Alright. I try not to be too much of a God damned nerd around here, but sometimes a soldier just gotta throw down and let the shit fall where it land, ya feel me?
Fuck it. Here I go.
I spend most of my day buried in Java code. I toss around acronyms that begin with J and contain the letter X. I think I know an application programming interface when I see one.
Just recently, I decided to punish myself by diving into the data that gets flung around the Web 2.0 interbutts. There are some good links floating around; stuff that could use a good analyzing. Many of these data stores offer an API. Eh, that's a misnomer. For example, if you look at Twitter's exposed methods from the right angle, they seem to be an API, just like if you look at a fat girl from the right angle in her MySpace pictures, she seems hittable.
Sooner or later, reality gonna cut you down.
And While We're On The Subject Of Twitter
Imagine if a graphics library only offered you one method call per minute. What if your database had the same restriction? Well, that's all you'll get out of Twitter's API.
Twitter isn't really well known for their engineering ability, and other startups in the space have proven this by, uh, existing. Twitter is really just a large store of small pieces of data. Why is it so hard to get that data out? There's no intellectual property, so all they have left is the data. Maybe Twitter's appearance of incompetence is just a facade: an excuse for crippling the API so that no one can replicate their data and start a service that works.
I'm not ready to give up on you guys though. When, by divine intervention, you come up with a business plan, maybe you can offer us an API that works. In the mean time, I'll try to make due with what I got, but it will be slow going.
I did have a pretty good experience with Digg, though. No published rate limits, requests return in a reasonable amount of time, and a wide array of data access methods. I did get a little nut-pain because of a malformed request. I failed the request construction and they failed the parsing and served a 500. We called that one even.
tl;dr
Twitter's API is practically useless. Digg's is OK. I feel ashamed for knowing this.
Fuck it. Here I go.
I spend most of my day buried in Java code. I toss around acronyms that begin with J and contain the letter X. I think I know an application programming interface when I see one.
Just recently, I decided to punish myself by diving into the data that gets flung around the Web 2.0 interbutts. There are some good links floating around; stuff that could use a good analyzing. Many of these data stores offer an API. Eh, that's a misnomer. For example, if you look at Twitter's exposed methods from the right angle, they seem to be an API, just like if you look at a fat girl from the right angle in her MySpace pictures, she seems hittable.
Sooner or later, reality gonna cut you down.
And While We're On The Subject Of Twitter
Imagine if a graphics library only offered you one method call per minute. What if your database had the same restriction? Well, that's all you'll get out of Twitter's API.
Twitter isn't really well known for their engineering ability, and other startups in the space have proven this by, uh, existing. Twitter is really just a large store of small pieces of data. Why is it so hard to get that data out? There's no intellectual property, so all they have left is the data. Maybe Twitter's appearance of incompetence is just a facade: an excuse for crippling the API so that no one can replicate their data and start a service that works.
I'm not ready to give up on you guys though. When, by divine intervention, you come up with a business plan, maybe you can offer us an API that works. In the mean time, I'll try to make due with what I got, but it will be slow going.
I did have a pretty good experience with Digg, though. No published rate limits, requests return in a reasonable amount of time, and a wide array of data access methods. I did get a little nut-pain because of a malformed request. I failed the request construction and they failed the parsing and served a 500. We called that one even.
tl;dr
Twitter's API is practically useless. Digg's is OK. I feel ashamed for knowing this.
