Would any other nerds be interested in a Fluther info-dump?
Asked by
jrpowell (
40562
)
June 17th, 2008
Maybe just the info on the users page to start. Username, points, last visit, member since, questions asked, questions answered. If we had a text file of this data I think we could come up with some neat tools to visualize the data.
It shouldn’t be hard to dump that into text file for people to work with. And it would be less damaging to the server than screen scraping.
Would anyone else like to see this? And what tools would you like to see with this data.
For example: Something could be made that ranks users by points per contribution.
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
15 Answers
Yeah. But that is screen scraping to get the data. It would be easier to have the data than to have to hit up the fluther server for data.
I was just think a info-dump would be a lot easier then a public API. (for the coders to implement)
I’d like to see that. Maybe a way to track the answers a Flutherer has posted.
I’m sure there’s an obvious answer to this, but I gotta ask…....why? I mean, you can see what users contribute (even if you don’t see every answer they post, you see those related to questions you’re interested in).
And making regular extracts of user data in order to pull up stats to see what contributions users have made…...when those that ‘cross-reference’ with your interests will be obvious by using fluther…..it just seems unnecessary to me (and yes, I know, I’m a non-techi, I don’t enjoy doing these things for the sake of doing them, I have a hankering for practical application or necessity)
What would that info dump mean for having the information out there for just anyone to use and manipulate without even the somewhat meager protection of the Fluther user agreement?
It could be done right now. The reason I don’t collect the data is that it will hammer the server with unnecessary requests. A zip file containing the data would be easier for everyone.
Lots of places have public API’s. http://Amazon.com gets by one. This isn’t any different.
I think it’d be interesting to have that kind of information about the Questions and Answers posted – not so much the people posting them.
Like, what category of questions (relationships, computers, internet, politics, etc.) get the most GQ’s and answers.
On questions with >50 answers, how many are repeats, i.e. how many users answer.
That kind of metric would be very interesting – the who gets most GA’s per post…..I wouldn’t be interested. It’s the information, more than the people behind it, that I look for.
And all that info would be great. I was just starting with a simple example.
Ranks users by per contribution. Sounds like a lurve batting average. Another stat for us to chase. Hooray!
@buster
I take it you aren’t a data nerd. That is cool. I love analyzing data. I think it would be interesting to see the raw data and play with it.
It would be fun to have some other stats you could see .
[Fluther Moderator:] An API has already been in the works for some time and is coming soon, according to Ben, Andrew and Erik. Besides, real time data would be more fun than static data updated once a week or something. Stay tuned!
As richardhenry said, we’re just beginning work on an API for developers now. I’m not making any promises about when a 1.0 version will be announced, but we may be looking for beta developers in the coming months.
In the mean time, feel free to screen-scrape or use our RSS feeds to harvest data. A couple users have already done this and created some pretty neat applications. We could give them some space on the blog to talk about exactly how they did that, if there’s an interest.
We’re super-excited about other people developing Fluther apps and we’d like to make it as easy as possible for you to do so. We also want to make sure we get the API right, so please be patient with us.
Answer this question 
Composing members:
0
