New "Social" APIs Worth a Look

Pete Prestipino
by Pete Prestipino 11 Feb, 2010
New

There is an unprecedented amount of information flowing around social media sites, and if you have the skills to tap into it, your Web enterprise will be better off for it. Let's look at three new social APIs that can be used to gain additional insights about your customers and the conversations occurring in your industry and about your products.

Google Buzz: Buzz is Google's new service to share updates, photos, videos, etc. and start conversations with those in your social graph. The API for Buzz will enable developers to access public updates as Atom feeds that are enhanced with Activity Stream data and published in real time with PubSubHubbub notifications. (Developers will also be able to connect third-party sites to Buzz.) Delegated authorization with OAuth, federated comments and activities with Salmon and distributed profile and contact information with WebFinger will be available to developers through the API in the coming months.

SamePoint: Samepoint's real-time social media API integrates data from social media sources including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Digg, blogs, message boards, and review sites, into one searchable database. Samepoint's service provides analysis and visualization of mentions, semantic grouping by theme, ability to establish benchmarks and identify influencers and influential sources, and a whole lot more. The API supports parsing, advanced search, word proximity and syntax queries to filter out the noise, so you can get to the buzz. Usage fees start at $2,500 per.

ViralHeat: Viralheat (a social measurement platform) Pipeline is an API that offers access to mentions, statistics, trends and data from video sites, and Twitter, as well as blogs and websites in XML. ViralHeat offers three paid APIs (Profiles, Statistics and Data) and provides free access to its Social Trends API for tracking topics, themes, or brands. The API can be used for a variety of applications, including for reporting in dashboards, for ad networks looking for additional data, for charting or reputation management.

Pete Prestipino
Pete Prestipino
Digital marketing executive with proven experience in all aspects of search engine optimization (SEO), performance-based advertising, consumer-generated/social media, email marketing, lead generation, Web design, usability, and analytics. - 20-year Internet marketing veteran, currently serving as the Digital Marketing Campaign Manager at Antenna Group (formerly Chicago Digital). - Former Editor-In-Chief of Website Magazine, and a regular speaker on Web technology digital marketing strategy - Author of several books on digital marketing Including Web 360: The Fundamentals of Web Success; Affiliate 360: The Fundamentals of Performance Marketing; Domains 360: The Fundamentals of Buying & Selling Domain Names, and SEO 360: The Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization.