The CrunchBase guys (thanks Henry and Mark) have been hacking away at the newly launched MySpace Data Availability APIs to create a test application that is now working, at techcrunch.com/myspace/app.php. You can sign into the account using your MySpace credentials and see a results page here on TechCrunch that contains your core profile information – your name, picture, bio, and list of top friends (we could grab more, but limited it to this).
MySpace doesn’t allow caching of information, so we dump it immediately after creating the results page. Also, MySpace is still finalizing some of the APIs, and their developer servers are also getting hit pretty hard right now. As a result, we’re seeing result errors approximately 50% of the time on our test app. This should clear up soon.
This is just a sample data dump, but it shows the potential of the service, which we called a real step forward in terms of user data rights and data portability. I am sure we will shortly be seeing some very creative uses of the product (including by Twitter, Ebay and Yahoo, who are all announced partners of Data Availability).
Update (Henry Work): The source code for the app is now freely available on GitHub: github.com/techcrunch/myspace_oauth/.
That looks great. It’s a great way of moving around data from different locations. It does bring up data security issues though.
are you just trying to reverse the inevitable slide in your blog’s traffic with more techcrunch stuff…
http://www.alex.../techcrunch.com
TechCrunch Dev Team’s speed is amazing!
@Barry you are an idiot.
Still some issues
Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘Exception’ with message ‘403 403Invalid Request Token Or User has not authorized this token.’ in /var/www/techcrunch.com/trunk/myspace/lib/base/BaseAPI.php:96 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/techcrunch.com/trunk/myspace/lib/base/OAuthBaseAPI.php(41): BaseAPI->_do_get(’http://api.mysp…’, NULL) #1 /var/www/techcrunch.com/trunk/myspace/lib/api/OAuthTokenAPI.php(44): OAuthBaseAPI->do_get_raw(’/access_token’, NULL) #2 /var/www/techcrunch.com/trunk/myspace/app.php(196): OAuthTokenAPI->get_access_token() #3 {main} thrown in /var/www/techcrunch.com/trunk/myspace/lib/base/BaseAPI.php on line 96
@cease: that’s the request token timing out. we’re not keeping any state in the DB or in the user’s session. I’ll probably use a cookie so that we don’t get this timed out error, and also probably should handle the exception more gracefully. Thanks for the heads up.
I dont mean to be a dick…but what is the point of this? To prove myspace was not lying about their api? i dont get the point…please let me know what I am missing. tks.
APP Myspace
ah…
I have a complaint to Harry and Mark.
I actually use your crunchboard jobs feature, and when I click on the email link, it doesn’t automatically fill the subject in the new Thunderbird email like Craigslist.org does.
http://www.crun...ob.php?jid=4549
Like if you go to that page and apply and click the email link the subject is still empty. On Craigslist.org jobs it fills the appropriate subject for you via the link.
It’s just annoying. Can you guys fix that please?
@faceloop
My guess would be that there will be some interest in creating something more of a loose community around the TC properties.
So does this mean that developers have to reinvent the wheel from Facebook to MySpace apps now? Or is there some standardization between the two platforms?
@Henry, Mark, would you mind posting the code for this app?
I am trying to build something very similar and I am having my troubles.
It would really help tons.
@Flavio: we are of one mind. Just pushed it to GitHub. This is my first outing with anything more complicated than commenting out lines in PHP, so take with a grain of salt.
yes folks, this is what startups like pownce and twitter are doing instead of building businesses – scoping out specs like openauth. the point is that somehow you will want to see techcrunch on myspace and myspace on techcrunch. openauth is a cool technology that will go over like a led zeppelin because most people just aren’t interested in this level of hyper-specialization and customization.
@Chris — I’ll ping those guys. We actually don’t maintain that site ourselves.
lol! fql and facebook rest api launched 2 years ago.
Chris said…
I have a complaint to Harry and Mark.
Yes Chris, and I had responded to your misunderstanding on data-mining subject from the other thread for :
MySpace Data Availability
where you think that data-mining is something like the following (your own code):
n=2
while(1) (
wget_implementation(”http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=n”)
regex(all_friend_data_into_sql)
n++
)
So, what knowledge that you have discovered by using the piece of code above?
Chris said…
I have a complaint to Harry and Mark.
Yes Chris, and I had responded to your misunderstanding on data-mining subject from the other thread for :
MySpace Data Availability
I read your response and will paste my response here in case you don’t get to see it there. BTW, I do not know word press BB code, so my formatting isn’t as nice. I’m not about to waste 10 minutes of my life to look it up either. I have javascript widgets to code.
“Amazon recommendation is data-mining”
Here’s something you do not know. I interviewed with Amazon.com’s page landing optimization team in Seattle and I have knowledge of their structure that you may not.
Amazon uses SQL to optimize page landing. The data is already collected from purchases, so it IS NOT data mining.
“You suck the data (retrieve) out of MySpace, but you haven’t mined the knowledge out of it.”
My pseudo code above included a regular expression line that simulated the extraction of profile data from each fetched web page iteration and storing it in a database.
That implicitly counts as mining. Sorry. Mining is not the process of creating graphs and other metrics out of data. Mining is the process of extraction.
Additionally, what you are describing is that doing a SELECT statement in an existing SQL with LEFT JOINs is in fact data mining. I retort that it is not because the data is already there. I would say that it is data processing, and only slightly overlaps on data mining.
The word mining implies that you are digging and extracting data from a new source.
Chris,
Did you go into WEKA (java open source data-mining project) web site?
I suggest you read it , learn about it before you spew out useless explanations about data mining here.
Chris
Now, here are some stuff (publications) from the former head of data-mining at Amazon, Dr. Ronny Kohavi (who now works for Microsoft). Here is Ronny’s site:
I have read all of Ronny’s papers which were published in various journals, such as Journal of Machine Learning, SIAM Journal of Data Mining
and ACM KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) Journal.
I invite you to go and read all of Ronny’s papers and slides from his past talks and presentation at conferences which are freely available from his site, then once you understand what Amazon’s data-mining recommendation engine is about, then you should shut up because you’re arguing for the sake of it.
Chris, have you considered a career as a stand-up comedian?
Chris,
Google for the name “Ron Kohavi”, which it will take you right to his web site.
I tried to post the URL in my last message but it was blocked by the TechCrunch spamfilter.
C’mon, go on and read Ronny’s papers. I hope that Ronny’s papers will educate you on the subject of how Amazon is using data-mining to run their business successfully.
How many app builders are not going to cache data!?
Do they allow the caching of some sort of ID piece so you can retain a link to your own acquired data on the user? I would assume they do. Don’t really want to wade through the API docs for that one quick question.
Harry “sorry for being lazy” Wang
@Henry Thank you so much!
don’t know about these app platforms and how successfully they will be in the long run. here’s a good blog post:
http://zooie.wordpress.com/
– pradeep
connecting with facebook.