Genius API

51 points by tomlemon 11 years ago | 28 comments

gobengo 11 years ago |

APIs can shut down, bummer. But it's more of a bummer to never use them in the first place.

It'd be rad if you could integrate with Genius' API in such a way that if they ever shut it down, or you want to switch to another annotation service for any reason, you would only have to point to another annotation provider instead of rewriting all the syntax/semantics of the integration.

Sound cool? Get involved with:

* W3C Web Annotation WG: http://www.w3.org/annotation/

* OpenAnnotation Ontology: http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/

* W3C Social WG and Vocabulary: http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD-activitystreams-vocabulary-2015...

dwhly 11 years ago | |

Thanks for this comment Ben! +1000

Feel free to try an alternative, open annotation api, like ours: api.hypothes.is

devbug 11 years ago | | |

Man, is Hypothesis awesome. I'm bumping into it more and more, and lovin' it more and more everytime.

What kind of tech stack do you run? Last time I check it was mostly Javascript (ugh).

Ryel 11 years ago | | |

Whoa, this is cool. Do you have a live demo of this working on videos/images?

hellameta 11 years ago | | |

dwhly - this is awesome. I had no idea such a thing existed!

dntrkv 11 years ago |

I am very hesitant to build anything on a free API like this nowadays, after seeing what happened to the Twitter API, and more recently, the Soundcloud API. I don't feel comfortable building an app using their API, and then having them shut you down for whatever reason they come up with.

pluma 11 years ago | |

And the Facebook API. And Google APIs. I think this is more about APIs than about specific vendors.

xasos 11 years ago | |

Isn't this a concern with most APIs? (Even paid ones can shut down, like Ordrx recently)

dntrkv 11 years ago | | |

The problem I see with companies providing an API on top of their service is that their core business comes first, API second. So if someone were to use their API to build something that takes traffic from their core business, they will shut it down. Whereas a company whose sole business is providing an API won't run into that same problem.

And I can't blame the companies for making that decision either, why should the company serve your app if they're not even getting any traffic from it? Which would be a logical argument, except these companies open up their APIs and act like they are ok with it at first, and developers spend time building on top of them, creating even more useful services, making the original company even more popular, and then after those companies benefit from these developers, they shut them down.

This is similar to what happened in this case, which I think was a complete dick move by Soundcloud: https://medium.com/@padschneider/r-i-p-soundflake-79f7cf5f9d...

neuigkeiten 11 years ago | |

What happened to the Soundcloud API?

dntrkv 11 years ago | | |

You can read about it here: https://medium.com/@padschneider/r-i-p-soundflake-79f7cf5f9d...

I was super bummed when it happened because I use Soundcloud a lot and their app has some serious issues. I was considering building my own client, but then saw that these guys built a really nice alternative. Sadly it got shutdown shortly after.

joshstrange 11 years ago |

Genius is really cool service (founders/owners aside) and I love it for song lyrics. An API into their backend sounds appealing but without some contract that keeps them from shutting down the API with little to no notice or pulling a twitter/soundcloud/netflix/etc I can't even begin to think about building on top of this (for anything but little fun side projects/POC's).

mason55 11 years ago | |

> for anything but little fun side projects/POC's

Which is exactly what they want. They don't want people scaling and running huge businesses off their API, they want lots of little experiments by people messing around. They can see what gains traction and then copy it. It's like a free startup incubator and your investment is the time your engineers spend keeping the API up.

dionidium 11 years ago | |

but without some contract that keeps them from shutting down the API

Hello. Welcome to every API ever.

kenshiro_o 11 years ago |

I created a modest Genius API (http://genius-api.com/) when these guys had nothing out there, but still keen to try out their own creation.

I do wonder though how they will react to people using the API to make money off a webpage or an app.

bliti 11 years ago |

Anyone that is not from Genius care to comment how useful this might be? I'm having a hard time thinking about why I should integrate with this service. All it seems to do is take notes. Am I missing something?

dntrkv 11 years ago | |

I actually think this has a ton of potential. Quick example would be documentation for some framework. Users can comment directly on confusing parts of some documentation, and after some discussion, it can be edited to fix whatever confusion there was. That's just one example, I think anywhere you have big blocks of text this will be handy. Even simple things like marking typos in an article would be much easier if every site used a single annotation service.

bliti 11 years ago | | |

Good point. Now, the question is, are the annotations available for download? If not, why bother? Annotations are useful if they can be saved and moved (just like bookmarks).

hellameta 11 years ago |

Sorry if this is a stupid question. Is the Genius Beta project powered by a reverse proxy that injects JS onto pages? Thank you.

elwell 11 years ago |

A more legitimate way to get backlinks for SEO.

wkirby 11 years ago |

I used to work at Genius.com when it was a marketing automation company. Super weird to see it now.

nightpool 11 years ago | |

Different company. We just bought their domain name.