Google continues to push away at improving its platform-as-a-service offering, the Google App Engine API. It has already seen two minor releases this year with the latest release bringing in much needed updates to the XMPP and Task Queue APIs. An earlier release in the year focused on the High Replication Datastore, that was clearly targeted to mission critical applications.
Google Assistant and other apps are about to get better at controlling your favorite media players. Google this week added a verification testing framework to the Media Controller Test, a change that will let developers test media playback on Android smartphones and Android TV.
Facebook has launched a new Continuous Live Video API that enables developers to broadcast long and persistent streaming video to the world's largest social network. Previously, Facebook Live streams were limited to 90 minutes, but thanks to the new API, third parties can broadcast longer events.
