We’re excited to announce that today Outside.in is launching our new API, the first ever to make up-to-the-minute, location-based news available to everyone programmatically.
The API is based on our “news around you” feature, Radar, which means that to use it, you just send us an exact location, and we return all of the latest news stories, blog posts, Twitter tweets and more located within 1,000 feet of that point. Then pick another location, and we send you all of the latest web content for that point. Then hit us again for that same location, and we send you an update with the newest, freshest content in that immediate area. And on and on like that.
There are so many ways you could apply this API. In particular, this calls out for use in the exploding field of mobile applications. Building a mobile app that gives users content based on their current location? Make it better by adding the news around them from the Outside.in API. Or local news sites could develop on it: want to give your readers a little bit of really local news? Tap into the Outside.in API and deliver a unique local experience for each one of them. Or add local content to your Facebook app, your Twitter app, or just about any other social/status software.
To give people a solid example of how our API works we gave two Outside.in developers free reign to create whatever they wanted with it in two days’ time. The app they built is called near.ly. It takes your location, searches for the latest web content around you, and delivers those stories to your Twitter feed in the form of bit.ly links. So now you can get all of the news around you from the comfort of your Twitter account!
When you start to consider adding tools like Firefox’s Geode, Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, or the upcoming Windows 7 to the mix, you begin to get a picture of what the future of local content browsing looks like. And it looks really cool.
This of course is just the tip of the API iceberg for us. We’re opening up more ways for partners and developers to access our vast stores of location-based news and web content. Stay tuned. If you’ve got feedback on this API or ideas for what you’d like to see next, please write to us. We’d love to hear from you.
Enjoy!
