YouTube has made some great enhancements to their Insights analytics tool. The data available to content creators is getting better and better. You can now see much more granular data about your viewers, where they come from, and how they engage with your content. This is really useful for optimizing video content strategy.
This query had enough volume that it was in the goog typeahead so I thought I’d note it here in case anyone I know needs to know. It’s simple: go to http://bit.ly/account/your_api_key/
I’ve just been playing around with the bit.ly API since it’s a holiday and I like playing around with code sometimes on the holidays. bit.ly has a simple REST API and you can get the details here: API Documentation
It’s very simple. Hope this helps.
You can now follow Alex’s Cocktail Making on Twitter @cocktaildaily so I’d love it if you followed me.
I have heard a lot about the twitter API lately being really easy to use and so having hacked things together with the delicious, flickr, eBay, typepad and facebook apis in the past I thought it was time to give twitter a go. The whole development process start to finish took me 25minutes (started at 18:11 and finished at 18:36) from creating a new twitter account to having a daily updating script which pushed a random cocktail with over a certain score and a reasonable likelihood of not being rude to twitter. It took me 12minutes to write this blog post!
For completeness here’s the code I used:
$message = "enter your message here";
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "status=$message");
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);I have to say I am super impressed by the Guardian’s crowdsourced analysis of the MP expenses scandal in the UK. Awesome fast turnaround to get it up and a third of the documents human reviewed. This kind of mash up is amazing and I think puts pay to the statement that the web will destroy great investigative journalism. Instead it seems really clever use of the web will enable more impressive journalism.
Of course one of the main reasons folks think the web and blogging will destroy great investigative journalism is that it needs to be funded by good advertising revenue. My perspective is that excellent use of targeting and loyal customers will allow newspapers online to fund the journalism with advertising. One thing that stands out to me is we need better targeting… the Guardian and other newspapers clearly have precisely the audience I want to target somewhere within their 30MM monthly unique visitors but no one seem to have a product yet through which I can buy exactly who I would want unless they allow a third party ad retargeting network to be live on their site.
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!
Wow in under one week I have added 10 000 users to my cocktail recipes application which is totally amazing. I am still getting c. 1000 signing up a day and that’s fantastic. One of the things that makes me most happy about this is the fact my application was the second mover in the market and that the message board/review board for my app is not crowded with complaints about how it is broken and doesn’t work. Instead it is full of cocktial recommendations.
This week I will add the ability for users to add their own cocktails via this app but until then hopefully the app will continue to be useful to users just at a base level. Also look out for more stats and some how to information on how I have created some of the cooler features of the application.
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 😀
I am really enjoying the phenomenon of Facebook apps and totally loving the way they have exploded from zero to infinity and beyond so quickly! The arguement that facebook just added a quarter of a billion dollars of RnD to their platform is looking more and more realistic to me.
The apps I like the best are the ones that have exploded without the help of the directory and hardly surprisingly these have exploded because of interpersonal activity. The latest great app I wanted to show case is Free Gifts. The Facebook Gifts product is really cool and not too dissimilar to the ze frank concept of gimme some candy. The 2 mistakes I feel facebook made was making all gifts the same value (since surely if there were expensive and cheap gifts you’d give your girl/boyfriend a more expensive one) and not expiring the gifts after a given time (i.e. flowers might last a week, a teddy for a month etc…). Differentiation is key in many things.
Well the app above is giving away gifts for free and when you send a gift to someone they have to add the app to display it… how perfectly viral I really love it!
The image above shows the current user base and all without the use of the facebook directory, pretty incredible stuff, keep it up Zachary. I am excited to see how far this one goes!
Ok I am simply blown away by the latest offering from the eBay API as an awesome way to make a bunch of money. eBay is now revealing (without the data + formula behind it of course) the results of their related searches algorithm. When you search on eBay for “tmx” on eBay at the moment it will give you 937 items but just above that it will give you the following related searches: ps3, wii, tmx elmo, tickle me elmo, playstation 3
This is really useful information you can use to determine (as a paid search advertiser for example) hey I don’t want to buy keyword “tmx” it’s too pricey but keyword “tickle me elmo” is closely related… I will buy that instead and send the clicks to the same page as TMX. This data is quite simply awesome and exposed world wide for free. Make use of it and you’ll do great, esp. as an ebay affiliate and you can access it via the REST API, I am playing with this and a little bit of MAA right now 🙂
I have spent a lot of the last week hacking about with the Skype api and vbs. I have wscript on my computer and wanted to open a skype chat window and send a message to the user based on the content of an API call response. Here is the code I used with the Skype4Com dll to do the skype call adapted from some JS API call code already available online. As always this is a true hack and so may not be 100% stable or great code it is offered as is for you to play with.