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.