If you're new here, you may want to view the multimedia in the left sidebar, as well as subscribe to the RSS feed. Feel free to leave comments, take the survey and send us email. Thanks!

The dev flock just whipped out our first external web API, bringing BILUMI closer to expanding how and where people get information. Try it!

Why is this cool? Now it is easier to mash BILUMI data with other data. Mashups can lead to insights and utility not available to a narrow data view. Plus, they’re hella fun.

For example, someone could map company ratings geographically to get an overview of corporate policy across countries or regions. Or she might map rating activity or content based on user location to get an overview of who cares about what where. This last example is not currently possible; we’re still thinking carefully about user information and security.

Help us think of more ideas and guage user interest by participating in this poll. If you have more than one idea to add please leave a comment so that we can add them to the poll.

[PS - Confused about what we actually did? By "external web API" we mean something quite simple: anyone can get information from our database about products and companies using an HTTP GET request.

Notice that the request is a normal URL that one can give to a browser. The response, however, is not a normal web page. Instead of returning a web page with a menu and images we return pure data. Developers can access this data directly in their code simply by calling a URL, or more specifically, making an HTTP request to our server at bilumi.org.]

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 11:12 pm by Lucy and is filed under Surveys, Technology. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.