Wow, what a stretch. About six months ago, I was asked if Samepoint has an API? Embarrassingly I had to say no – then I thought about it. What would an API have to do in this day in age to be different? I am just saying, there are tons of APIs out there. Yahoo, google etc. So I stepped up and got API keys to all the major ones. I was surprised of the diversity of options. Yahoo was cool because it had many output options. Google blog search was excellent because of the real-time nature. Technorati was great to show off the “little guys” . There were three gaps that were missing.  These gaps took us 6 months to fill.

The gaps were volume, diversity, and search-ability. By volume I mean, if you want to make a real brand attribute decision, you need more than 100 comments. I need say 100,000. No API was giving that up. Well I guess the hose from twitter does but that does not settle the diversity factor. By diversity I mean, we need comments from bookmarks, networks, micro blogs, blogs etc. We found that the only way to get such a diverse representation of sources was to build it ourselves.

The other gap was search. The APIs we reviewed were awesome for mashups. The gap that existed was the ability to search deeper like proximity search, fuzzy search, etc. This is so needed because the vocabulary of social media contributors is very diverse. For example, LOL means Laugh Out Loud or btw is “by the way”. When looking for Brands like “Target” you can imagine the value of having enterprise search functions.

I did take six months to build this, and thanks to Amazon, our server farm can grow with the speed of social media. You can read about the API here. If you can think of some cool features you’d like to see added, just shoot us a note at learn@samepoint.com or make a comment. Thank you all for your interest in our unique API. I will just put this out there – If you think you have a need for a robust API to make your application rock, just shoot us an email. We love to collab.

- Darren

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