NY Tech Meetup, API Launch & Consumer Beta

Parsely Chopped

Tomorrow Parse.ly will be presenting at the NY Tech Meetup.   We’re part of the “university demo” segment, though we’re not actually university students anymore (if only!).   This is a particularly good time to for us to talk to the New York Tech community.   We have a few upcoming product offerings for developers, publishers, and individuals that we’re super excited about.

Primarily, our presentation will be about our API launch and what developers can do with Parse.ly’s personalized recommendation technology.   Developers of news/blog content mashups or online content sites can use our technology to offer Amazon/Netflix-style recommendations to their users.   Here is what the Parse.ly API does for you:

1) parses and cleans RSS/Atom feeds and other content sources in near-real-time, via an integration with PubSubHubbub (PuSH) technology

2) builds a full-text index of your content, as well as personalized “resonance profiles” for different users that can be trained and queried

3) delivers personalized recommendations (Amazon/Netflix-style) of content to users, that can be listed, searched, and filtered

Our whole value proposition is that, yes, you could build algorithms to do personalized recommendations yourself and in-house, but it’s hard. There’s a lot of infrastructure that goes along with it. You or your engineering team will spend months — not days — getting it right. So, why not just plug into our nice API instead?

Our API is a standard HTTP/JSON RESTful API, and we already have a Python binding, with more bindings on the way.   We also have an overview of our algorithms online in our developer docs.

We know there are lots of awesome ways our developer community can leverage this technology.   However, we want to break the ice, so here are a few ideas to get the creative juices flowing:

  • an iPad application that creates an elegant, full-screen experience for browsing news content from across the web.   Think Pandora.com, but for news stories and other content that can be read online.
  • an iPhone / Blackberry application for getting personalized content recommendations on the go.
  • an Adobe Air or other desktop technology application that delivers content recommendations as desktop notifications integrated into the user’s operating system.
  • Blogging platform plugins (e.g. WordPress) that assist with content writing and editing based on current blog posts, future blog post drafts, and user interaction with existing content.
  • Custom publishing applications that can produce beautiful, printable flowed layouts of online content, powered by personalized recommendations.
  • Personalized versions of any of your favorite content sites on the web; for example, personalized versions of TechMeme, TweetMeme, TechCrunch, or other aggregators.

We’ll be collecting e-mail addresses and info for developers that want an API key to play with our tech.   We’ll automatically add interested people to the Parsely API Developer Google Group.   Interesting ideas and discussions should emerge there. Then, within the next couple weeks, we’ll send out API keys to those who signed up.

At the meetup we’ll also discuss our re-vamped Consumer Beta that will launch within the coming months.   When we launched our private beta last August, we wanted to release a minimal, productive reading interface that allows users to interact with as much content as they wished.   Since then, we’ve been curating feature requests and usage to plan for the next release.   We have excellent ideas about how to make the our web application the best reading interface on the web.   Expect to hear more about it soon.

Finally, Parse.ly is partnering with a number of high-traffic, original content sites on the web through our Parse.ly Publisher Platform, aka P3.   Within the next couple months, you’ll see Parse.ly powering content personalization features ranging from personalized e-mail solutions, to widgets, to full-on Netflix-style experiences.   We’ll be rolling this out with some top online publishers, and will let you know once these are live!