Tynt Gives Developers InSight into its Data via API

Romin Irani, December 7th, 2010

Comments(2)

Tynt, an innovative service that provides you more insight into how user engage with your web site content, now provides a Tynt API to access the analytics. The company and is expecting users to develop interesting mobile and web mashup applications with it.

The Tynt Insight Service is fairly interesting. Research has shown that one of the most frequent activities when users find something interesting in your web site content is that of Copy-Paste. They copy interesting parts of your content and then most likely paste that into email and send it across to their contacts. What Tynt provides you is a simple script such that when any one does a Copy-Paste operation of your content and into an email for example, it puts a link back to the original content, so that you can more hits redirected to your original content. Through specific metrics, it also will determine what parts of your content was found more interesting to readers and what they interacted with, thereby giving you a completely different insight into your content.

Tynt has now announced its API, which allows developers access to the popular content that users across its network are engaging in. Currently they are exposing two methods:

• Keyword Search : To engage real-time information streams based on keyword searches and see how users are engaging with content.
• Top Content: To get a real-time stream of content related to several popular categories namely: Celebrity, Sports, Technology, etc.

An example call for the Keyword Search method is shown below:

http://api.tynt.com/search/v1/pages?appid=<YOUR_APP_ID>&q=<YOURQUERYSTRING>

The API is RESTful, HTTP-based and return JSON or JSONP. You can find the API profile listed here.

To get started with the Tynt API, you need to sign up at their Developer site and get an API Key for the application that you wish to write. The API comes with sufficient information and sample applications to understand the API usage. The API Key needs to be provided with each call.

The Tynt Insight product looks interesting. We are increasingly seeing companies mining the enormous amount of data that is being generated by users interacting with online content and services. Tynt is clearly targeting application developers to write applications that can access the most engaging content on the web as analyzed by the Tynt Service.