
Show HN: Hooks Data API – Realtime Data about Thousands of Topics Over Webhooks - krammer
https://data.hooks.co
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krammer
Hi HN!

We are the makers of Hooks App (gethooksapp.com), and for a long time we have
been creating content on notifications for hundreds of thousands of users. Now
we are opening our data so developers can do whatever they want with the it.

We are really excited to hear what do you can do with the API.

Feel free to ask anything!

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NationOfJoe
FYI in the "Channels" section under twitter your have the same description as
for pintrest.

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krammer
wow, thanks, Fixed :)

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koolba
This looks nifty. On the outbound side having a SNS topic publish option (with
customer supplied AWS access and secret key) would likely be popular with the
serverless crowd.

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ortuman
Cool. We're also planning integration with push notifications services,
including SNS.

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jsonne
Any plans to integrate with advertising APIs so you can run/edit campaigns
based on this data? Seems to be potentially a really useful mechanism
especially around concurrently running ads with when commercials are running
etc?

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ortuman
Sure! Future integrations with advertising APIs is in our roadmap.

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andreygrehov
This one looks amazing. I had a side-project, Terraflow, with the exact same
goals. The project is on the graveyard now, but the fact there is a market for
things like that makes me feel great. At least the idea was good :)

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krammer
Would love to hear more about Terraflow! Drop me a line at jose at
gethooksapp.com :)

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assafmo
I'll definitely test this with Twitter!

I'm using IFTTT to send webhooks from twitter and the delay can get up to 15
minutes. I also tested Microsoft Flow and the delay was bigger than IFTTT.

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metaodi
Is it possible to add new data? Like connecting an Open Data portal or
something similar and get notified if new data is added/updated?

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krammer
We have not implemented yet the tool for you to add the data "manually" (we
have an endpoint to publish new content to a topic, but that's not what you
need). BUT, we can add the data, and the Open Data portals are a great source
we have not explore. Do you have any specific data right now in mind? Would
love to discuss this use case.

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metaodi
First of all, there are many open data portals around, so this might be a good
source of quality data no matter what.

CKAN is currently the de-facto standard for these kind of portals, so being
able to query the CKAN Action API enables to gather metadata from portals all
over the world.

Some portals even have an API directly to their primary data (e.g. exposing a
CSV as a querable JSON REST API), in CKAN this is called "DataStore". And this
kind of data might be something you want to integrate. I can think of a number
of datasets that could be interesting, e.g. schedule of garbage collection,
public transport timetable or measurements from public weather stations.

Different portals have different data available. I'm from Switzerland and I
know these datasets are available here. Is there a geograhical region you want
to cover/not cover or it doesn't matter?

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krammer
Wow, thanks! We are currently querying using CKAN for some alerts at Hooks
App, but never thought about massively adding open data to our system, as for
our mobile app it made no sense. But now it does.

Actually, we want to add what our users/clients want. No region in mind.

As a side note, its quite easy to create alerts about "new item in the data
set" but it get worse if you have to understand the use case, as, e.g. sending
all the "garbage collection schedule items" its different than sending
"garbage collection new items in that street of Geneva". Hopefully the CKAN
spec will allow us to let the users to set a query over the data, so we will
be able to push them only when the new data matches that query.

Thanks again!

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namespace
Kudos on data launch! I have been using Hooks app for free for more than a
year. How do you get your revenue?

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krammer
Thanks!

For the data api we plan to stay free for a while and then charge new users
with a low per subscrition fee to indie devs and have a plan for big data
consumers.

Offtopic: how much would you have payed for the Hooks app? Just from the top
of your mind.

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elyase
Cool project. Are you also going to allow access to the historical data?

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krammer
Thanks! Yes, we are :). What use case do you have in mind?

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krammer
We have been hunted on PH :)

[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hooks-
data](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hooks-data)

Feel free to comment there too.

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myaso
Really cool! Looks like some interesting stuff can be done with this. So I get
to passively pick up updates from your channels? I wish there was more stuff
like this instead of having the process be powered by people using a app.

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krammer
Thanks! You can actually search for the channels to subscribe using our API,
and we are working now on standardizing that API so you can know what to
expect there. Yes, the point is that once you subscribe you KNOW that we will
tell you if something happens and we will give you the needed data to do
something with it.

What use cases do you have in mind?

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myaso
Nothing firm yet, I really would have to take a look at the data closely. This
looks like a practical implementation of the semantic web. You caught me on
short notice, I'm going to have to think a bit harder :) This gives me more
options and very useful ones at that, since data is a bitch to get -- pardon
my language.

~~~
krammer
feel free to write me at jose@gethooksapp.com

