MyBlogLog API: First Impressions
Thanks to Ian, Kent, and the rest of the MyBlogLog team, I got my hands on a beta invite for the MyBlogLog API earlier today. It’s easy to use and has interesting potential to connect a bunch of popular services from across the web in an open, social way (as if those buzzwords weren’t getting enough play these days). I put together a crude example of what you can do with it. If you would like to see it, visit my MyBlogLog Recent Visitors + Recent Bookmarks page in Yahoo! Pipes. What you’ll find there is a list of del.icio.us bookmarks from people who recently visited Techcrunch. You can change the “MyBlogLog Community Name” and re-run the Pipe to see similar results for any website running the MyBlogLog widget (ex. use “AVC” for Fred Wilson’s blog). My example isn’t particularly interesting aside from the fact that it demonstrates how this API could be used to connect disparate web services based on the people who use them. That’s a pretty powerful concept in my opinion… sort of like a “groups” feature for the web.
Unfortunately, the API doesn’t seem to offer a way to target a particular visitor to your site in real-time based on their personal information from other sites like del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter, etc. The API lists all recent visitors to a particular MyBlogLog-enabled site, but I was hoping that it would also provide a way to access a certain user’s information at run-time in order to personalize their site visit based on preference data from other sites they use. You can access a list of all visitors and their data, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to isolate one particular visitor during their visit. Perhaps that’s possible and just over my head, which is entirely possible given that I’m not a developer.
All things considered, this is a great move by Yahoo! I see two areas of opportunity: 1) to organize people’s data and interests around website “groups” and 2) to offer site owners the ability to personalize their visitors’ experience based on interests from other sites they use. The API seems to deliver on #1 today in a simple, well-documented way. I hope to see future features addressing #2.
Nice work Yahoo!
