Wetpaint Launches API and Platform

John Musser, May 19th, 2008   Comments(0)

Seattle-based wiki and social network startup Wetpaint today announced Wetpaint Injected, a new embeddable publishing platform designed to allow creation of user-generated content directly within any site. As you can see below, by including Wetpaint Injected, a web page can become user editable by leveraging Wetpaint’s platform. Its core functionality includes content editing, keyword tagging, activity feeds, and embedding of images, video and other widget (for more API details see our Wetpaint API profile).

Part of the appeal to site owners versus other third-party options may be that they’ll get the “credit” from a search engine and SEO perspective because the content is directly included into the host’s site (see below).

From an API perspective there are three models available: server side includes (SSI), data access APIs and client application APIs. The SSI model is the simplest and Wetpaint provide standard include snippets. The data access APIs allow for more granular access and control. It is a RESTful API returning XML. These are full read-write APIs that allow data to be created, retrieved, updated, or deleted programmatically. The client APIs come in the form of a JavaScript library and can can control formatting and functionality. These can be used in conjunction with either the server includes or REST API.

On the licensing side, Wetpaint Injected is “free for any publisher to use on their website for up to 100,000 impressions per month. For web properties that use more than 100,000 impressions, Wetpaint charges on a CPM or revenue-share basis.”

Wetpaint began in 2005 as a wiki platform but have since expanded in a number of directions including social networking. Now there are over 900,000 Wetpaint sites. This new platform and API will further expand how and where their service can be applied (not to mention the $25 million they just raised).

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