With Facebook’s IPO scheduled for the 18th this month, many are questioning the nearly $100 billion valuation. No one argues that individuals and companies of many shapes and sizes currently use facebook as a marketing tool. The argument boiling around Facebook is whether advertising on Facebook works. Most social websites that drive revenue through selling ad space have proprietary tools that measure ROI. However, Buddy Media hopes to remove the “anarchy” of social media marketing and give deeper insight to advertising across multiple social media sites with its new unified social media API.
APIs serve up a lot of valuable data and resources, but the most valuable API currency right now is social data, and specifically public data from Twitter. APIs are essential in not just accessing this social data, but also delivering meaning extracted from this firehose of social data.
Wishpot typically brings “lists” to mind. With Wishpot’s original service, users could create a single wish list from multiple sites. The service eliminated the need for a new list for every site in which a shopper was interested. Wishpot has now expanded the wish list experience into a full shopping experience with a new API framework that provides true social commerce (shopping/browsing through checkout from the same platform).
Involver launched its Engagement Optimization API last week (read the official release here). Partners are utilizing the API to “optimize their ad spend on social in the way they’ve been doing across the web for a long time.” Although advertising across social networks has been deployed for quite some time, advertisers have had limited tools to track engagement. Facebook Insights is probably most commonly used to analyze social data. When users have required deeper analysis, the advertisers were forced to use highly custom integrations.
When Nate Drouin, the founder and CEO of Fundraise.com, first sat down with Dustin Dulginow of Atlas Venture he had already finished development of the Fundraise.com Iphone/Ipad applications (the Fundraise.com API came later). That lunch meeting must have gone well because Atlas Venture later became one of the investors that contributed to a $1.2 million round of seed money for the startup.
Klout is currently putting the finishing touches on a new version of its API. The company has started a private beta with selected partners, and ProgrammableWeb had the chance to catch an early glimpse of what is to come in this new Klout API.
The sales world is clearly undergoing a serious shift in the way that it operates. Brick and mortar retailers are forced to compete with online stores that can offer more aggressive pricing based on lower operational cost. In many retail sectors this has been obvious for some time; other sales arenas have been far more resistant to internet migration. This post will attempt to illustrate the significance of the Chictopia API to the fashion industries move to the internet.
Facebook is planning to update its Open Graph API to enhance the ability of developers to integrate location-based data to user’s newsfeeds and posts. Facebook announced its intention to develop this feature at the Where 2012 Conference in San Francisco last week.
The friend graph lets developers explore connections between people. That’s not enough, according to a new service that debuted at SXSW. It uses the status updates, interests and other data–currently just from Facebook–to determine a personality type. Whit.li calls the resulting information the “psycho-social profile.” From that, developers can compare users for different types of compatibility using the Whit.li API. The service could potentially fuel a entire breed of “AirBNB for {blank}” type of apps, among other use cases.
As a website owner, implementing social tools like sharing and commenting can be a pain. These JavaScript widgets each operate in their own space, without a common standard to follow, or guidelines for security and interoperability. From an end-user perspective each of these tools can require a separate login, before allowing me to interact or personalizing options for me–and even though multiple tools can be on the same page, they know nothing about each other, let alone share information with each other, creating very separate and siloed experiences.
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