Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles on JavaScript performance, use of Node.js, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and more.

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Twitter became what it is today largely thanks to a big and very enthusiastic community of third-party developers who built applications on top of the fast-growing service. There were other factors as well, but few would argue that strong support from its developer community hasn’t been key to Twitter’s success.

For developers, the Twitter API has been almost as hot a commodity as the Twitter service itself. So imagine our surprise when we noticed that worldwide interest in the Twitter API seems to have dropped off since mid-2010 (based on search statistics from Google).

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Things have been going so well with the new Pingdom REST API that we have decided to move forward and make it public. In fact, we made it public yesterday.

The new API will remain in beta for a few weeks just in case, but this is pretty much the final thing. It’s more of a release candidate than a beta.

The goal with this new API was to make it as powerful and flexible as possible, but still easy to use. It gives Pingdom users full access to their accounts via the API. The feedback we have received so far has been great.

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We’ve been working on a brand new API for Pingdom and would now like to work together with a selection of beta testers to make sure it’s the best it can be before we release it into the wild.

This new API is part of a wave of backend development we’re doing here at Pingdom that will be the basis for taking our uptime monitoring service to new heights. We’re growing fast and have recently added several really talented developers to our team, and another hiring spree is coming up in a week or two for seven new positions. You will see a lot happening with Pingdom over the coming year.

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Looks like the tide of the web API protocol war (if there ever was one) has shifted firmly in REST’s favor while SOAP has been forced back. Web developers have cast their votes, they want RESTful APIs.

Here is the distribution of the different API protocols and styles, comparing the situation in 2008 versus that of 2010, based on ProgrammableWeb’s directory of more than 2,000 web APIs.

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Paypal has been around since 1998 (eBay bought it in 2002), which is a small eternity in internet time. By now it’s easily the most established online payment solution, so it should be in a great position to benefit from our general tendency to increasingly buy and pay for things online.

And something drastic happened about a year ago. Just look at how traffic to Paypal.com has been growing.

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We computer geeks are a breed of our own, and as with any group of people with mutual references, we often make jokes and observations that are totally incomprehensible to outsiders.

So consider this post a litmus test. If you laugh at these jokes, then you are most definitely a computer geek.

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If Facebook has its way (and it usually does), over the coming years a ton of websites and online services will become part of the open graph that Facebook is promoting, with Facebook firmly planted in the middle. The concept is very interesting, and the potential for this web of data from a wide variety of sources is enormous. You could say that Facebook will tie all our information, and the whole web, together.

There’s just one problem (two, if you count privacy): When the web becomes “interconnected” with Facebook, it also means that when Facebook breaks, the web breaks. In short, Facebook becomes a single point of failure for the web.

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Five years ago, no one had heard about jQuery. It was just an idea in the back of Javascript guru John Resig’s head. Today, jQuery is by far the most popular Javascript library in the world and is used by over 28% of all websites on the internet.

jQuery is open source, web developers love it, it’s been embraced by a slew of big companies, and is close to becoming a de facto standard for website development. It doesn’t just have the support of the open source developer community behind it, it’s even received official support from Microsoft.

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