visual Goods

SiteMeter has made a switch from a codename based management system to an email based system. This means that users can now consolidate their SiteMeter accounts under one email address. In doing so, users will be required to reactivate their accounts under their email address. You can even group your premium account reports by topics to compare and contrast the data of all your sites .

Visually, the service has redesigned the way users can now view their data. Statistics can now be visually seen using charts, graphs, or a table view. Choose date ranges of data to view, export your data, view demographics and do a ton more via a sweet visual interface. SiteMeter is also reporting to have more accurate data for visitor counts and page views by differentiating between visitors and unique visitors. All of your statistics are available visually and textually for any section of the service.

Taking Notes

With some of the new features, we have to wonder if SiteMeter decided to take a couple of visual cues from Google's popular Analytics service. Whether they have or haven't, SiteMeter has certainly done a great job on an long over-due upgrade. However, we're not sure if the new features are enough to keep users from using Google Analytics for free. If you're a user of SiteMeter, let us know what you think of the site's redesign and changes in the comments section.

The high profile but heretofore loosely organized Data Portability Working Group announced last night that it has elected its first group of Steering Group officers. The Working Group strives to help user data become freed for secure re-use across different websites and services. The first chair of the Steering Group will be Daniela Barbosa, who is a Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a Dow Jones company.

Can the Data Portability Working Group overcome some early shakiness caused by the perception that it's all hype and no substance? The group got big press when Microsoft, Google, Facebook and many other companies publicly joined up - but critics allege that press is all that's been accomplished.

Context

The Working Group is really important. The work of the entire group, not just the most visible member and founder Chris Saad, has put the issue of data portability on a much larger public stage than it might have been on otherwise.

That said, it's unclear how much additional work has been getting done there.

The Open Web Foundation launched separately to be a place for developers to crunch code together in the same spirit as the Working Group.

Many have questioned what the big players have done since joining the group. Saad and Barbosa point to data portability initiatives like Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpace Data Availability as examples - but it's unclear how much that has to do with the Working Group. Barbosa says that members of Microsoft, MySpace and Digg have been particularly engaged in the day to day discussions about the forthcoming Best Practices documents the group is focused on.

Chris Saad has been criticized as a petty dictator who struggles to work with the existing community and who puts the credibility of the issues at risk by building so much hype. Saad says that building buzz is one of the most important things the Working Group can do and that it's complimentary to coders coding.

The election of Barbosa as Steering Group chair could help the group move past some of those criticisms and help public awareness extend to the many other members of the Working Group. An employee of a giant company, Barbosa is unlikely to face the same criticisms of pushing an obscure technology in her own interests as Saad has with APML (Attention Profile Markup Language.) She will likely face some criticism as a "big co" player who could push the data portability agenda away from the interests of users and little companies - but that's mitigated by the fact that she does relatively obscure, geeky work at Dow Jones and is widely liked as a person. (Disclosure, Barbosa's book The Taxonomy Cookbook is advertised here on RWW.)

Photo of Daniela Barbosa by, once again, Brian Solis.

What's Next?

In addition to the election of Barbosa, the whip-smart Elias Bizannes has become Vice-chair, a number of Action Groups have been formed and various people are heading those.

Bizannes is leading the Mission/Vision task force, Saad is heading the Communication task force, Steve Greenberg, the CEO of pre-launched white label social networking service Ciabe is leading the Governance task force regarding how the group will work, tech entrepreneur Brady Brim-DeFores is leading the much-needed Branding/Logo task force and Barbosa is leading the DataPortability Grid Tool Task Force tracking tangible company support.

The prize inside this complicated box may be the promised documents on best practices. While the Open Web Foundation is working on code standards, the Data Portability Working Group could help articulate best business and communications practices for companies wanting to support data portability. There's a lot of interest, but concerns like privacy, monetization and confusion are slowing adoption of data portability measures. The Working Group is well positioned to tackle these issues.

We look forward to seeing those documents. It may take awhile - everyone's got day jobs to do and this is all volunteer work being done for the well being of the web and humanity. We're encouraged by what the group is doing on a daily basis, as well, on the Google discussion group for example.

We wish the group's new officers the best of luck in advancing an agenda that will help empower users and developers to build a better internet for all of us.

Chris Saad, a co-founder of the Data Portability project has posted that tomorrow at OSCON a new Open Data Web Foundation will be announced by David Recordon and others.

The goal of the new foundation is to set out the actual data specifications, legal structures around data portability and in helping to evangelize set formats. Saad says that the initiative is different to the Data Portability project in that it is details oriented around specific technology and legal implementations rather than the broader evangelizing effort that has come out of Data Portability:

Continue reading on TechcrunchIT >>

Update: David Recordon has responded by saying that he isn’t at OSCON tomorrow.

Update 2: David Recordon has confirmed that an Open Web Foundation will be announced on Thursday morning.

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

Ping, ping, ping! That's the sound made day and night by the new social media technologies rapidly proliferating around the web... and the machines are getting tired. Polling for updates to user data streams, wishing they spoke the same language and dreaming they knew which accounts belonged to the same people across different services.

Sounds like a great opportunity for an infrastructure provider, doesn't it? Enter the sexiest infrastructure provider we've seen in a long time: Gnip. Venture funded and built by exited MyBlogLog co-founder Eric Marcoullier, Gnip wants to serve as the grand central station and universal translation service for the new social web.

What Gnip Does Now

The primary service that Gnip offers at launch today is to capture user data updates from any web application and then serve up the very latest information to anyone else who requests it. Your application doesn't have to ping Flickr, YouTube, etc. etc. every few minutes and ask "have any of our users done anything on your individual service?" Now with Gnip, Flickr (a launch partner in fact) can report user data updates to Gnip, which can then pass that data along to consuming parties, along with data from all the other social media services of interest.

It's about scalability and decreasing latency to near zero. It sounds like a great idea.

What Gnip Says it Will Do Within 90 Days

The sexiest features are still in the works. Here are just a few plans that the company has disclosed so far.

Protocol switching You want to communicate instantly with an application using the IM protocol XMPP/Jabber but it only publishes and consumes RSS feeds? Gnip will stand in the middle and translate so each end of the transaction can send and receive data in the format it wants. Hot!

Standardized metadata Different services publish user data with different titles for the various fields sometimes. That makes it hard for the robots to know what exactly is being said. Gnip is working with visionary developer Chris Messina to create a meta data standardization process, for social bookmarking activities in particular. Gnip will consume feeds from user bookmarks on any service, then make publicly available those same feeds appended with another version of the same data but in a standardized format. That's a really big deal because it makes interoperability possible.

Identity discovery Right now it's hard for services and for users to tie multiple social media accounts together from around the web. Gnip will let users provide usernames or emails and then check to see where else those identifiers are being used. That's a solid sounding idea.

All of this will be free, none of it will be public-facing. Application developers will tie into Gnip and there may be premium services available eventually, like translation of data into a particular vendor's proprietary template.

Is This Too Centralized?

Gnip's Eric Marcoullier acknowledges that the centralization here is worth questioning. Two primary concerns come up: scalability and privacy.

As far as scalability is concerned, that's the name of the game here. If Gnip can't scale with fantastic uptime then there's no service. The company has been working with Pivotal Labs, the strike force hired to fix Twitter, since Gnip started work.

When we asked Marcoullier about privacy, he emphasized that Gnip is only working with publicly available data right now. The company might venture into user authentication and private data, but that's "a whole other can of worms," he said.

No doubt Google is already indexing most of the information that Gnip will be transmitting, but we can't help but think that Gnip will be in a uniquely powerful position to do some mining of anonymized user data and social graphs. That could lead to very big money but it could also raise some concerns on the parts of users. Gnip says they aren't worried about monetization right now, they just want to build out their service and add value to the market place.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/design/Gnip_Grand_Central_Station_for_the_Social_Web';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'normal';That may be the case, but we think that Gnip has a whole lot of potential to deliver huge value to the applications leveraging it, to the backers financing it and ultimately to all the users of the emerging class of social web applications. We love this kind of stuff.