We’re getting 2011 started off right with some awesome new features for our API. A sampling:
And more! Read all about it on our developer blog and be sure to follow @outsideinAPI on Twitter for updates on our API.
This October I gave a presentation at Mashery‘s Business of APIs conference, speaking about how our API provides hyperlocal headlines on CNN.com as a case study for how APIs can power business relationships between tiny startups and multinational corporations.
The video and slides from the conference are up, so you can check them out:
Interested in using our API? Check out our documentation at developers.outside.in—and the sweet sample code posted last week by our lead API developer Brian Moseley.
Tomorrow at 1:00 P.M. EST, Outside.in Sr. Product Manager Lauren Sperber will speak at The Business of APIs Conference, sponsored by Mashery. The conference will be held at SunWest Studio, located at 450 West 31st Street here in New York City.
Lauren will be talking about our API as a case study for how APIs can power relationships between large and small companies (take Outside.in and CNN, for example). Though we’re probably a bit biased, we think that sounds really interesting, and we can’t wait to hear Lauren’s take on things.
The rest of the speakers at the conference sound similarly compelling:
Interested in attending? Tickets are still available through the conference site. The conference will be followed by a cocktail hour at 6 P.M. and sounds like an incredibly interesting event for developers and others interested in the business of APIs.
As Outside.in’s first product manager, Lauren introduced order and documentation to the company’s small, scrappy development team. She moved on to head up product management of Outside.in’s hyperlocal search and syndication platform, including the newly released API, which enables developers to access local news in any U.S. state, city, ZIP code, or neighborhood. Before Outside.in, Lauren worked in product development and marketing in the education and non-profit sectors. She studied literature at Georgetown University and NYU, where she wrote her MA thesis on how search engines construct the authoritativeness of online text.
As you may have already heard, we just released a brand new Outside.in Hyperlocal News API — the latest addition to Outside.in for Publishers suite of powerful publisher tools to create hyperlocal experiences easily, efficiently, and economically. We built the API for creative and savvy publishers looking to innovate ways to engage their consumers with hyperlocal news and information.
What can the API do? Quite a bit. Publishers can build and design mobile apps to custom web experiences by tapping into our massive database of more than 54,000 sources from local bloggers, journalists and mainstream sources for any neighborhood, city, state, and ZIP in the U.S. API users can filter the results by various parameters such as date, number of stories, source attributes (e.g., vertical/category, format, author type), and keywords. A few ideas:
What clever ideas do you have? Get going and introduce the API to your developers: send them to check out the documentation on our API portal where they can get an API key to start playing around.
What are the benefits?
How do I get started?
1. Check out the details here and introduce your developers to the API. Have them sign up for a dev key to see what the API is capable of and take it for a test spin.
2. Give us a shout via email to discuss any of the following:
There is a lot to take advantage of, so start building your own unique hyperlocal experience today! We can’t wait to see what you will create!
*P.S. Follow @outsideinAPI for the latest scoop on the API.
Great news for hyperlocal-loving geeks and media publishers across the country: We just released a fresh version of our Hyperlocal News API, which allows easy integration of local news stories and blog posts into your own sites and applications.
We gave a sneak peek of the API at texting.ly‘s Geo/Mobile Hack Day this weekend, alongside other geo-tech startups in NYC, including foursquare, Meetup, and SimpleGeo (slides here).
Here’s how it works:
Send the name of any U.S. neighborhood, ZIP code, city, or state to our Stories Query Resource to get information about the region (including geographic centerpoint and containing region), plus the most recent stories we’ve associated with that region.
You can filter the stories returned by:
If you’re building an application that requires user input to identify a location, you can use our Locations Query Resource to find locations matching any string. The location metadata returned includes a unique identifier that can be used to lookup stories for any matching location.
Visit developers.outside.in to check out our documentation and register for a key—you’ll be approved immediately.
We can’t wait to see what you come up with! Send an email to lauren {at} outside {dot} in to get your app featured in our Application Gallery.
Follow @outsideinAPI to learn about future API releases and interesting apps built with our API.
Last month we announced the launch of our API, which gives developers access to our database of local content including news stories, blog posts, and Twitter tweets within 1,000 feet of any specific location.
Amidst all the excitement, we noticed that some folks wanted to to grab results for a larger area.
You asked for it, so we’ve added an additional parameter to the API that allows you to enter a custom radius to get results for any distance up to two miles. Sweet!! Check out the documentation for instructions on how to use this new feature, and let us know if you have any questions in the outside.in API Google Group.
previously: API Developer Video
On behalf of the Outside.in developer team, I am proud to announce the launch of the Outside.in API. We’re opening up our vast location-based news database and are really excited to see all of the cool mashups developers will create!
Here’s our API team (myself included) giving it a brief intro:
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!
Over the past two years, we’ve compiled a rather large database of local expertise: millions of stories and discussion posts collected from thousands of feeds, and growing. We figured its about time to share this pile of content. As a precursor to our upcoming API, we’ve teamed up with several developers looking to integrate hyperlocal content into their own apps.
Locly, an iPhone app that shows useful info based on your GPS location, was first to start using the Outside.in data. Locly also displays info from Wikipedia articles, nearby Flickr images, Twitters tweets, and local events from eventful.
You can find and download Locly from the iPhone App Store. It’s free.
How does Locly pull in Outside.in news you ask?
All of Outside.in’s City, Neighborhood, and Place pages broadcast an RSS feed, making it very simple for a blog, a news site, or any application to bring our data into its platform. For now, if you subscribe to our feed, it’s up to you to customize the presentation, adjust it to best suit your site or application, and if you would be so kind, contact us.
Also, we’re working on opening up an API to let developers build with our data, so if you have any ideas, thoughts or comments, please leave them below.
Are you currently working on a phone app? Tell us about it.
