digg

Join DiggAbout

Discover and share the best of the web!
Learn more about Digg by taking the tour.

Digg API, Flash Application Toolkit, and Contest Announced!

blog.digg.com — Many of you have been asking about the Digg API and I'm happy to announce that it is now publicly available at services.digg.com along with a Flash application toolkit. This will be a great tool for Digg users and partners to openly access all Digg data dating back to 2004.

Bury
show profanity settings
expand all
  • Universal, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18Check out the API contest here: http://digg.com/contest
    • birkoph, on 10/12/2007, -14/+3If they offer better prizes I might consider. People usually get paid for their work.
    • Aupajo, on 10/12/2007, -10/+5It's like millions of Digg clones suddenly cried out in terror... and were suddenly silenced.
    • fkr3, on 10/12/2007, -10/+39How about instead of focusing on getting more eye candy digg focus on some real improvements to the site. A few changes would be much nicer than yet another way to visualise the way stories are being dugg, such as ...
      - real comment threading
      - a real way to browse your comments eg: http://www.headzoo.com/comments.php
      - precaching stories on shared hosting sites (can be entirely automated)
      - a real search system
      - a real comment moderation system eg: slashdot
      - probably lots more

      All this competition is going to do is identify the weakest areas of digg and get other people & companies taking a chunk of digg's thunder. Really I could care less if I get the best experience on digg directly through digg.com or through someone using the api, except I'd rather it was here since it'd be one site instead of x pages and y tools.
    • donjaime, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I am sure that if some tool developed using the digg api provides a good enough user experience, digg might incorporate it into the site. This contest is just another way of leveraging the digg community.

      The things you pointed out are very good candidates for potential projects (except the search. That is something that this API won't be too much use for).
    • fkr3, on 10/12/2007, -6/+12At a deeper glance you're right - they are leveraging the community. Leveraging it in a beautiful way - not. You permanently forfeit every right you have to anything you submit, and in return for your work, time, creativity and skill digg will credit you as the developer in whatever way they decide.

      Anyone who creates some killer works using the API would be better off keeping it, hyping it and selling it to the highest bidder or capitalising on it yourself. The prizes are nice but they're hardly adequate compensation - a kick ass apollo interface for digg that does everything better and as is inevitable, gets frontpaged and widespread, is worth millions of dollars for the market and usage it'll pick straight up off digg's shortcomings, not a computer with a bunch of games.

      "You hereby acknowledge and agree that Digg is hereby granted a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable right to display, perform, use, reproduce, modify, distribute and provide users access to all Animations (including all related intellectual property rights) in connection with the Digg services and Digg website. Digg will credit you as the developer of the Animation in a manner that Digg reasonably determines."
    • donjaime, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1As for search, might I suggest an addition for the api:

      A query endpoint that takes in some form of regular expression, designed by whoever is leveraging the API, as well as some other obvious fields like date ranges etc... The RegEx could be applied to story topics/bodies in a standard fashion.


      @fkr3
      You hit the nail right on the head. But given the Digg demographic, you will still see one or two cool things pop up from people who don't mind being exploited in this way.
    • fkr3, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Actually the API doesn't appear advanced enough to let anyone get a chunk of digg's market. Smart move on their part. All it does is let you retrieve data on stories, not interact with the website (other than linking back to digg).

      So it's just going to be more eye candy visualisations only a drunk sociologist could care about and various ways to browse popular/upcoming stories.
    • donjaime, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Well... I can think of a few ways of exploiting this to "interact" with digg. I'm just waiting for a man in the middle attack website that provides an attractive interface to grab digg user account information users who think they are interacting with a legitimate digg extension.

      For a non-illegal, legitimate (although I wouldn't do this myself) interaction.You could make a website that accepts digg user login and password information, and so long as you make sure that the client's session information and other state information that digg needs for user authentication are kept correctly (have interactions come from client scripts... not part of the Digg API ofcourse) then I think you could pull off a decent level of interaction.
    • fkr3, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2It could be exploited easily enough even without the api. I know .NET has the ability to post data to a url and grab the cookies that url sets, and then attach those cookies to future requests. I'm sure PHP and the others have similar abilities.

      But that would violate the terms of use and win you a free c&d (or lawsuit, depending on how much better you make the site, or how much harm you do, depending on your intentions).
    • donjaime, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Boy, nested comments sure would be useful for this thread :).

      Anyways, I know that you can do that without the Digg API (you only need vanilla Http requests). What I was trying to say was that in conjunction with the Digg API you could essentially make a better version of digg by providing the additional mechanism of passing along authentication information using some client side scripting.

      Same domain restrictions for traditional ajax kind of limit this. But There are ways round it.
    • estacado, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Does the contest NEED to use Fash? I'm already working on a Konfabulator widget.
    • estacado, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Nevermind. I read the rules... must be in U.S., so that rules me out. Whatever the case, I can say my widget is going to kick ass when it's done.
    • SamKellett, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12US only?! :-(
    • mercurysquad, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1What's the point of this story's submission? We all see the big box on the right side announcing the same thing on the homepage.
    • geoken, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"So it's just going to be more eye candy visualizations only a drunk sociologist could care about and various ways to browse popular/upcoming stories."

      What's up with your undying hatred towards innovative methods of data visualization.

      I feel sorry for anyone who has to work for you. It must suck trying to make sense of large amounts of data plotted in a plain text file with ascii art seperators because you decided colorful graphs with 2 or more axis are eye candy.
    • Ryosen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@fkr3

      I think you've misunderstood the terms that you read. You claim that "You permanently forfeit every right you have to anything you submit", but that is simply not true. The legalese says "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable right to....", meaning that Digg has the right to use what you produce in anyway they see fit without having to pay for it. The term "Non-exclusive" means you keep your right to use it elsewhere, to sell it, to give it away, whatever. No where in there does it say that Digg *owns* the content. It just says that they can use it. This is not unreasonable and is no different from any other site out there that solicits user-generated content (e.g. YouTube).

      You are not giving up anything by participating in this contest.
    • fkr3, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I think you misunderstand what that involves exactly.

      Say you create some innovative and hugely popular way to do something on digg. Digg than implements it themselves, as is their right, because you gave them the right when you submitted it to their competition.

      Now all you have is some hugely *redundant* way to do something on digg. Cash value? $0. Traffic? 0.
    • Ryosen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1@fkr3

      The likelihood of success for a feature or utility that leeches from Digg, with the express intent of gaining profitability, is probably very small indeed. Anyone that is concerned about maintaing proprietary control would not be submitting their code to a contest such as this.



    • whistlercom, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0US entry only does bite.
  • spinchange, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8Awesome! Thank You Kevin!!
    • birkoph, on 10/12/2007, -16/+3"Awesome! Thank You Kevin!!"

      translation.

      omfgzz i lub you kevin rose 4 ever omg omgzzz
    • timdorr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Don't forget all the people that actually coded all of it. Sure, Kevin should get praise for yelling crazy ideas at them, but we also should be appreciate the people that turn the crazy into the less crazy implementations :)
  • dreicher, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Awesome...simply awesome.
  • chkmate21, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2Is it just me or would everyone here prefer the 2nd prize over the 1st one since I really am not that much into gaming. But I must say this is the best prize lineups I've seen. Digg knows what we want!!!
    • Ikerous, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I don't game much, but it's one nice new computer. Not to mention a 21" lcd. Plus the adobe cs3 master collection is included as well.
  • chomp, on 10/12/2007, -6/+0how come i cant find the download link?!?
  • njohnston, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1If you are looking for the download link to DiggTop click here:
    http://www.gskinner.com/DiggTop/ then click on "Download Now"

    • timdorr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Oh man, I was kind of hoping for something that looked sort of like the top linux command line tool :D
  • Minos, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3Meh. You have to build it yourself.
    Whereas joomlastars, pligg and the others are ready for use.
  • Aupajo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Kudos to the Flash Development kit.

    Links to toolkits:
    http://code.google.com/p/diggflashdevkit/
    http://apidoc.digg.com/ToolkitsServicesDigg
  • pwarnock, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Digg to Del.icio.us, anyone?
  • hsbsitez, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I have nv worked with an api but I am tempted to try this out. I do have some questions about how this works, but main one is:
    1. I can only access the diggs data but cannot like have a user submit a comment through my api and it will be added to digg''s?
  • brendanheyu, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10"First, due to legal constraints and the value of the prizes, this contest is only open to legal residents of the U.S."

    Love that attitude. "***** you punk, you ain't a Yank." So much for the world wide web. Kevin - thanks for helping Digg ride over silly little obstacles.
    • kingkilr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Its because they would have to pay customs on anything out of the US.
    • Ryosen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Contest are subject to the laws of the state and country in which that contest is conducted. If a contest is made available world-wide, it will have to conform to the laws of every single country in which someone participates. This is simply not practicle, not to mention rediculously cost-prohibitive. This is what prevents things such as World-wide lotteries (scam mail to the contrary).

      It's not meant to say "You're not American, sod off".
    • dburka, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Hey guys. As a Canadian and a Digg employee, I totally understand your frustration. It sucks that we can't open this contest up outside the USA. It's not that we're concerned about duty or shipping costs and it's not that Adobe, Falcon Northwest, Palm, EA, or anyone else asked us to keep it in the US. It really is a legal issue - it's extremely difficult to legally run a contest from the USA and to have entrants from all over the world. We really wish we could, but we can't.
  • cricke, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9"..this contest is only open to legal residents of the U.S."
    Why are we non-US citizens always being left out like this?
  • estacado, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I just skimmed through the API pages. Honestly, I barely understood anything. It's like I need to know rocket science to figure this thing out. I don't know if it's the API itself or the documentation. I'm used to working with Flickr's API, and this thing nothing remotely close to it. I think it's the documentation. It's being written by a very technical person who assumes everybody knows what he/she knows. Try to "dumb down" the documentation to "high school science teacher" level instead of "rocket scientist" level.
    • migurski, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Can you be more specific? Are there particular pages or concepts that you're finding difficult?
    • estacado, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I've read the documentation thoroughly and have understood it. I have also identified what the problem was earlier. The term "Endpoints" is very confusing. I know the term fits the structure of the API, but for developers new to Digg's API, the term "Endpoints" really is "out there". In the Getting Started page, there should be an explanation of what "Endpoints" are, and an example of it together with the URL, e.g.:
      *Get stories dugg by Kevin Rose (http://services.digg.com/user/kevinrose/diggs)

    • migurski, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thanks, I'll try to think of a better term or explanation than "endpoint".
  • Dested, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I wonder why they released it as a PEAR API instead of just a regular xml one and let us sort it out. Any chance someone wants to work on porting this to .NET? Whats the PEAR equivalent in .NET? Anyone know?
    • Dested, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Sorry, I just found the xml part of the doc. I hope to have the .NET api done within a day or so.
    • saltybeagle, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0PEAR is not a API, it is a repository and distribution system for reusable code. Perl has CPAN, PHP has PEAR. Not sure what .NET has.
  • Philluminati, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Someone should make a "Digg Popularity" calculator. It sums up your total digg ups and downs for each comment and then it ranks you against the other users to see what your global digg position is.

    That would be cool.
  • Floris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Sigh, I have to be living in the US so it seems, in order to be eligible.

    Social network, limited to the USA.
    You know digg company, there are ways to ship products around the world.. sigh.
  • bluemorbo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0The whole "US only" issue does suck, but it's for legal reasons rather than general hatred of non-Americans :)
    • T0PS3O, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7Legal my ass. Probably just picky prize sponsors. Pretty lame IMO.
    • drzeus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Picky prize sponsers? That's just silly. With the price of the prizes, Digg would probably have to pay through the nose on taxes and tariffs to be able to send them anywhere. It's lame politics that brings us these US only contests.
  • rtbenson, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Nice! I'll finally have an excuse to learn OOP in Flash!
  • Eirik90, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1SICK prizes! But, as it is US only :(
  • Ryosen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11I just got an email that might be of interest to non-US citizens concerned about the prizes being limited to US citizens...

    Dear RYOSEN,

    My name is Muhallad Abdul Kallekwa III and I am the former DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER of Zindala, a small North African providence. Recently, I won a programming contest on DIGG and need your assistance in collecting the prises......
  • vanmeir, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1The license agreement says that the API is licensed only for development of "non-commercial animations." Do they mean applications?

    http://apidoc.digg.com/LicenseAgreement
  • harry4000, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I'm trying to use the Flash API. It is not clear how to start using the ActionScript API. Which class do I instantiate first? Is there going to be a sample app that shows how to use this?
  • fLUx1337, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1:(

    US only?

    C'mon, I know its for legal reasons, but you could do it if you really wanted!
  • piterwilson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1US only. Buried, legal or no legal, its lame. Cool API thou...
  •  

    Login or register to add a comment

    Create a new account or login to join in the conversation on Digg. You'll also be able to Digg stories to help promote things you like.


© Digg Inc. 2008 — Content posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain.
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.