After the huge success of our first publishing API we heard your suggestions and decided to improve it in a number of ways.

We just released an OAuth based API with publishing and also reading features, providing a better integration to anyone who wishes to develop an application that uses tarpipe.

On the reading side, you’ll now be able to obtain information about services, user activity actions and workflows. This will, for instance, allow you to give information to your users about which actions they can execute.

One of the publishing features that we’re very excited about is the ad-hoc workflow execution. This API method lets you publish information by sending the workflow definition on the request itself.

Find out more by reading the documentation and requesting a consumer key and secret. Please let us know if you find any bug or have any suggestions.

As a part of our ongoing commitment to Open Source we’re very happy to announce that tarpipe is sponsoring the development of WireIt. This Open Source library accelerated the development of our workflow interface and it makes all the sense to help it grow.

So, what is WireIt and why should you use it? Quoting WireIt’s official description, “it’s an Open Source JavaScript library to create Web wirable interfaces for Data flow applications, Visual Programming Languages or Graphical Modeling.” Basically, it will let you create interfaces similar to the one we’re using on tarpipe:

Eric Abouaf, the author of WireIt, has a lot of plans for future releases of the library. If you’re a JavaScript developer or a Web designer, please give a hand to this fantastic project.

I just came across the article “Fire Eagle and tarpipe: two ways to avoid battery-drain on your mobile” written by one of our users, Guillaume Riflet. I found this article particularly interesting because the author makes a deep analysis of one of the causes of device battery draining: using too many applications. Quoting the article, where Guillaume comments about the current diversity of mobile applications:

However, the major technological bottleneck for this new eco-system to strive, is the device battery-life. Today’s smartphones and pdas drain all the power in just a few hours. This is a big problem that is bound to stick around for a while, (unless some physics Nobel prizer comes up with a brilliant solution).

Until someone finds a way to dramatically increase battery lives, there’s a simpler solution that relies on two services that act as a middle-layer for two different types of information:

• fire eagle: a Yahoo! service that receives updates about your current geographic location. Then, other services can access that geographic information, eliminating the need to update the same information to different services;
• tarpipe: a social media publishing platform that lets you send information to different services by performing a single action.

By using fire eagle and tarpipe you’re in fact spreading your geo-location and publishing your information by performing a single action, instead of using many different applications. Quoting the original article:

With this in mind, you’ll hopefully drain less power from your device, and yet have the same functionality.

All this makes me think about launching a tarpipe fire eagle connector. What do you think?

We know some of you use the popular photo sharing service 23 so we decided to add it to our growing portfolio of supported services.

This connector is very similar to the flickr connector. It lets you publish a picture and outputs its URL, the uploaded picture and a thumbnail.

Whether you want to distribute pictures across multiple services, or you want to publish to different services on different occasions, we think you can find good use in this connector.

Have you ever wanted to be able to automatically tag your pictures based on the text on them? What about having a searchable catalog of every note you publish?

Evernote has just launched their API and we made it available to you immediately. The Evernote connector lets you automatically publish notes with a text body and an optional picture.

The connector will publish the note on Evernote and will attempt to receive the corresponding text recognition. If Evernote recognizes any text in the image, that text can be used through the tags output.

You can, for instance, use this automatic text recognition to populate the tags on pictures you send to flickr. To start using this connector right away you just need to authorize us to publish to your Evernote account and that’s it.