

Show HN: A single, searchable API for all social networks, news, and blogs - hollandaise
https://streamified.me/developer/

======
urza
You lost me here: "We think that formats like RSS don't make sense for today's
internet".

And honestly.. another API? So it only works as long as you are in business
(which is based on what by the way?) or decide to kill or change it? And also
posting to my social media will be going through your machines? Seriously?

If you'd offer me an opensource script that I could call like
"localhost/post?message="hello"&where="twitter,blog,facebook".. that would be
different story. But hey, good luck locking others in your new service.

~~~
anonfunction
RSS format sucks because XML sucks.

I agree that it would be awesome if it was opensource so you could mitigate
any risks by having it run on your own hardware, but really it's a valuable
service and they deserve to make some money, which will play into keeping the
service alive.

~~~
ZaneClaes
Thanks!

The stack which is required for the Streamified API is really quite large,
too. Between node, mongo, elasticsearch, and a few other pieces of software...
plus a few dozen node modules and even some custom linux configuration, it's
really not feasible to expect devs to install it on their own machines ;)

~~~
graue
You could open source it anyway, though, or parts of it. NewsBlur does this:
<https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur>

One could run their own NewsBlur, but Samuel has stated it requires a lot of
resources to pull RSS feeds, and so in practice it's much easier to pay them
$2/month. (This may not apply if you plan on having business customers who are
paying orders of magnitude more than that.) But it alleviates any fear that
the service users depend on may disappear; in the worst case, run it yourself.

~~~
ZaneClaes
Fair points, thanks. I'd have to discuss with the team if this is an option,
ultimately. I can promise that if we ever did go away, I would certainly aim
to opensource it (why not?) But as a company w/ investors, it's not a decision
I can make myself right now ;)

------
switz
I could have used this about two months ago. Instead I built a simple npm
module – <https://github.com/switz/melt>

This is far better, though.

~~~
ZaneClaes
Nice! That's where we started, then got carried away... very, very carried
away ;) Hope you find it useful; we'd love to hear from you!

~~~
switz
I'd definitely consider implementing it into <https://tweezer.io> – send me an
email!

------
JustARandomGuy
This is a nice announcement to see, especially your support of searchable
article feeds. Quick question: I see in
<https://streamified.me/developer/#concepts> that we can search news articles,
is there a list of sites that you cover, or is it safe to assume that you
crawl over all major news services (tech, politics, money, etc)?

Also like your support for ADN. I have an account there that is sitting empty,
might build something up over the weekend.

~~~
ZaneClaes
Thanks!

We should cover all major news sources. We have at least 250,000 different
sources we're scraping, plus we also "crowdsource" news discovery. That is:
organically (stream-discovered) content gets indexed as well.

Hope to hear from you! Zane@Streamified.com

------
mamcx
I try this with js sample app + twitter auth. I get Error:
{"type":"Authentication","status":401,"details":{"message":"OAuth
Authentication Failure: invalid oauth_token syntax"}}

In the other hand, this could be handy for my news reader app for ipad. This
notify of new content? Is this suitable for manage several users, each one
with their own rss subscriptions?

~~~
ZaneClaes
Hey mamcx,

Would you mind shooting me an email to Zane@Streamified.com so we can discuss?

And yes, you could easily manage many users' RSS feeds :)

------
graue
Looks nice, just a note: the redirect from <http://streamified.me> is broken.

    
    
        $ curl -I http://streamified.me
        HTTP/1.0 302 Found
        Cache-Control: no-cache
        Connection: close
        Location: https:\/\/streamified.me

~~~
ZaneClaes
I'm not following... how is this broken? The headers return a 302 code,
pointing to the proper HTTPS site. If you click the link you pasted, your
browser should properly redirect (tested in FF, Chrome).

~~~
eli
Those slashes are escaped with backslashes _in the response_

~~~
ZaneClaes
Oh, yikes! Weird, wonder why it works on browsers, then. Hm. I'll have to dig
into this ;)

------
SamirSam
The idea is good. But clarifying it further, how many API calls per month do
you offer or plan ? Correct me if I am wrong, searchable means topic/keyword
parsing with context analysis (i.e. intention analysis)?

~~~
ZaneClaes
Our courtesy limit is 1k requests per day to the API. Beyond that, we're happy
to discuss what makes sense, we obviously just need to prevent abuse.

Yes, our searching capacities include everything from categories to sentiment
to tags to media... you name it. ElasticSearch powers our backend, which is
powered by Lucene, so anything in an article can be searched. Check out the
articles/search endpoint:
[https://streamified.me/developer/#endpoint=GET%20articles%2F...](https://streamified.me/developer/#endpoint=GET%20articles%2Fsearch)

------
monvural
Really love this idea. I've started something similar for my content platform
Amplifize.com, but am still in very early stages.

How can folks help build this out? Could it be an open service?

~~~
ZaneClaes
Thanks! I'm one of the devs on the project; you can contact me directly at
Zane@Streamified.com.

To your questions: one of the major benefits of the service is the
"crowdsourced" aspect of it. That is: the more people using the same API, the
more news articles get found and indexed. Furthermore, the API actually hooks
into other paid APIs, so it actually wouldn't work very well for you to run it
on your own servers unless you wanted to also pay for them. For all these
reasons and more, we think that a hosted API is the best solution.

~~~
monvural
Totally agree with all of the above. I'll send you an email to keep the
conversation going.

------
niggler
If this depends on the individual APIs (especially twitter) and sees any sort
of traction, isn't there a massive risk that one of the providers could block
access to streamified?

~~~
ZaneClaes
Per our "whitelabeling" philosophy, Streamified actually uses your own app IDs
(not ours). From Twitter's perspective, we're just acting as a middleman to
help you use their API better; any blockage, then, would be a result of your
implementation of their API (throttling, etc).

------
jrussbowman
Sweet, looks like something I could really dig into for unscatter.com

I'm curious, are you proxying apis or crawling and keeping the information
local to serve?

~~~
ZaneClaes
Thanks! Be sure to drop us a line if you want to dig a bit deeper into
integration.

For social networks, we're proxying the APIs (essentially). For articles and
news, we both aggregate organically discovered articles from streams, as well
as scrape 250k+ RSS feeds and other news sources. So, articles are stored
local to the server (which is why we have such a large collection of them),
but sensitive social information is a pass-thru to the social network.

However, in both cases, we're doing lots of analysis on top of the data per
our "normalization" philosophy.

~~~
jrussbowman
sure I have a couple questions, I'll shoot you an email

------
anonfunction
Hey just wanted to say that I appreciate the API and it has very nice docs!
Ignore the naysayers, it's not for everyone but I can already imagine a ton of
uses.

~~~
ZaneClaes
Thanks!

------
akennberg
Who's behind this? There's not a single name anywhere on the .me or .com
sites. It's hard to trust a platform service without knowing who is building
it.

~~~
ZaneClaes
Streamified, Inc.: Zane Claes and David Lee You're welcome to contact us
directly @ zane@streamified.com and david@streamified.com

------
bc1323
This sounds a lot like <http://singly.com/> \- how is it different?

~~~
ZaneClaes
Sure, we both cover social login and sharing. However, Streamified supports a
whole bunch of news features, and a lot more social endpoints, which Singly
doesn't begin to touch on.

------
Valid
This is a fantastic resource... I'm finding myself trying to come up with a
project to use it on.

------
lawl
Totally not readable on a mobile. Left sidebar uses nearly the full screen
even if you zoom in.

~~~
ZaneClaes
Sorry, but this is a developer portal -- not a news source or blog -- and
really isn't meant to be used on a mobile device. I acknowledge that this may
not be the answer you're looking for, but we didn't design the site for mobile
because what it needs to do isn't really appropriate (or feasible) on mobile
-- eg, the API console.

~~~
lawl
Well it is a news source, called hacker _news_. You telling me a developer
doesn't read stuff on a cell is just complete BS. I never said i want a mobile
site. Just a css that doesn't completely break on small resolutions. If you
don't want to fix it fine. But don't give me such a BS answer.

I acknowledge this might not be the answer you were looking for.

~~~
ZaneClaes
I'm sorry, I think I misspoke. What I meant is: you're right. What we should
have done, though, was link to a blog post for you to read, rather than the
dev portal itself. It just wasn't realistic to build a mobile enabled dev
portal, so we should have posted something mobile friendly instead.

