According to TechCrunch Google has accidentally announced its read-only APIs for Google+ Photos and Videos in a blog post the company put up too soon and then pulled down today.

The removed blog post said:

Google+ gives users full control of their information, and we’re starting with read-only access to public albums, photos, and videos. Google also supports Creative Commons licensing, which we expose so developers can easily respect copyrights.

Using the new API, developers can get a list of public albums from a Google+ user, and list the photos and videos within each album. Combined with our existing public data and search APIs, I’m hoping to see new services such as a family-focused ‘screen saver’, a new way to crowdsource great images, or a live photo wall for a party.

We don’t know exactly when the APIs are to be released and officially announced, but we assume that it’s going to be soon, since someone had their hands on the finished blog post already.

As we reported before, the Google+ team is taking a slow and very calculated approach to the release of its APIs. Not wanting any privacy disasters like it had with Buzz, the company is choosing to release read-only versions of APIs at first. No writable APIs have been made available for the service, yet.

The photo below shows the official post that was pulled down almost immediately:

What does the API mean for app developers? It means that companies that develop apps that pull in photos from all different social networks and sites now have one of the biggest ones to pull from. For example, photo sharing app Batch will benefit greatly from being able to pull in photos from Google+. It also can help Google+ catch up with top photo sharing sites Facebook and Flickr.

How long can the service turn down growth opportunities with having a read and writable API? Twitter saw incredible growth when third parties started building apps on top of its service.

ReadWriteWeb‘s lead writer of four years, Marshall Kirpatrick, annnounced today that he is stepping back from the day-to-day job of covering of startups, to begin the journey of starting his own.

Kirkpatrick had this to say on his blog about the new venture, called Plexus Engine:

It’s with both excitement and sadness that today I announce I am stepping back from my full-time position at ReadWriteWeb to build a product and a company. I’ll be continuing to post at RWW regularly, but I’ve got some big new things up my sleeve as well.

After years of writing about startup companies, I’m now building one myself. Specifically, I’m building a company that’s developing a technology based on some of my favorite consulting projects I’ve done for clients over the years: an app and data platform that discovers emerging topical information. It’s a learning-curve busting, “first mover’s advantage” as a service, technology for information workers who want to win. It’s about helping users “skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been.”

Plexus Engine is currently in private beta, and we hope to take a look at what he has in store for us very soon.

Kirkpatrick explained the name he chose for the new company:

A Plexus is a place where nerves branch and rejoin in the body and the Plexus Engine analyzes points of intersection online to detect emerging signals.

Kirkpatrick has a long history as a respected technology journalist, dating back to his days of writing for TechCrunch.

His thirst for knowledge pulled from aggregated data can be seen in his work, and it sounds like Plexus Engine will further that thirst, and be the basis for his new company.

While Kirkpatrick isn’t talking about what Plexus Engine is exactly, he teased it with this background story:

I’ve built my career as one of the web’s leading technology journalists by making strategic use of lightweight tools for processing data to gain first mover’s advantage.

I’ve also consulted for companies large and small on how to build and use new media technologies, launch products and identify potential hires and industry experts, using tools as well. That’s where Plexus Engine was born.

Now I’m building a technology for everyone to use in order to save time and derive value from the huge sea of data being published online.

I spoke to Marshall today about his experiences in tech journalism, and what’s coming next:

TNW: What was the single most important thing you’ve learned being a tech journalist?

Marshall Kirkpatrick: That’s a really hard question Drew! Lemme think about it some more. That there’s a lot of good news in the world, that despite the state of the offline world, the online world is filled with opportunity, innovation, hopefulness and excitement. It may not be evenly distributed yet, it’s disproportionately available still to the most privileged people in society and to early adopters, but hopefully that’s changing.

TNW: Are there things tech companies can do better to get their products seen that they’re simply not doing?

Marshall Kirkpatrick: Be awesome, add value, read and listen, help me be more awesome is what I’d suggest. Kathy Sierra says great software helps people kick ass – that’s a good way to get press too.

TNW: What excites you the most about being hands on with your own project?

Marshall Kirkpatrick: I’m excited to be learning what it takes to build a company and a technology and the Plexus deliverables are awesome!

We wish Marshall the best of luck in his new venture, and look forward to reviewing the company here on The Next Web.

➤ Plexus Engine

Dustin Rowles knew early on he wouldn’t deal with publicists.

A few months after he launched movie review site Pajiba, his correspondence with a movie studio PR flack led to the request that he not use any profanity. Given that the tagline for Pajiba is “scathing reviews for bitchy people,” the site is not exactly timid about dropping four-letter expletives, in fact that’s what gives it its edge. So Rowles decided almost immediately that he wouldn’t deal directly with the studios, and Pajiba’s coverage has always reflected that.

“We don’t do interviews,” he told me in a phone conversation. “We don’t do set visits. I personally don’t even do advance screenings. I feel like if you’re going to talk to a publicist — they’re nice people and they’re often very attractive aren’t they? — you don’t want to disappoint this person with your review or anything. And if they show that look of disapproval, you’re going to feel awkward about it.”

This highlights a dilemma many journalists face; There is absolutely no guarantee that a source will talk to you and it’s not uncommon for reporters to try to grease the wheels with their interview subjects, a practice that sometimes raises ethical questions about whether the journalists are too acquiescent in their watchdog roles. When a Rolling Stone article led to the firing of General Stanley McChrystal last year, Politico published a rather interesting article in which it admitted that a “beat reporter … would not risk burning bridges by publishing many of McChrystal’s remarks.” After some critics highlighted this passage, Politico promptly deleted that sentence without much explanation.

Last week, TechCrunch entered this debate when it reprinted an email from an editor at AOL sister site Moviefone. After Alexia Tsotsis interviewed Duncan Jones and Jake Gyllenhaal about an upcoming movie debut, a studio representative contacted Moviefone and asked whether they could request that TechCrunch’s snark be “toned down.” Unsurprisingly, this didn’t sit well with TechCrunch, which later published a post calling for Moviefone’s editor to be fired.

Her crime? Admitting that “the reality of our situation is that, as a movies site, we work with movie studios every day, and it is in our best interests to stay on good terms with them.” To TechCrunch and others, this was key evidence that Moviefone was selling its journalistic soul in exchange for access, and that the movie studios wouldn’t dare make such a request if it wasn’t common practice within the industry.

This isn’t the first time the public has gained insight to how PR sausage is made in the movie industry. Last year, director Kevin Smith took to Twitter to bash a number of movie blogs, announcing that he would no longer field interviews with industry sites. “I’ll just furnish all the information I’d normally serve up one at a time to a small, jaded audience that doesn’t really give a shit unless there’s someone famous in the room, to a much larger, APPRECIATIVE audience that would actually enjoy & benefit from hearing the same information,” he wrote.

Many bloggers noted that up until that point Smith had been friendly with the blogosphere, and only turned on them when their reviews of his latest movie grew sour. A few years ago, Angelina Jolie’s representatives got caught trying to get celebrity journalists to sign a legal agreement that “the interview may only be used to promote the Picture. … The interview will not be used in a manner that is disparaging, demeaning or derogatory to Ms. Jolie.” The contract was quickly shelved after widespread ridicule. And Harry Knowles, creator of Ain’t It Cool News, has long been derided as being too subservient to the movie studios, especially the ones who invite him onto the sets and lavish him with access and gifts.

Cole Abaius, a critic for Film School Rejects, told me he wasn’t surprised by the request made to Moviefone. “I think, in fact I know, that it’s fairly common, because that’s their job,” he said. “Especially for the larger studios who have bigger PR machines in place, their jobs are to control the image of what’s going out there. And I certainly wouldn’t blame a PR firm or PR arm of a studio for doing their job, which is going to any level to create and maintain that image, whether it’s sending a fairly benign email asking if something can get changed or taken down.”

Abaius said that the way the studios treat you depends largely on the size of your audience. Sites like Deadline.com and The Wrap and trade publications like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter get fed much more access than smaller publications like Film School Rejects, which averages about 2 million uniques a month. Still, Abaius does get at least some access. “We’ve been on set visits, get press releases, get interviews and access to special events and that sort of thing, but I’ve never felt like I’ve had to ‘play a game’ or ‘play by the rules’ or anything like that. We’ve always shared an opinion, whether it’s good, bad, or ugly, and the studios and smaller filmmaking outlets have always seized it to give a solid amount of access.”

Some defenders of Moviefone pointed out that it simply relayed a message to the TechCrunch writer and didn’t actually try to pressure her to make any changes. But Pajiba’s Rowles felt that the pressure was implicit. “[If my boss] came to me and said, ‘I’m not forcing you to change anything but the studio asked us to tone this down and we want to stay on good terms with the studio, so do whatever you’d like’ — if my job depended on it, if I were paid $50 a review and I wanted more reviews in order to pay the rent, then I may be inclined to tone it down.”

Abaius seemed to agree that the Moviefone email wasn’t exactly kosher, but said that it was probably blown out of proportion. “I think that the email was probably done in good faith, but from a pure Journalism 101 standpoint, it was probably a mistake sending that email to TechCrunch.”

Given that many tech companies have seen their unsavory emails reprinted on the tech behemoth, Moviefone won’t be the first — or the last — to learn this valuable lesson.

News broke late on Sunday that American news website and blog The Huffington Post would be acquired by AOL. The news has now been confirmed and the agreed price is a reported $315 million ($300 million in cash), expected to close in the late first, or early second quarter 2011.

As part of the deal, Huffington Post Co-founder Arianna Huffington will become president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group within AOL. Interestingly, the position will see Arianna Huffington in charge of all of AOL content and other content properties, including gadget blog Engadget and recent AOL acquisition TechCrunch. Judging by the lack of information on TechCrunch’s post about the announcement; most AOL properties may very well have been kept in the dark about the arrival of their new boss.

Arianna Huffington has made her own announcement on the Huffington Post itself where she details how the acquisition took place and the direction of the site moving forward:

When Kenny Lerer and I co-founded The Huffington Post in May 2005, we had high hopes. But even we would have been hard put to predict that less than six years later we would be able to announce a deal that now makes it possible for us to execute our vision at light speed. AOL is an online pioneer that engenders great trust among its 250 million global users. HuffPost is on the cutting edge of creating news that is social and brings with it a distinctive voice and a highly engaged audience. In this case, 1 + 1 = 11. Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be, for HuffPost, like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.

In an interview with the NY Times on Sunday, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong explained the company’s motivation behind the acquisition:

“The reason AOL is acquiring The Huffington Post is because we are absolutely passionate, big believers in the future of the Internet, big believers in the future of content,”

Huffington Post launched in 2005 with one million in funding. It has since grown to over 200 staff, over 25 million unique monthly visitors and an estimated revenue this year of $60 million.

Are we witnessing the resurgence of AOL as a dominant media player? Or is the resurgence in fact complete? And who will AOL acquire next?

Update: Watch Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong discuss the acquisition on video here.

Update 2: Read AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s internal memo to AOL staff here.

What’s going on in your neighborhood? If you live in New York City, you can find out on Neighborhoodr’s local Tumblr built blog network.

If Craigslist is the modern day Classified section, then Neighborhoodr is its editorial component. It acts like a newspaper for each neighborhood, filled with little stories. In New York City, people move around a lot. (I’m only 26 and am now living in my 7th apartment in NYC.) There’s also a lot going on in New York and its inhabitants are notorious for wanting to share that information. Neighborhoodr provides local content for 60 New York City neighborhoods, so that wherever you are, or whenever you move, they’ve got a news local outlet for you to browse, contribute to and share.

Here’s how it works. Visit the Neighborhoodr site and pick your neighborhood, which takes you to the specific Tumblr blog. View the blog’s content or click the big red button to submit a post. Once you’ve submitted a post it will be added into a queue to pass by the eyes of one of Neighborhoodr’s 50 local moderators.

Gawker‘s Richard Blakeley and Reuters‘ Anthony De Rosa officially launched Neighborhoodr in September 2009. While Neighborhoodr doesn’t aim to be the go to place for political crises in the world, it was the go to place for local Brooklynites to share information and read about the tornadoes that touched down in the hood this fall. And a local Williamsburg resident even used the blog to find her lost puppy.

“The simple fact of the matter is nobody has quite cracked the hyper-local news market yet, and of all the attempts Neighborhoodr comes closest in terms of functionality, reach, quality and engaged users. We are also aware it’s going to take several more years before we’re at the intersection of hyper-local and user submitted blog content, but when we get there we hope to be right in the middle of it,” says Co-Founder Richard Blakeley.

Neighborhoodr is riding atop a pretty big wave. Tumblr hit 1.2 billion pageviews in the U.S. in October, up 1,540% from the year before, according to a recent TechCrunch article. Yesterday, Tumblr announced that their network has expanded to more than 11 million blogs. And RWW just reported that in fact Tumblr now has more page views and money than WordPress.

Co-founders Blakeley and DeRosa are bullish on Tumblr. “Tumblr is way more viral than Twitter and tweets have a short shelf life,” says Blakeley. “But Twitter does act like  CB radio, leading eyeballs to Tumblr.” Since they use Tumblr, they measure their user base by subscriptions not page views. In less than a year they’ve grown from 600 subscribers to over 3,000. ”I like to call re-blogs ‘sideways traffic,’” Blakeley says, “Because when you see something good enough, you just have to reblog it because it’s so easy.”

And the best part about Tumblr?  The site is free for users and there’s literally no overhead for the site. In fact, they haven’t put a penny into the operation since it started. But they have started to make money. They’ve signed up their first advertiser, Tanqueray, the gin company, that is sponsoring a “cocktail safari” in Manhattan for the team and their friends as I write this post. De Rosa says the blog will be a powerful tool for businesses who don’t want to take out expensive ads in sites like Eater but want to cheaply advertise to a hyper local, targeted market. While they haven’t nailed down a number yet, ad space on the site will be in the ball park of $100 p/month.

With 3,000 dedicated contributors who know how to spread content virally, I’m feeling pretty bullish on Neighborhoodr. After all, how could you live in a neighborhood, use Tumblr and not want to follow your local news?

In a blog post today, Delicious says “No, we are not shutting down.” But they aren’t staying at Yahoo either.

Yesterday, it was all but confirmed that Yahoo! was sunsetting Delicious, one of the most popular social bookmarking services. They do admit that they are not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, and are looking for a home outside of the company.

From the blog, “We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.”

In the words of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, “Don’t Panic.” Delicious says they are maintaining the site and encourage users to stay active.

Yesterday, Yahoo made an official statement:

Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.

Why would Yahoo want to sunset (a.k.a. kill) Delicious? The domain name itself may be worth $1million, although serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis disagrees. While Yahoo might not want it, the Internet support for Delicious has been phenomenal. In fact, yesterday supporters created the Twitter account, “Save Delicious,” which already has over 400 followers.

What do you see in the future for Delicious?

Who doesn’t love infographics? Today, The Guardian, a British national daily newspaper and website launches its “Data journalism” site as a new way to visualize content and understand the news.

[Journalism is] going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse it and picking out what’s interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it all fits together, and what’s going on in the country. Tim Berners-Lee

Visualizing data is so much easier and more pleasurable than poring over paragraphs of description or even worse- spreadsheets. But they take a lot of work, both in data gathering and in design. It’s fantastic that the Guardian is dedicated an entire site to this effort. Its site will include ”key data of the day,” their “pick of the data blogosphere,” world government data and featured apps.

Today, November 15th, 2010 Jason Calacanis officially announced in his JasonNation.com e-mail list that he is taking TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to court over the now defunct TechCrunch50 conference. Calacanis writes that the conference, which the two worked on together for 3 years, was his idea and that AOL purchased it as part of their deal for TechCrunch but Calacanis was never paid.

Calacanis accuses Arrington of re-branding the TechCrunch 50 as TechCrunch Disrupt, which has had huge success and launched start-ups such as Soluto, Mint, Powerset, FitBit and Yammer. Arrington, who is a lawyer insisted that he and Calacanis never sign a contract for the TechCrunch50, despite Calacanis’ wishes to do so. The two have been name calling and duking it out online over the past several months. Earlier this month, Arrington wrote a piece on TechCrunch calling Calacanis “unbalanced and dictatorial.”

But while he and Arrington battle it out in court, Calacanis is channeling the rest of his energy into a “bigger, better and more start-up-centric conference” called “LAUNCH,” which will take place in the same venue as TechCrunch50 did in San Francisco on February 23rd and 24th 2010. We recently reported on Calacanis’ conference and how it might compete with Disrupt, but he has now laid out many of its details for the public promising multiple forms of funding and a cheaper ticket cost.

Calacanis promises LAUNCH, which will feature around 50 startups, will be the most affordable, high-end technology event in the world. Bootstrapped startups, those with less than $1 million in investment and less than 10 staff, will pay only $400 to cover costs while everyone else, including lawyers, VCs, angels and more established companies will pay only $1,000, which is much lower than the $4,000-$7,000 price tags of conferences like TED.

“I want to keep leveling the playing field and fighting for the little guy.”

LAUNCH will have two competitions: 1.0 for new companies and 2.0 for existing companies “with epic new products.” Start-ups will be able to receive funding through 3 different ways, including a $1 million “Angel Grand Jury,” essentially 12 high-profile angel investors to coach the companies before and after the event, and potentially invest in the companies presenting. According to Calacanis, each angel must “commit on the spot (pending due diligence and negotiating deal terms) to investing between $50-250k in the companies they love most at LAUNCH.” The day will finish with a 75-minute round table for the Jury to discuss the companies. Profits from the event will be reinvested into the startups, so Calacanis will be personally funding many of the start-ups. Lastly, he believes that hundreds of investors in the audience will also be funding the start-ups.

Further details of the conference can be found here.