Show HN: Hooks Data API – Realtime Data about Thousands of Topics Over Webhooks

krammer 8 years ago |

Hi HN!

We are the makers of Hooks App (gethooksapp.com), and for a long time we have been creating content on notifications for hundreds of thousands of users. Now we are opening our data so developers can do whatever they want with the it.

We are really excited to hear what do you can do with the API.

Feel free to ask anything!

NationOfJoe 8 years ago | |

FYI in the "Channels" section under twitter your have the same description as for pintrest.

krammer 8 years ago | | |

wow, thanks, Fixed :)

earlyriser 8 years ago | |

How is this different from Superfeedr? What will be your pricing?

krammer 8 years ago | | |

Hi! We have data about the topics that is delivered when it actually relevant, not only when the data is created. We can send you a webhook when, for example, when bitcoin reaches a price, or when a sports game ends. Superfeedr pushes you when an RSS feed has new content (that has a lot of value, we also have that) and over that a super cool real time search engine that can match articles from their RSS base (that's quite huge). We love superfeedr!

It will be free for a while and later a per subscription price is what sounds good for us.

koolba 8 years ago |

This looks nifty. On the outbound side having a SNS topic publish option (with customer supplied AWS access and secret key) would likely be popular with the serverless crowd.

ortuman 8 years ago | |

Cool. We're also planning integration with push notifications services, including SNS.

jsonne 8 years ago |

Any plans to integrate with advertising APIs so you can run/edit campaigns based on this data? Seems to be potentially a really useful mechanism especially around concurrently running ads with when commercials are running etc?

ortuman 8 years ago | |

Sure! Future integrations with advertising APIs is in our roadmap.

andreygrehov 8 years ago |

This one looks amazing. I had a side-project, Terraflow, with the exact same goals. The project is on the graveyard now, but the fact there is a market for things like that makes me feel great. At least the idea was good :)

krammer 8 years ago | |

Would love to hear more about Terraflow! Drop me a line at jose at gethooksapp.com :)

assafmo 8 years ago |

I'll definitely test this with Twitter!

I'm using IFTTT to send webhooks from twitter and the delay can get up to 15 minutes. I also tested Microsoft Flow and the delay was bigger than IFTTT.

metaodi 8 years ago |

Is it possible to add new data? Like connecting an Open Data portal or something similar and get notified if new data is added/updated?

krammer 8 years ago | |

We have not implemented yet the tool for you to add the data "manually" (we have an endpoint to publish new content to a topic, but that's not what you need). BUT, we can add the data, and the Open Data portals are a great source we have not explore. Do you have any specific data right now in mind? Would love to discuss this use case.

metaodi 8 years ago | | |

First of all, there are many open data portals around, so this might be a good source of quality data no matter what.

CKAN is currently the de-facto standard for these kind of portals, so being able to query the CKAN Action API enables to gather metadata from portals all over the world.

Some portals even have an API directly to their primary data (e.g. exposing a CSV as a querable JSON REST API), in CKAN this is called "DataStore". And this kind of data might be something you want to integrate. I can think of a number of datasets that could be interesting, e.g. schedule of garbage collection, public transport timetable or measurements from public weather stations.

Different portals have different data available. I'm from Switzerland and I know these datasets are available here. Is there a geograhical region you want to cover/not cover or it doesn't matter?

krammer 8 years ago | | |

Wow, thanks! We are currently querying using CKAN for some alerts at Hooks App, but never thought about massively adding open data to our system, as for our mobile app it made no sense. But now it does.

Actually, we want to add what our users/clients want. No region in mind.

As a side note, its quite easy to create alerts about "new item in the data set" but it get worse if you have to understand the use case, as, e.g. sending all the "garbage collection schedule items" its different than sending "garbage collection new items in that street of Geneva". Hopefully the CKAN spec will allow us to let the users to set a query over the data, so we will be able to push them only when the new data matches that query.

Thanks again!

namespace 8 years ago |

Kudos on data launch! I have been using Hooks app for free for more than a year. How do you get your revenue?

krammer 8 years ago | |

Thanks!

For the data api we plan to stay free for a while and then charge new users with a low per subscrition fee to indie devs and have a plan for big data consumers.

Offtopic: how much would you have payed for the Hooks app? Just from the top of your mind.

elyase 8 years ago |

Cool project. Are you also going to allow access to the historical data?

krammer 8 years ago | |

Thanks! Yes, we are :). What use case do you have in mind?

krammer 8 years ago |

We have been hunted on PH :)

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hooks-data

Feel free to comment there too.

myaso 8 years ago |

Really cool! Looks like some interesting stuff can be done with this. So I get to passively pick up updates from your channels? I wish there was more stuff like this instead of having the process be powered by people using a app.

krammer 8 years ago | |

Thanks! You can actually search for the channels to subscribe using our API, and we are working now on standardizing that API so you can know what to expect there. Yes, the point is that once you subscribe you KNOW that we will tell you if something happens and we will give you the needed data to do something with it.

What use cases do you have in mind?

myaso 8 years ago | | |

Nothing firm yet, I really would have to take a look at the data closely. This looks like a practical implementation of the semantic web. You caught me on short notice, I'm going to have to think a bit harder :) This gives me more options and very useful ones at that, since data is a bitch to get -- pardon my language.

krammer 8 years ago | | |

feel free to write me at jose@gethooksapp.com