My notes from Business of APIs conference: New York Times API
New York Times
Marc Frons CTO
19.5M uniques
Strategy: Times Open
Syndication - times widgets, pushing content out
Aggregation - be a focal point for discussion and quality content
Community - news sharing app released called times people
Identity - attempt to understand users better
Syndication
Data Universe - taking content and thinking it of data, getting it tagged, exposing it via apis, tools for devs and users (apis and widgets)
Times Open APIs -
Community APIs
NYTimes Developer Network
Aggregation
TimesExtra - took BlogRunner, displays related stories to NYT articles, then expose an api of that feed, combination of algorithmic and editorial judgment
Community - TimesPeople, IBM Many Eyes that takes data and users can make visualizations with that data, user blogs (proposed), q&a (proposed), socail mapping (proposed)
Why release open apis?
Syndication drives traffic back to NYT.com
Innovation - when others build, we learn
Journalism - fulfills mission by pushing info out to the public
Branding
New Business Models - we expect new business models will emerge around apis, probably around advertising and licensing
Developer network was launched in October.
First api was campaign finance database.
Five active apis
Times Tags - matches query to NYT meta data.
Movie Reviews - returns critics picks and links to reviews.
Community API - can retrieve user generated content. Ratings and reviews will be available in a later version.
TimesPeople - returns profile and activities of a particular user
API ROadmap:
Recipes
Movie Reviews - two new releases
Congressional Votes
Article Search
Q1 2009
Event Listings
Weddings
NewsFeed (river of content from a source, near realtime feed)
Bestsellers
and more
Theme: Making public record data more available and accessible
Two types of apis
internal and external
Open api includes subset of information
what isn't included:
not giving away complete sets
trying to drive traffic back
What can be done?
Create mashups
Restrictions:
Canit' modify
can't change or distort meaning
can't imply nyt endorsement
can't display any other logo other than nyt that implies ownership
API Limits
qps, and rate limiting
Emails sent if user exceeds limit
Can't be used for commercial use, except for campaign finance api
may loosen this policy up.
TimesOpen Developer Day
Februay 20, coming out party for APIs.
