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Socialcast this Wednesday released an official developer API. After weeks of beta testing with select clients the API is now available for all Socialcast members. Socialcast is a real-time collaboration platform that allows companies to communicate and collaborate via activity streams where coworkers share text, files, images and links. Socialcast also allows for users to organize groups to share information with enterprise teams.

The Socialcast API allows developers to create applications through a robust set of operations to interact with activity streams. Socialcast also offers users a desktop client built off their API.

“Socialcast Founder and CEO Timothy Young mentioned that Socialcast aims to be a platform, and not a tool like Yammer, or Twitter,” says TechCrunch reporter Daniel Brusilovsky.

When viewing the Socialcast website I see this eWeek quote featured as the latest buzz, “Socialcast is like a secure Twitter for the Enterprise.”

What I’m going to take away from these contradicting statements is that Socialcast is working on developing and enhancing features to break away from the “enterprise Twitter” mold, however bases the platform on similar functionality.

The top story from the Googleplex this week is the announcement confirming Google Wave will be available to 100,000 testers this fall. The latest project lead by Google Maps developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, Google Wave is an open source collaboration and communications platform that fuses conversations and documents in real-time.

Developers have already been getting their hands dirty in the Google Wave Sandbox with almost 6,000 active accounts. Google is working on filling an additional 20,000 account requests over the next month.

Leading up to the September 30th test launch Google will be working on increasing the stability, speed and usability of the Google Wave platform while expanding API features.

Source: Google Wave Developers Blog

Looking at Google these days we not only see a search giant but also a software company which has been built through acquisitions and internal developments. Google now boldly validates this fact with the announcement of Google Chrome OS, a lightweight open source operating system. “Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects,” says Sundar Pichai, VP of Product Management at Google.

The first place we can expect to see the Google Chrome OS in action will be on netbooks, popular with business travelers, and eventually full-sized desktops. The operating system is targeted towards users who spend most of their time online. The new OS is designed to start up and launch the Web within a few seconds.

Viruses, malware, and security updates may be a thing of the past for Google Chrome OS users. “It should just work,” says Google who is “going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS.”

With Microsoft battling for ranking in the search market and Google booting into the OS market, expect to see some interesting developments in the near future.

Source: Google Blog

Many companies these days are focused on developing applications that run online within “the cloud” a.k.a. Software as a Service (SaaS); Opera today introduces what appears to be a P2P development platform that promotes running applications locally and using the Opera browser as a web server. Opera Unite is a new technology from Opera that claims to “radically extend what you are able to do online.”
 
Out of the box Opera Unite has a standard set of applications which give users the ability to share files, photos, media, and chat with friends. These applications are not meant to be the core functionality of Opera Unite, but rather simple examples of what can be developed using the Unite API. “The key to Opera Unite is that it enables a whole new class of social software on the Web, applications that benefit from two or more people being online at the same time. And, with Opera Unite, these people can all connect directly without needing middlemen who control third-party servers,” says Lawrence Eng, product analyst at Opera.

The Unite platform also promotes the ability to create collaborative applications such as wikis, shared documents and spreadsheets, which are not hosted in the cloud.

An introduction to Opera Unite available on the Opera Developer Community attempts to explain how everything works, but many have security concerns with users turning their home computers into web servers.