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Alex Schultz

Category: API support on the web

  • Understanding Cocktail Rating Distribution

    Something interesting with my facebook application is that in the past week I have gathered >1000 ratings on the cocktails in my database from 745 unique users of my cocktail making application. This is a fairly small number for data analysis but 3 things stood out:

    The most votes were given in the bucket of “10” – people seem to tend to vote on the cocktails they like.

    The cocktails that were rated 10 tended to get more votes in general i.e. 3 votes per cocktail and not the average 1.5

    When looking just at the users who gave a ten and what % of each voting bucket they made up it became clear that these users were pretty much all or nothing guys relative to the crowd, either they gave a cocktail a 10 or they gave it nothing.

    More to come on user voting behaviour over time I am sure and also on the most popular cocktails, cocktail ingredients, favourite cocktails lists and so on… I now have far too much data to work through and that is great!

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  • In the Facebook Directory

    So I have been working on my facebook cocktail application for a little over a week now having started it on the memorial day weekend. It allows you to do everything my cocktail site does and a little bit more including recommending a cocktail to a friend and seeing the most recently popular cocktails and the top 12 users yesterday. I actually have a bunch more ideas of what it could do like little graphs of the popularity of the cocktail over time and so on.

    What is exciting is that in 3hrs I have added 300users to the application, now obviously rates won’t stay that high but realistically most of the east cost wasn’t browsing facebook when the app was approved and neither was the UK. It will be really interesting to see how things go over the next 24hrs.

    The best news is I have log files tracking everything going on so I will be able to note down and describe what the growth of a facebook application looks like!

    More posts to come down the line but I want to leave you with a thought. For my cocktail recommendations engine I now have a track… at a user level… of every cocktail viewed and rated, and at what level (pretty much tied to demographic too if I can get my ass in gear and pull that data). This recommendation engine can get much, much smarter 😀

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  • How to use the Typepad Widget API with PHP

    The Typepad Widget API is awesome. The concept is that you have a great widget you want users to add to their sidebar. Typepad want this to be a small self contained piece of DHTML code and want to be able to do all the verification of the user on their side without giving the widget owner any access to the user’s account.

    Browser based authentication used at both the eBay and Yahoo! developer programs (and explained beautifully in diagram form on the Yahoo! site) simply won’t work for this since it gives the programmer access to your eBay/Yahoo/Typepad account (were they to use it). So Typepad found a solution to the problem that is really simple and elegant.

    All data is sent to the API in a POST command along with redirecting the user themselves (rather than just a server to server POST call). Typepad’s Widget API requires fields identifying you as a developer, your application, what it is called, verifying you are who you say you are (with a token) and finally containing the FULL HTML you want inserted in the user’s sidebar to be sent to them through the POST command.

    The user then lands at a Typepad log in page and all the data is carried through with them to a page where they can effectively suggest whether or not to keep the Typepad widget. GREAT!

    I love this method, it’s secure, clever, simple and behaves exactly as you would expect… Having worked with Google AdWords/Base/Adsense APIs, Yahoo! APIs, eBay APIs and a fair few others I have to say this Typepad Widget API has been the simplest yet. Well done Typepad!

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  • Releasing an API can make you more money

    So facebook have released an API earlier this week. I just can’t see the revenue upside for them. This is a neat segway into the flipside of my earlier post saying natural search APIs are poorly supported due to the lack of revenue upside.

    For me the power of a lot of sites is in the platform they offer and the fact that this platform is their revenue base. APIs that enable use of a platform to make the API owner more money are the best supported tools out there.

    I am writing this post through the typepad api using the great windows live blogging tool and Typepad simply don’t care since I pay them for using their platform. Offering out their API is helping to keep me a loyal customer.

    eBay’s API is awesome. Without the eBay API such companies as channeladvisor and marketworks probably wouldn’t exist. The beauty of this API is simple, eBay makes money wherever and however users buy and list so long as they use the eBay platform.

    I am a passionate fan of forward thinking corporations who use APIs to their advantage. In summary if you want to make money from an API make sure it’s users interacting with the platform that’s valuable for you and not visitors to your website.

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  • Why do search companies offer these Map APIs?

    Maps is a really interesting area for looking at the offerings of the large web companies. They offer out their maps API for free and get thousands of users developing and adding maps to their site. These resources developed by developers are fab for me as a user but I simply don’t understand the value they offer for the search giants.

    I do have one suggestion for why it’s good that the search engines are offering these APIs out. Perhaps they are trying to capture the future of search. Offering out map APIs for free gives them a huge R&D network. Let’s say they have 1000 developers each using their maps and each spends 3 weeks of late nights working on their cool mashup – that gives them 120,000 hours of free developer time from people near the cutting edge.

    Certainly geo-location and local search are important and will be of bigger and bigger importance as time goes on. Being seen as the provider of choice thanks to all the geeks using and exposing your product, and having 1000 applications in test to see which ones take off – that’s actually quite a good idea.

    Potentially these big search companies aren’t just having a random altruistic brain fart but are being very canny about capturing a future search channel.

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  • Search APIs offered by the largest engines

    APIs are a topic dear to my heart. Something that I have never understood is why a company would build an API, only allow developers a couple of thousand calls a day and then leave those APIs out there relatively unsupported for a significant amount of time.

    A quick analysis shows all pure natural search APIs are highly restricted. Why is this? As I see it the question is one of upside for the search engine. A non-exhaustive list of negative suggestions include back engineering their algorithm, producing copernicus and dogpile tools which don’t monetize with their adverts and competitors finding ways to compare and improve their rankings.

    The search engines do not support their natural search APIs well at all and since there is significant risk and little opportunity to exposing them I don’t see this changing in the near future. The same cannot be said for their revenue driving tools. Panama by Yahoo is a really significant tool and the adwords API and adsense API are well supported.

    I think it is clear that search engines promote and support the APIs that offer them more revenue.

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