Praeda & Co.

This week we have investigated the API’s of web applications that we plan to use in our project. It was important because it shows whether we can achieve our goal or not. We have shared the API’s between us and some of the field and technology research results are stated below.

Last.fm

There is a clear and useful API of Last.fm so that we can use it efficiently in our project. Most of the user profile information and user logs are reachable without an authentication. We can use these informations to get idea about tastes of users of our system. Some sample API functions available are as follows:

user.getTopArtists user.getLovedTracks user.getPlaylists user.getTopAlbums user.getTopArtists user.getTopTags user.getTopTracks

More information is available on: http://www.lastfm.com.tr/api/

Del.icio.us

Although there is a useful API of Del.icio.us available, it needs user authentication. But the last user activities can be fetched from RSS data.

More information is available on: http://delicious.com/help/api

Stumbleupon

There is no available API provided by them, yet we can fetch users’ last 15 ‘pages liked’ from RSS data.

Picasa

There is a GData API of Picasa does not need authentication for public information. But it needs authentication for private information of users.

More information is available on: http://code.google.com/apis/picasaweb/developers_guide_protocol.html

Flickr

There are some functions of the API that does not need authentication like flickr.favorites.getPublicList and flickr.contacts.getPublicList. After authenticating the user, we can access private data which are accessible by hat user, using flickr.contacts.getList and flickr.favorites.getList functions.

Friendfeed

As we touched on last meeting, there is some social networks that do similar things even their principles are different. Friendfeed is one of them. Therefore we tried to find out what methods it uses when looking for user data.

Biletix and MyBilet

Both ticket master companies don’t offer API’s for developers. Hence we have e­mailed these two companies that we plan to benefit from their databases as local event information providers. We are looking forward for the replies.

Facebook

We also plan to utilize facebook profiles of users as a primary data source. Facebook requires us to develop a facebook application to access related data. However, we can use infinite session and recently announced ‘facebook connect’ features to synchronize user data and facebook profiles.

Other Sources

Youtube, Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, MySpace and all other Google services have interfaces for data availability outside of these applications.

According to our mentor’s recommendations, we have done extra research for our project proposal. For this, we investigated iPhone App Store and Android Challenge Top 50. Also Murat investigated Turkcell API and what they will provide to us. And we have browsed web to find similar applications. We’ve been inspired by wertago, softrace, cityslikkers, jaiku, strands, lifestreamer, tumblr and many others.

Our project proposal has been changed significantly according to our new ideas. We propose to develop a social mobile network which enables you to stream your life to others; keep track of your friends; get book, music, web site recommendations you may like; and find someone who share similar hobbies and interests.
People will be able to enter books they read, artists they listen, web sites they visit, cafes and bars they like. The back end of the system will also be able to retrieve additional relevant data from other social networking sites.

In this social network, system will recommend you stuff according to your current tastes like last.fm and stumble do. This system is different from other social network systems in terms of merging these advice systems into one. For example, it will be able to advice some books for you by tracing your music log and so on.

Using the location tracking capability which comes from Turkcell API and GPS info, people can find their friends who are near them and meet new friends with similar interests nearby.