Samepoint, a company which grew out of the need to monitor and manage what people were saying about my clients, is making its vast data pipe available to the enterprise. Let me tell you a little bit about how it started. About six months ago, my co-founder and CTO, Darren Culbreath, was asked if Samepoint has an API? Embarrassingly, we had to say no and then thought about it. Why should we have an API? What could we developers do with our API that would be dramatically different than the other search companies offering social media APIs?
So to Darren’s foresight, hard work and determination, he undertook a major effort to evaluate each and everyone. He was surprised of the diversity of options. Yahoo was cool because it had many output options. Google blog search was excellent because of the real-time nature. Technorati was great for its ranking capabilities.
However, Darren identified three gaps that were missing, in which Samepoint could bring our innovation to the test. These gaps took us 6 months to fill. Filling these gaps became our mission, which we have now delivered on. The missing elements include:
- Volume – if you want to make a real brand attribute decision, you need more than what other search engines are giving up. I need say 100,000 to get a large enough sampling of opinions.
- Diversity – as a market researcher, you want a broad spectrum of social media channels from which to gather your data. This includes comments from video sites, social networks, Twitter and other microblogs, blogs bulletin boards, review sites, etc. We found that the only way to get such a diverse representation of sources was to build it ourselves.
- Search-ability - The other gap was search. The APIs we reviewed were awesome for mashups. The gap that existed was the ability to search deeper like proximity search, fuzzy search, etc. This is so needed because the vocabulary of social media contributors is very diverse. For example, LOL means Laugh Out Loud btw is “by the way”. When looking for Brands like “Target” you can imagine the value of having enterprise search capabilities built into the API.
So, we made an API. It currently holds 100 million comments and has comments from a mix of millions of sources. It discovers about 5 million new comments per day and is equipped with an enterprise search engine as the backend. Our clients are now pulling over 100,000 records per day from the API (but can pull much more if needed).
We are all very excited about this API because it now opens the doors for us to partner with some really cool application providers. It took us six months to write our code, and thanks to Amazon, our server farm can grow with the speed of social media. You can read about the API here. If you can think of some cool features you’d like to see added, just shoot us a note at learn@samepoint.com or make a comment. Thank you all for your interest in our real-time API. To the developer community, If you think you have a need for a robust API to make your application rock, just shoot us an email. We love to collab.