Just announced and covered by readwriteweb.com, Xoopit – a firefox plugin that allows integration of Youtube, Flickr, Picasa (and more) into GMail – just announced in their recent update to their plugin, they now allow users to set/update facebook status’, browse friend status’ and photos – right from gmail.

Pretty cool mixture right? For those of us who spend alot of time on http://mail.google.com and probably have it permenantly open and love facebook (I don’t, I deleted it. Its a weird wiretap on my life), Xoopit’s plugin looks to be a perfect fit!

It looks like they are wrangling support for yahoo mail as well, so fear not you yahoosters.

Read the full story at readwriteweb.com or browse the plugin page

The feature set of xoopit is as follows:

Search and Browse Attachments and Media

Xoopit allows you to earch your stuff, not your messages. Xoopit upgrades Gmail search to show you the photos, videos and files that match what you are looking for. Browse photos and videos from YouTube, Flickr, Shutterfly, Kodak and Picasa. Links sent to you are automatically collected, saving you the hassle of going to these sites. Get out of Attachment Hell…easily find and access your files in Gmail. Never misplace an attachment again. All of these files and photos can be easily shared with friends, posted to your blog or shared on Facebook.

Compose a Mail by Searching

Quickly search for web links, maps and videos on the web and add them to the mail you are composing. For example, just type in the name of the restaurant you want to go to. Select the Maps feature and add a map and link to Google driving directions directly into your mail.

Your Email Social Graph Revealed

Xoopit exposes information about all the senders on a thread. See their profile pics, recent conversations and all the attachments and media they have sent you.

Under the Covers

Xoopit’s innovations deliver the next generation of search, productivity, and social media applications to Internet users. Our passion is in building smart, simple applications that work for you. We’ve all grown tired of fussing with applications to get things done. Xoopit was founded to solve some of the most basic Internet application problems we face everyday.

Facebook chat from within gmail? maybe. Just wait and see – you’re almost there.

In an indepth preview and announcement by Yahoo, we see a big move in the tiered pay/free API ecosystem. No doubt fueled by the current economic climate and the fight for Yahoo to make a comeback, Yahoo’s BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) will go paid in Q2 of this year.

Not all is lost, there are open pricing schemes and from what I can see up to 10k requests a day will still be free, so – you can still get your Kiva.org search engine going for free, but if it actually works out, you’re going to need to pay for it.

There is even more good news,
I swear I heard about this earlier this week (very shortly after the Kiva announcement) but I can’t find the post, but anyway… Yahoo will offer SearchMonkey integration into BOSS! This is very cool, and my mind has been flying through ideas since this annoucement. SearchMonkey is basically a service for “enhancing” yahoo search results with additional metadata. Ex. a search for a movie showing showtimes and rottentomatoe links right in the search!

Now that you’ve herd all about news with these API Services from Yahoo lets throw down some factsheets, explanations, api classes, and tutorials to help out some of the non-know’rs after the turn.

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Thats right, I just posted about its launch yesterday, and already Kiva.org developers are hawt to trawt. I’ve been following the Kiva.org Google Group and I found that one dedicated and altruistic developer is creating a Ruby Wrapper for Kiva! (you can find it at the almighty github)

Now, thats not is, another developer created a “KivaCloud”, designed to show and navigate through the Kiva.org datasets. A great little webapp created by smoovej on the build.kiva.org google group

viewable at: http://www.frazao.org/kivacloud/

Not bad for a days work right? People are really jumping on Kiva.org! I look forward to what happens next!