Interactive Rich Media

Today, I registered for an eBay Development account. The eBay Developers Homepage provides support, documentation, code samples, API keys, affiliate programs, forum, sandbox, tools, release notes and system announcements.

A sandbox key and a production key can be generated on the personal account page. There are different API’s available : shopping, merchandising, feedback, trading, client alerts, large merchant services, platform notification, research. The developer center is segmented in Windows, Java, php, Javascript, Flash and other. The eBay community codebase contains several open-source projects.

I started using the shopping API (view guide) which is optimized for response size, speed and usability. This API allows to search for eBay items, products and reviews, user info, and popular items and searches. You are able to retrieve public eBay data in a buyer-friendly view, for easy consumption by buyer-focused applications. The call reference (version 613) of the eBay shopping API is available on the following link. The call “FindItemsAdvanced” is the most useful and enables you to search for items on eBay based on many possible input fields and filters. Detailed informations are available here.

On april 21th, Google announced that the Google Analytics Data Export API beta is now publicly available to all Analytics users. The API will allow developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users.

A list of featured examples from Google customers is available at the Google developer website. All the documentation needed to use the API is found on the same website.

FeedBurner is a Chicago-based company that provides media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Its Web-based tools, including an extensive feed and blog advertising network, help publishers promote, deliver, and monetize their content on the Web and make feed-based content more accessible and manageable for its end users. In 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google.

A FeedBurner Blog is available at the Google website. FeedBurner Stats is Google’s analytics offering for blogs, websites and feeds of all kinds. The service is free with every FeedBurner feed and provides publishers with a comprehensive view of their audience.

The FeedBurner Stats service for feeds provides the following feed-related information:

• Subscription data (e.g. number of subscribers by day, previous week, last 30 days and all time) and Reach data (the estimated number of individuals clicking or viewing your feed content in a given day)
• Breakdown of feed readers and aggregators, email services, web browsers and bots by which subscribers are accessing your content
• Clickthrough tracking
• Uncommon uses — sites where your content has been resyndicated including other blogs, directories and even spam sites
• Item enclosure downloads (podcasts)
• Live hits, conveniently translated to your local time zone

For even more insight, you can activate the following PRO features for no charge:

• Reach
• Item views

Today I activated FeedBurner for my Blog.

(http://feeds2.feedburner.com/InteractiveRichMedia)