There’s been a lot cooking behind the scenes of late. Secretly the newest version of the webservices have been up and running for about a month. First we wanted to update the docs. Then they began growing. And there was a tutorial. And more examples. And the new Ruby bindings were shaping up.

Before we knew it, we had a full-blown developer site in the works. So, folks, that’s what’s on the menu today:

http://developer.directededge.com/

There’s a bunch of stuff in there we’re excited about.  There’s a nice intro to some of the concepts that folks sometimes get hung up with when starting to work with the API. The API Docs have been improved and expanded. We’ve got examples out the wazoo. The docs for the Ruby bindings live there now and there’s a step by step tutorial on using them and a sample implementation for using them and pulling the data out of an existing MySQL database using ActiveRecord.

Whew, but that’s just the stuff about the webservices, what’s actually new in the webservices?

• Separate methods for related and recommended queries giving much better personalized recommendations. This is the biggie (despite its humble packaging).
• Weights (aka explicit ratings) are finally supported.  DB’s had them for a while.  Finally popped them up to the webservices level.  There’s more in the pipe there, but we’ve got to leave some excitement for the next update.
• “excludeLinked” basically goes hand in hand with personalized recommendations; doesn’t recommend stuff you’ve already seen / bought / rated.
• add / remove for incremental updates.  Means that you can add a tag, link, or whatever to an item without having to pull down the item or worry about consistency.
• Lots of bug-fixes and performance enchancements. Not that our code wasn’t perfect before.  Ahem.

So, dig in, let us know what content is missing on the developer site and enjoy.  Hopefully the next batch of features will get pushed out just a wee bit faster.  We’ve also been slowly expanding the beta program and setting up accounts for more and more sites, so if you’ve got something interesting you’d like to bang out with our API, we look forward to hearing from you!

In preparation for going live with our new database, updated API and new clustering algorithms we’ve switched the Wikipedia mashup and API over to the new database.  The most obvious part of the transition is that obscure topics have higher quality results as do the results for tagged items.

Here’s an example for Canonical Ltd., note the difference in the results for related companies:

 

We’ll be following up in the next few days the details of the API updates and, by popular request, some technical information on our graph database.