Announcing the Interest Graph API by Dave Golland.
From the post:
Today we’re taking the first step in opening up our interest graph by releasing an API that automatically identifies the thematic content of a piece of text. Sign up for an API token to start tagging your text.
Our Expertise in Your Hands
At Prismatic we’ve spent a long time thinking about how to provide our users with the most relevant recommendations. To do this, we’ve engineered the interest graph — a model that helps us understand our users, their interests, publishers, content, and the connections between them. By aligning with users’ interests, the interest graph enables recommendations of products and content to deliver an experience that people care about. Today, we’re releasing the first building block of our interest graph, the connection between content and interests.
When we built the interest graph for Prismatic, we wanted to find interests that people identify with. Most existing taxonomies were either too specific (e.g., Wikipedia) or too task-focused (e.g., ads targeting), so we decided to build our own. We surveyed the popular newspaper categories that have been used to classify articles for centuries, supplemented this list with the top liked pages on Facebook, and added the most popular search queries from the Prismatic app. The result is the most comprehensive list of interests that people care about on the web today.
These interests are single-phrase summaries of the thematic content of a piece of text; examples include Functional Programming, Celebrity Gossip, or Flowers. Interests provide a short, meaningful summary of the content of an article, so you can quickly get a sense for what it’s about without spending the time reading it. By providing a short, intelligible summary, interests lend useful structure to otherwise raw, unstructured text.
We have received many requests to open our interest graph to external developers. Today, we’re happy to announce an ALPHA version of the same interest graph powering Prismatic. We are excited to see the creative and new projects that will come from getting our interest graph into the hands of developers.
As an “ALPHA” version, Prismatic needs your help to check the functioning of the API and the accuracy of tagging. Get in on the “ground” floor!