Last December, a developer on the Kynetx platform, Ed Orcutt, released an application that used the Qwerly API to show people the other social networks that Twitter users were on. Called HoverMe, the application pops up a hover card when you put your cursor over a name or picture on Twitter or Facebook like so:
The app surprised us all because it got a little press love and took off with over 30,000 installs in just 3 days. Since it's original release, Ed has enhanced HoverMe to add PeerIndex scores and Empire Avenue value.
Last week I was sitting in the audience at Defrag and Delyn Simons mentioned HoverMe, Kynetx and Qwerly in her talk saying that HoverMe was a good example of someone else building out a user interface on top of an API, noting that Qwerly had closed their user-facing Web page not too long ago.
As part of building HoverMe, Ed has released three modules that will make it easier for other Kynetx developers to use Qwerly, PeerIndex, and Empire Avenue in their apps:
- Qwerly Module - The KRL Qwerly API Module provides a programmatic interface to the Qwerly profile service. (Ed's documentation)
- PeerIndex Module - Module for PeerIndex API
- Empire Avenue Module - Retrieve Empire Avenue Ticker Symbol, Share Price and ProfileURL based on Twitter Username.
The last one of these is interesting. Empire Avenue doesn't have an API that allows you to look up ticker symbols with a Twitter handle. Ed figured out how to use their Website to do it and built the module around that. In esseance, Ed built an API for them inside Kynetx. What's more, he was nice enough to release a module so other Kynetx developers could do it too. He told me that Kynetx made it easy for him to do this with built in support for HTTP, regular expressions, and jQuery style selectors.
I'm excited to see apps like HoverMe suceed, but even more excited to see developers like Ed coming onto the platform and being willing to share their work.
Meanwhile, go install HoverMe and see how it works.
