DIGG announced the launch of the public DIGG API yesterday. I’m not a DIGG fan myself, but it is a major service so the launch is significant.
The API should enable more visualizations along the lines of the popular Swarm and Bigspy visualizations. This is clearly part of the interest on DIGG’s part, as they have also announced a DIGG API Visualization contest. Entries must use the Flash toolkit provided by DIGG.
You can read more about the launch on the DIGG blog. Basic API concepts are fleshed out here.
I hope it proves useful to Processing people as well.
I hope so too. Web services are still much easier to deal with in PHP etc., but Java apps have data persistance to make things more interesting. One major hurdle in Processing is the lack of a good way to render styled text and GUI components. I’ve worked on a personal hack for Stikkit, but it was much easier to hack together in PHP than to try to deal with it in Java.
I’ve been dabbling with the Digg API and it’s pretty good.
So far I’ve built…
http://www.duggornot.com
…which allows users to check how their Digg story submissions are doing.
And…
http://www.duggornot.com/comment_reader.html
… to see how their comments are doing. I plan to integrate them both soon.
They’re still in early development but I’ve learnt a lot about the Digg API in the mean time.