Innovations in Software Industry

During browsing, came across a interesting web page. Here David A. Wheeler is listing out most important Software innovations. Ofcourse it is based on his own analysis and not a perfect list.
But it is an intersting reading for software developers and students.

http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html

His articles on Secure Programming in Linux and Unix environment is available in IBM developer works : http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sp1.html

Open Social - social networking APIs

These days i was reading more and more about startups...But the interesting thing is most of the startups are for enabling Web2.0 technologies and applications. One of the main focus is social networking domains, like orkut, facebook, bebo, etc..But the funny thing is the interfaces and features provided by almost all the social networking sites are same(may be lookwise it is different).So, it is very logical to have a common APIs to use by all the application. The search for this APIs gave me this link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSocial

Yes, Open social makes the design of social networks very easy. OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. It was released November 1, 2007. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them, including features on sites such as Hi5.com, MySpace[2], orkut, Netlog[3], Sonico.com[4], Friendster[5], Ning and Yahoo!. Here is the official site and more info : http://www.opensocial.org/