The New York Times launches an API

The New York Times just launched their first API.  You can get campaign finance data and movie reviews.  The campaign finance API is based on data from the Federal Election Commission, which you can already get online elsewhere.  So the information itself is not big news.  But information is valuable in direct proportion to its accessability, and that’s why this is so great.  This is the same principle that drives the GDP multiplier for the link economy.  If you follow their site, you probably have noticed that the Times is good at pulling information into engaging and informative flash widgets and interactive maps.  Having the data available to the public through an API lets do the same thing with the campaign finance and movie datasets.  The ways in which you can query the data aren’t as numerous as if you had it all housed in a relational database on your own server, but you have to make some accomodations for scalability.

The movie API is also nice, although it has a similarly narrow focus.  Based on earlier statements I expect then to launch a few more separate APIs, for things such as restaurant reviews, local listings, and recipes.  Of course I’d prefer if they released it all at once, under a uniform API.  But I hope these go well, since I would love to see all of their content available through it.  About a year ago they also pondered offering a search API, but I have heard nothing about it since.  I think they don’t realize how cruelly they tease us.  

At Daylife we recently launched a service to help publishers do just this.  Our CEO Upendra Shardanand blogged about it in more detail.  The Times has a large and talented group of technologists at their disposal, so they can go it alone for a project like this.  Rolling out an API calls for a different set of skills and has different infrastructure requirements than a news portal or web site, and not all publishers will be able to do it successfully.  Those that do have the technical skills won’t be able to do it as quickly.