Official DotSpots Blog code culture design vision

DotSpots Goes Real-Time

At DotSpots, we’re excited about the prospects of real-time citizen journalism and making sure that every contribution in our system can be as useful as possible. In this vein, I’m proud to announce that we’ve just launched the first version of our public API.

We’ve focused on making sure that each of the API feeds we supply comes complete with support for real-time notification of updates so that you can get access to the real-time stream of dots without having to keep pinging us. The real-time part of our API is powered by the excellent PubSubHubbub protocol. To scale up our API quickly, we are partnering with the Superfeedr team, the leaders in the real-time space.

For our first release, we are making the feeds of dots created by users and people they follow available. This will allow developers to integrate DotSpots into other applications and use dots in ways we haven’t thought of. Each of these feeds comes with real-time notifications as well: we’ll let you know when users create and update their dots.

We feel that our choice of Atom and PubSubHubbub make a powerful combination for real-time, third-party integration moving forward.

For more information, visit our new API documentation or drop by our open-source development mailing list.