We have been beta testing and thinking about api support for a long time now.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to create a “23 API” that can only be used with our service and is proprietary.

We believe that APIs should be open and non-vendor specific to create a common field for interoperability and competition for anyone that wants to build apps using people’s photos in useful and creative ways. We believe that there should be a wide variety of services in the “photosphere” that gives people full freedom to choose whatever service and still be able to use a lot of 3rd party apps, see all the photos in the world on a tag, share private photos without requiring people to signup for the service one is using and to participate in photo community groups from all photo sharing services. Everything we know and love from the blogosphere.

We’re committed to participate in taking leadership to realize that vision together with other people who builds tools for sharing photos whether they are phpgallery software, photosharing services, communities, desktop apps, etc. Whether they are large and small. We’re all ready discussing this with a wide variety of people and hope soon to be able to start an open process.

In the meantime we’ve added (almost) full support for the so far most used photo sharing api, the Flickr API, giving any developer who’s already has spent time implementing the Flickr API a chance to support 23 without any changes.

Read more about how to add support for 23 in your app in our new 23 api section

One of the downsides of not having 23 as a nine-to-five job is that, at times, all those other things in life comes begging for your attention. And frankly, that’s been the case at 23 for the past month or so. Luckily, with January coming to a close, our need to devote attention elsewhere seems to have gone as well!

So we’ve been busy adding new features this week (and writing some documentation, which Thomas will be telling you about in a few hours). Here’s a list of the most important additions:

• New languages: We’ve added Galician, Taiwanese, German, Norwegan and Portuguese. The first two are pretty much done, while there’s still work to be done on the latter three. We have had so much help in getting these languages to where they are now, mainly from vblee, Xabre, rutine, ifrit, and Mentor , but there are plenty of other people to thank as well (a complete list will be posted in the about page soon.) If you want to help out, volunteer here.
• Updated subscription viewer: Back in December we did some basic ajax’ing on the site, but we didn’t get around to updating the Subscriptions section. That’s done now! If you’ve haven’t really found a reason to start using the viewer, now’s the time to start. And if you’re already a fan, you’ll certainly appreciate the speed boost.
• Searching user photos: We’ve added a search option under every user, so surfers can easily search through all the user’s photos.
• 23 Plus overview: There’s now a section under My account listing status on 23 Plus subscriptions. And we’ve added a coupon functionality, so a mere twenty characters can be not be turned into years of unlimited uploading and pure 23 fun. (Now the only trick is to get hold of one of those coupons!)
• Minor changes: There are plenty of minor changes as well. For example, some quirks in fotonotes have been worked out and there are some very minor visual changes as well.