Winners of Bit.ly API Contest announced

I saw this via a tweet by @davemc500hats a.k.a. Dave McClure:


http://Bit.ly API Contest winners announced

Excerpts:

[

1st Prize (winner of a netbook and VIP Pass to Shorty Awards):

bit.lify - A BlackBerry application that makes it easy to share urls on the go.

"We’ve had a lot of people ask for more convenient ways to use bit.ly on mobile devices, and this one took the cake."

2nd Prize (Winner of an iPod Shuffle, and a VIP Pass to Shorty Awards):

PHP and JQuery bit.ly Libs

We chose this entry for its thoroughness and utility. If you’re looking to integrate bit.ly with your PHP application, take a look at this project.

]

I think this (organizing API contests) is a good idea, and will spur software innovation. It would be great if more organizations (whether commercial or non-commercial) organized such contests.

You only have to look at how hot Twitter's growth is to realize the importance of API's (which are nothing but libraries, of course, and I've written about the importance of software libraries more than once before). It's been widely reported that most use of Twitter's microblogging service is via the Twitter API.

So remember that word: API, API, API (reminds me of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer reportedly jumping up and down on stage, chanting "Developers, developers, developers!" :-)


Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises.