The New York Times decided to take it a step farther today by actually providing data in the form of the Congress API. This data is pulled from the House and Senate websites but I have to guess also includes data that is mined from the Congressional Record, the daily public account of all official business that is still, ironically, published in print form en masse. Up until now, the Congressional Record has been available upon request and is hard to actually get real signal from amidst the noise of process and procedure.

With the NY Times Congress API, it is now possible for developers to build tools that mine the Record for roll call votes, members of each chamber, and information about members including chairmanships or committee memberships.

It will be interesting to see how this data is used and how it can be leveraged to keep the government honest. Developers can check out the technical details here.

As recently as yesterday, speculation was that the ill-branded Live! Search could be rebranded in a much more internet friendly way. Kumo.com anyone? Their IM client… well, no one uses it.

Of course, they have jumped headfirst into the incubation industry by launching BizSpark, which seeks to provide promising young companies with technical resources, such as their server offerings, and human and business resources to help these investment companies, mostly web based startups, become viable.

Naturally, one of the odd players in the Microsoft ecosystem has been the Xbox 360 platform. It is a killer gaming platform (I am an avid Xbox Gamer) and their online gameplay over Xbox Live is second to none. It has always lacked any kind of cohesion for an online service though. Especially in 2008, where Facebook and Twitter rule the day and it is rare to find someone who is not on some kind of social networking platform.

So a few months ago, when word leaked out about a complete overhaul to the Xbox Live experience, there were many of us who were excited about a modernization with significant incorporation of social networking elements. With the launch the other day, some of that has been delivered.

The Xbox Experience, as it’s called, is a significantly streamlined dashboard making it extremely easy to access common items, such as the Xbox Marketplace. Incorporation of online video giant, also dabbling in the social networking space, Netflix makes the Experience worlds better. It is possible to watch Netflix “Instant Play” queue items directly via your Xbox Dashboard. Sweet, if the video quality was better. Putting this aside, the mashup is a great step in making the Xbox an entertainment hub.

However, significant issues remain. A “big bling” element to the new Xbox Experience, is the new avatars. Going through a wizard the first time I logged in, reminded me a bit of creating your Tiger Woods 2008 character. Though this is fine in creating a personalized environment, I find no purpose for an avatar except to snap a proverbial photo and making that photo your “avatar photo”. I would much rather designate an actual graphic or picture as my avatar, in much of the same way most social networks allow you to.

The storyline falls apart more when you login to manage your Xbox Live account from the web and discover they have not incorporated any further way of getting at your data. Microsoft would do well to develop robust APIs that would allow players to get an XML or JSON feed of achievements, gamerscores, last/currently played games as well as other social network elements.

Why not provide a much more efficient “friends” method that would allow players to have wish lists, friend challenges, friend groups, as well as a unique element I call “tip sharing”. Tip sharing would be a forum element where a friend could share intel about a game (say Fallout 3) and I could “download” that tip into my Xbox Live user account. When I reach the Farrugut West Metro station in Fallout 3 and my friend has discovered something, the game could feed me that intel from a friend.

Another social element would be the concept of a “lifeline” where, if I’m stuck during a game, I could get immediate assistance (in-game or otherwise) from my friends through screen sharing, instant message (kill Live! Messenger and use OpenAIM, please) or other “helper” element.

Let’s make it really social and make it possible for gamers to find other gamers in their area and schedule times together (if you have to, use a modified, online, lite version of Sharepoint or Exchange Server to make this happen).

Of course, a natural tie together, via OpenSocial, with other social networks, possible use of OAuth for data access and login, status messaging and comment, and other “social elements” would really flesh the Xbox Experience as useful in 2008.

What are your thoughts on the Xbox Experience?

It has been a long time since I got downright giddy about something developer-oriented. Lots of new APIs are coming out all the time and I usually take a once over look at them to determine if there is something cool there. A lot of time there are cool things and I promise myself to come back and explore the possibilities later. I rarely do.

However, with the announcement of GNIP today, I finally feel like my incessant mulling of API frameworks might be coming to an end.

Let me back up. A few weeks ago, I was fiddling with a bunch of APIs trying to create some mashup I was working on. I sent Keith a direct message pitching a “crazy idea”. An API for all APIs. One API to rule them all. His response, “A meta API?”

That made sense and made me laugh because I know how much he hates the word “meta”.

My idea quickly dissipated as I realized it was probably pretty futile to create an API for all these varied services that all had different data formats and types and my need for it wasn’t all that important at the time anyway.

I could have also used the concept when I was working on Mokonji, the project that now sits dead because Trackur beat me to the punch.

The idea with GNIP, bringing this story full circle, is that it is a meta-API. It sits in front of “data producers” (Digg, Flickr, Disqus) and provides a standardized API for “data consumers” (Plaxo, MyBlogLog, even Lijit!) to exchange data.

Since this is still so very early, there are bound to be other data producers and consumers. Also notable is that the only data format is XML. XMPP and JSON are missing. That will likely change over time too.

Data Producers not yet involved that should be:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Seesmic
• Viddler
• Mixx
• Twitter
• Amazon

And a few Data Consumers that are also missing:

• FriendFeed
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Clearspring