This Week in APIs - November 13-19 »

We just spent a great few days geeking out and talking about APIs at the Defrag conference. Here's all the other API news from the week. 

Great article out in Business Week on how the "app economy" and mobile era are encouraging top payment and credit card companies to open up to third party developers with APIs. The article takes a look at how Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and American Express are working with developers to innovate. Keep watching this space and look out for new entrants like Ixaris.   

HootSuite launched a new API and App Exchange to let developers quickly build and get out new apps and integrations. As Tris Hussey at The Next Web points out, this is significant because it marks the expansion of the HootSuite platform beyond Twitter.   

At Defrag, the year's best conference focused on data, analytics and APIs, Twitter announced a partnership with Gnip to offer 50% of all Tweets for $360K/year. This will allow companies to innovate in the social analytics space and, as Marshall Kirkpatrick points out at ReadWriteWeb, might help ensure that everyday developer access to Twitter remains free. Check out the story and make sure to check out Defrag next year, and Gluecon, a related conference, coming up in May! We'll be there too.   

Stuff to Play With

• Social gaming platform MindJolt launched a set of APIs called "AdJolt" which allows developers to integrate advertising and virtual currency to monetize content. This combines three hot stories in APIs right now - gaming, virtual currency and developer monetization. MindJolt's head is the former CEO of MySpace, Chris DeWolfe. We're excited to see where AdJolt goes and how it helps developers make bank!  
• ProgrammableWeb's got the story on the new Wordnik API, which targets word game developers by giving access to its online dictionary. Coolest part? Wordnik has a write feature so you can manage your own word list.  
• MailChimp, a popular email platform, is launching a $1 million integration fund to support developers and projects building applications around their API. More than 80,000 users are already on the API.

What'd we miss? Hit us up on Twitter.