Newsvine APIs: What Would You Like?

I have a few ideas, here they are:

@nato4:

That really isn't an issue related to the API.

How about being able to include a user's column on an external page? So say someone has website.com, they can put their column there which also links to newsvine.com. That's all I've got.

Maybe I'm missing it, but a search function would be nice!

Go Boi: The search function is at the top right

I'd be interested in seeing some stats on top tags, articles, sources, and seeds. Think Google Zeitgeist offered via API.

Go Boi: the other right ;-)
Full-text search results offered via RSS would be cool, though I know you already offer RSS feeds for each tag.

I currently maintain a blog on Blogger, and I cover a lot of technical issues and API's. Some of the entries I would also like to appear on Newsvine as they may be relevant to your readers. It would be nice if I could selectively pull my Blogger articles into Newsvine.

It would also be nice it I could post to my Newsvine blog from Writely. Writely already supports a large number of blog API's, so it would be just a matter of implementing one of them. There may be an issue though because Writely supports HTML editing, which would probably need to be stripped before insertion into the Newsvine blog.

Another nice feature would be to create a JavaScript API, where I could place JS code into my Blogger entry, and have it pull a list of related Newsvine articles into my site. Not full articles mind you, but titles and maybe a synopsis. It would be useful if I was writing an article on HTML standards to say "View related articles in Newsvine", then place the JS code.

I am also involved with a large web site that houses a lot of factual data including several encyclopedias. It would be very interesting if they could show related Newsvine articles next to the entries based on keywords. We could consume the data via any RPC mechanism as long as it was relatively fast. In this particular case a JS drop-in wouldn't be accepted.

Thanks, and keep it up, the site looks great.

Buss wrote:
How about being able to include a user's column on an external page? So say someone has website.com, they can put their column there which also links to newsvine.com. That's all I've got.

Dude that's already been done sense Newsvine came out. Look at the left column under your watch list.

Feeds

Use RSS for your newsreader and JSS (javascript) for an existing blog:
RSS: Posts & Links
RSS: Posts
RSS: Links
JSS: Posts & Links
JSS: Posts
JSS: Links

Go to your Column and use the JSS: Posts & Links and it well give you a special code to place on your site and it well display your column on your site, or any other site that has the code.

Ryan, I actually didn't notice the JSS links. Thanks for pointing that out.

This is more of a site-feature comment than an API comment, but from the above, it appears I'm not alone.

Of course, each comment on any feature has a permalink, but allowing to write a comment on a comment would be nice. The ability to thread a conversation results in less mindlessness and hopefully less redundant comments. Implementation might be tricky for the user experience and it's a feature than might not get used that much, but could be very productive.

Ex. - In response to Buss's comment, Ryan Crimson copied his comment and then responded. That was very helpful of Ryan, but readers not interested in RSS/JSS could have skipped over this thread altogether as opposed to seeing it pop-up repeatedly. Allowing Ryan to create a comment on Buss's comment would have been great.

This is HOT! Way to go man! BTW loving Newsvine

For example, simple REST API:
1. Get user tags
2. Get user posts/links (may be some parameter, for specify return type)
3. Get posts/links filtered by tag, date
4. Get recent post/links (can specify number of returning posts count).

And may be some API for posting articles and links? MetaBlog, or other...

Look at the top of this article. There is a title, date, tags, comments, and votes. I would hope their would be api set in place so I could access the number of comments and votes, the date and the title just by sending the permalink/id of the article.

Obviously this is a closed/authenticated entry site, so if you provide a way to authenticate with the api, then you could basically offer up all content available through the api ( ability to read article and comments ), and some really cool apps could be built much like the delicious director.

I would like to see the relevant pages of wikipedia show as links in the text of Newsvine articles. Or at least the ability to make that myself... hmm... that's what an API is isn't it?

I'm not a developer, but if I were presented with the chance to do something like that I would learn how to do it.

To add to Smickles, I would like to see a similar feature to Google news, where you can see a link to all related/similar articles to the one your viewing. But I'm no developer either, and am not sure if this is API-specific. I like Jason Coleman comment for slashdot-similar comment-threading.

How about some Atom APIs? I know you've got RSS feeds, but Atom has publishing APIs as well.

Location-based APIs might be interesting. I'm sure you saw the Google Maps mash-up thingy earlier- something like that is nice, but it is per-country, and that's rather limited; beyond that it might be nice to set a specific location, or to try for something slightly more specific than your current (also rather limited) list of locations (for editions).

On another random note, please add Google and APIs to your spellcheck dictionary :D

I would like the option of Newsvine in other idioms, like Portuguese.

I like smickle's idea but it reminds me too much of Trillian.

I'm as non-techie as they come. (What's API?) Perhaps this is something you plan to roll out later, but along with ericojp's comment, I'd like to add that some personalization of the main page interface would be nice so that you can get the news the way you want it. Foreign language interfaces would be a part of this, and are probably somewhere down the road. Similarly, the ability to select postings about a region or country would be good. Otherwise articles about certain topics (like the article on rape in New Zealand up today) are going to get lost in the shuffle.

Personalization would let me see the things I want to see on the front. For instance, I never want to see sports news on the front, and alot of the stories that dominate the news (runaway brides, etc) don't interest me. I'd prefer never to seem them up front either. Also, I'd rather have more stories on the front, less randomly organized. One of the biggest problems with media in general is being replicated here: You have sensationalized murder, followed by kittens in trees, followed by Guinness Book of World Records-breaking Filipino teeth-brushing public health campaigns all in one endless stream of blathering sameness. I can get this anywhere. The beauty in Newsvine's potential is that it offers what I cannot get elsewhere: the ability to select the things I want, and to deselect the things I don't want, ahead of time. I'd prefer not to have to wade through all that crap to get to North Korea's threats of nuclear war, a subject that does interest me.

Maybe you need an algorithm that helps the site learn what interests users, and learns to present things that interest them over time. And perhaps you could make its use optional, so that they can read newsvine like a newspaper (i.e., they'll read what is presented to them), or like a personalized news service (they'll be presented first with things they are already known to be interested in, or in which they might be interested based on other interests.)

It could be that you have already incorporated these functions. If that is so, then your site is not terribly user friendly, because I don't know where they are. This may be the case, since your search function isn't so readily apparent either.

Finally, why is there no link to a user's comments on their main profile page? There's links and posts, but no comments tab. Why not?

Not to sound ungrateful though. This is a very good site, with very good potential.

The obvious one here would be the ability to post via the API. I'm sure that's already on your list.

Unatine has nailed the basics otherwise, I would love to see anything involved with my profile to be able to be pulled up. Tags/Posts/History, the works. My articles should be accessable.

Geolocation data would be very cool as well.

This is probably slightly off-topic... but as a Mac OS user, some widgets would be really nice.

Something that lets me know when my stories have been commented on, or when there are new comments on stories that I've commented on. I'm sure there are other ideas that would work great on a nice looking Dashboard widget.

I am not sure if this is already possible but it would be great to have the ability to snip articles and add them to a news folder, then that folder could be syndicated to my blog should I desire...

I would like to not only have the things I write to be in my profile but also the things I have snipped and found interesting. I know I can watch an author, but I don't see a way to just add single articles to a "news folder."

Brian, the idea of an API is that it allows third-party developers to create things like that. The API would give them a way to access all of this data, which they would then present to you via their own interface implemented as a dashboard widget or whatever.