As CEO Upendra Shardanand posted last nite, Daylife now serves one billion API calls per month. He provides some context:

To put that in perspective, Bing’s API does 3 billion calls a month. Google does 120 billion calls a month across 60 different APIs

Congrats to the phenomenal Daylife team, who hit the milestone in November.

In a recent look at New York City’s leading digital media companies, Silicon Alley Insider featured Daylife as one of 10 top acquisition targets. Reporter Erin Carlson described Daylife as one of the market’s “promising platforms that aggregate content in nimble and marketable ways.”

Carlson writes that Daylife, “analyzes, curates and distributes media content for a roster of clients including USA Today, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, providing news feeds custom-tailored to various topics.”

Silicon Alley Insider also cites The Huffington Post, Gawker and Foursquare as high potential acquisition opportunities.

Read the full piece on Silicon Alley Insider here.

Mashable’s third annual Open Web Awards have kicked off, this time with a focus on Social Media. True to form, voters submit their nominations by logging in through Facebook or Twitter, making the contest even more viral.

We’re asking our friends to show their support and nominate Daylife for Best Site for Publishers. The nominations deadline is November 15, 2009, so please act quickly and help spread the word.

And to show our thanks, we’ll retweet every nomination to the world!  Nominate Daylife now.

This a guest post by Daylife’s lead designer Michael Surtees. It was originally published on his blog DesignNotes.

I’ve been testing a slightly updated idea of distributing content. While it’s not unique and the tools are available to almost everyone, there’s a number of intermediary connections that rely on each other to make it work. The underlying concept is that people have unique relationships depending on the different web tools they connect with their friends and peers. For example a person might have some good connections on twitter, yet that relationship isn’t the same on Flickr. They’re interested in reading some quotes but not trading photos. Another scenario might be that people are connected via Facebook and Friendfeed. Because Facebook has become full of people they’ve chosen to see what stuff they’re looking at by what’s posted to FriendFeed, yet for another person status updates keep them in touch. It’s all fragmented.

Now consider another scene. Last year I was part of a group of people that ran a site that asked people to take photos at 10:15 am local time. Once they had shot the image they needed to download it from their camera and email it to the general email address. From there one of four people would manually upload the photo, copy+paste the title information and tag the location. It was a fun project but the manual labor for one photo was quite a lot. The second part of the equation was that the images were hosted on the site and a viewer actually had to visit the site to see the images. Pretty basic stuff that most people take for granted.

When I think of Fragmented Medias as an idea, I see it as one piece of content being pushed out in as many different directions as possible, allowing for different meanings depending on how the content is pushed through a channel while finding ways to be connected in other media spaces. My latest photo experiment is called #walkingtoworktoday. The rules are simple and open to anyone—while walking to work take a photo from a mobile device. From there the photo needs to be pushed to twitter via flickr while containing the hashtag #walkingtoworktoday somewhere in the tile. With a simple push of the button via email from a phone, a number of different automated triggers happen that eases the burden of labor unlike the other photo project. The responsibility is left to the photographer. While I like using a mobile device, a person could take the time to upload an image with a better camera as long as the hashtag is in the title and is connected to flickr.

A typical walking to work today process would be as follows for me. I’m walking to work through Manhattan and come across something memorable in Soho. I pull out my iPhone, take the photo and email the photo to flickr with a special email address that will also connect with Twitter. In the subject line of the email I’ll try to keep my message to less than 140 characters and use #walkingtoworktoday somehow. Once the photo has been uploaded and the message readable on Twitter and number of other things happen. My tweets are connected to my Facebook status, so the photo link is announced there, I also have Twitter and Flickr connected to Friendfeed which in turn is connected to Facebook. So a number of different ways people stay in touch with me have all seen my #walkingtoworktoday photo. It’s possible that the friends from Twitter aren’t connected to me in Facebook and vice versa so I’ve been able to cover a couple unique mediums with a simple push of send via email.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that the process is great for a one to many push, but how does it become a group thing? I use Tweetdeck and have a search for #walkingtoworktoday so I can see who’s posting what and seeing the images from there. But there isn’t one dedicated space outside of Flickr to see the photos, and even then it’s only seeing it through one medium—I don’t get to see the tweets. So that’s why I decided there needed to be a site. Because I have a lot of knowledge in taming the fire hose of information from working at Daylife, I decided to create a site http://walkingtoworktoday.designnotes.info/ using Daylife tools that contained Flickr and Twitter moduals. The main modual streams photos from Flickr while the right rail shows the tweets. It’s an interesting redundancy that works. On one side there’s the large photos, the people’s avatars and tweets put the photos in context on the right, plus at time the photos and tweets won’t be in the same order. Because I have the full set of Daylife tools at my disposal I thought it would be interesting to pull quotes from general news about walking to work, and headlines of walking stories. Just for good measure I selected a number of topics that people might also be interested in. From there if any quote, headline or topic is selected there’s a ton of info available, but if people are interested i looking at the photos of people walking to work, they’re available and hosted on Flickr.

I really like the potential of this, everyone has a certain entry point to push the content in the manner that they want, but also allow for hooks that can be pushed into other content areas while leaving a trail where it originally started. Another remarkable thing is that at all times I know who the creator of the digital piece is. The name is connected on Flickr, Twitter and any other content distributing medium. It’s also amazing to consider that once the system is set up and the nodes are connected that with one push of a button a number of different conversations can start. Someone might read the tweet, like the photo and re-tweet what I just said, or maybe just reply with a simple mention. On Flickr someone might favourite the image or comment just like a person could do on FriendFeed or Facebook too. Now consider the number of eyes that have seen or read that one photo that was pushed to them in comparison of having to hope that someone visits a website. The odds and clicks are infinitely higher with a number of Fragmented Medias as opposed to one static site. Lots to explore with a concept like this.

Curious to hear what others considered Fragmented Medias last night on Twitter, this was what I heard.

Judy_Sims (who has a great blog btw) mentioned “The rise of the trusted editor/curator who aggregates by target audience and/or topic, ad networks organized by channel.”. daniel_howells passed along “Few years ago, only a few media types and channels; now hundreds of types and channels. Exposure is weakened/fragmented”. And inakiescudero suggested “Fragmented media means + difficult to reach consumers, + important to include your single minded benefit in every message”.