The Robot Co-op

Upcoming has been very actively improving its web services API over the last week or two, and a few of their most recent changes have allowed us to integrate upcoming.org into 43things.com:

Events on city pages. You can now see upcoming events on any of our city pages. It’ll display the next 10 events in that city and link to upcoming.org for the rest.

Call our web services with Upcoming’s IDs. You can now get city information from our web services by passing Upcoming’s metro_id instead of our id. We’re hoping that this’ll make it easier to combine web services if, say, someone wanted to create a site that matched goals up with events and plotted them on a google map along with all of the craigslist apartments that were available for rent. At least, they wouldn’t have to do an extra search on our site to match the cities together. This kind of stuff makes my brain spin, but it’s the future!

More info added to person requests. While we were mucking about with the web services, we also added a couple extra fields to the Person object (the XML that gets returned whenever a person or a list of people is requested). First, we added the Upcoming.org metro_id for those people who’ve let us know which city they live in. Second, we added the flickr_username for anyone that’s associated their flickr photos with their 43 Things account. Here’s my profile as an example. Again, we’re hoping that by consolidating some of the various information about a person on the web, that people will be able to do cool things more easily.

Finally, all of the person-related method calls now support requests where you pass us someone’s flickr_username instead of their 43 Things username. It would be fairly easy for someone that’s already getting information from flickr to send out one extra call and get that person’s goals, or their entries, or their teammates, or their tags.

This is where we see web services getting really interesting. When the web services start playing nicely with one another, you can begin to string them all together and build things that are greater than the sum of their parts. Let us know if you build anything with any of this and we’ll link to it from here.

For full documentation of our web services, go here.

You can hear Daniel’s band on the radio in Seattle and live on the internet doing an acoustic version of a few songs from their new album. The new record is released tomorrow. Daniel’s voice is deep on the radio. Maktub played a sold out show this past weekend here in Seattle – leading up to a great tour.

Don’t miss your chance to meet Robot Spils on the road (and see a free Maktub show). We are cheering for you guys!

It’s time to trot out the next pony. Sometimes we announce one with a bang – like hugster, or quackers – but this time we’ve been working a bit more behind the scenes on the new release we call Bubbles.

Like all our releases, Bubbles is a pony, maybe even two ponies as it looks like there is a “baby bubbles” that matches the big bubbles – and that is appropriate as we are percolating the release out onto the site in belches and burps over the last few weeks. So far we’ve fixed about 40 bugs with this release, changed our host, and added several new features (some of these you might have seen in the last few weeks):

1. ideas.43things.com (more on this in an upcoming post)
2. goal thesaurus – the beginnings of matching similar goals together (again, more on this feature in an upcoming post)
3. who cheered you (or Erik) – now on your profile page
4. a full web services API and a Ruby library thanks to Pate
5. a hidden 43 Things store
6. newly Ajax-ified tags

We’ve got at least one more burp of bubbles in the next week before we retire this pony. We’ve got 3 more ponies in the works: next up Wavedancer, Whizzer, and Tootietails . . .

So of the sites on the list, we’ve now seen 6 out of 7.

1. Two of them are really great
2. Two are really late
3. Two are way over hyped
4. Two should have taken longer to come up with something that is actually new
5. One of them is still not done
6. One of them is under-hyped
7. Five of them are still not released