Newsvine API: What I would like

Way back during newsvine's beta period in January, the newsvine team asked the community what custom APIs they would like to build all sorts of custom external applications. The discussion resulted mainly in a request for features, though there was some good suggestions for possible APIs.

Some of you may know that I have been working on a newsvine toolbar extension for Firefox (and Flock) called Firevine (So the name may be a bit cliché). I released version 0.3 in early January. There are many features that I would love to add, as well as a few other applications such aswordpress plugins, and various widgets. However, at the moment I am limited to basically just the various RSS feeds with which to work, and thus the possibilities are limited.

Thus I present to the community a few suggestions for possible newsvine APIs and their possible uses, listed in the order of which I feel is more important and useful.

Access to the conversation tracker

This is by far the most useful and needed feature. I even created a sample XML document (the DTD) that would be perfect to store the conversation tracker information. All it needs is the newsvine team to populate it with the proper information.

With this access, we could be notified of new comments where ever we happen to be browsing. You could be surfing CNN.com and notice that one of you articles gained a comment, open the external tracker and navigate straight to that comment. The conversation tracker is easilynewsvine greatest advantage over other sites such as Digg and Netscape, where you have to manually track your own conversations. Imagine the possibilities if you can track your newsvine conversation while not even browsing newsvine!

Access to the votes

Currently there is a method used by the seeding window that checks whether the current URL being seeded is a duplicate. It returns a few values, one of them indicating whether the URL is a dupe, and another value the URL to the original seed if the item is a dupe.

It would be great to add another value or two returned by this method, or a similar one. If the URL is already seeded it would be great to receive a notification of how many votes the articles already has, and a method to vote for the article.

Basically if implemented properly, when browsing an article that has already been seeded you will be notified that it has in fact already been seeded, you will see how many votes it has and you can vote for it yourself. I think this could greatly increase the amount of votes seeds receive because as we browse the Internet, we can vote on items without having to find where they are posted at newsvine.

Another use for this API would be to create newsvine badges similar to ones available for both digg and Netscape that we could place directly on blogs or other content sites. Not only could we then use it to submit an item to newsvine, but when it is already submitted we could vote directly on that page, again without having to find the item on newsvine to vote for it.

External commenting

I am less certain as to the benefits of this potential API and its uses, however I will at least propose it.

Just like the previous proposal where submitting a URL to the API will yield the amount of votes and let you vote, a different API could accept a URL and return a method to post a comment to the seed of that URL. Thus we would be able to comment on seeded items without actually visitingnewsvine.

There are a few potential problems though with this API and I would be quite fine if it was never implemented. The first problem is that we would be commenting blindly. For all we know we may just be repeating five other comments. Another problem is that these comments would not help support newsvine because users would be commenting externally and not viewing the newsvine ads that the site needs to stay afloat.

Another use of this API could be integration into blogs and the comments of mainstream sites. When posting a comment directly to the blog or mainstream article, you could be given an option to cross-post that comment to the corresponding seed at newsvine, if it was already seeded.

Access to the Chat

Other than for a few big events like Arena of Death matches or Drinking contents, the newsvine chat feature has gone relatively unused. Part of that is because there are never that many people at one time even viewing a particular item, much less wanting to chat about it. The newnewsvine live page and corresponding chat module could encourage more real time communication as this could serve as a central location for generalnewsvine talk.

Following that idea, it would be useful to be able to have a method to call a newsvine chat pop-up window from anywhere. That way if we just felt like chatting on newsvine we could click a browser bookmarklet and open the newsvine live chat.

Or even better, there could be another method that if given a URL that is already seeded, will return how many people are in the corresponding chat, if any, as well as a link to open an external chat pop-up and join right in.

The Big Picture

It was recently announced that Netscape would soon be unveiling version 9.0 of their browser. The big story is that the new Netscape browser will be very integrated with Netscape.com a social bookmarking and news site similar to newsvine and digg.

In my mind, this is clearly the next logical leap for social news. Flock was an attempt to integrate social networking and Web 2.0 with a browser. Netscape 9.0 will go one step further an integrate a browser with one particular social news site. I do not believe that newsvine requires its own browsers, because thankfully browsers like Flock and Firefox already exist that allow us to extend them to our heart's content.

Newsvine needs a full featured extension. Newsvine.com will be the hub, but the extension could connect everything together. Access the most important features of newsvine while browsing anywhere. Utilize the many features of newsvine for every page that you visit. Newsvine will no longer be just a website, but an entire experience.

I'm willing to write this extension, I just need some help in the form of an API.

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