Outside.in Launches News-Around-You API

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) November 11, 2008 --

BROOKLYN, New York, Nov. 11, 2008 -- Outside.in (http://outside.in), the web’s leading platform for neighborhood news and conversation, today launches its API (http://api.outside.in). The API offers access to Outside.in’s database of recent blog posts, news stories, Twitter tweets as well as other sources of local information geotagged to a specific latitude and longitude. Queries to the API contain a central geo-point and will return all news items within 1,000 feet of that location. The API is the first ever to make up-to-the-minute, location-based news available to everyone programmatically.

“This API is unprecedented in that it gives developers access to web content by geo-coordinates, allowing them to retrieve stories from the web according to the location of those,” said Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in. “This type of access to online content has never been offered in an API before! We invite developers to take advantage of this dataset and are excited to see the resulting creative applications.”

Availability of the Outside.in API is Significant for:

• Mobile: This kind of API lends itself to building applications for mobile devices - any developer of a mobile application can now deliver the latest headlines around their application’s user just by sending that person’s latitude/longitude points to Outside.in’s API and displaying the results.
• News Sites: Any newspaper can now add a local news feed using the API to personalize it for each reader and add to their site’s wealth of content.
• Feed/Status Sites (e.g. Twitter): There are interesting possibilities for use with any site that makes use of status messages, like Twitter or Facebook, in that the Outside.in’s API results can fit very nicely into status message areas to broadcast the latest news around a particular user.

• Location Awareness Tools: Combining Outside.in’s API with tools like Fire Eagle and Firefox’s Geode could easily create a number of interesting “news around me” applications.

First Application to Use the API – near.ly
Near.ly (http://www.near.ly/) is a cool new app that merges Outside.in geotagged stories, bit.ly’s shortened URLs, and Twitter to help users stay on top of local news. After selecting a default location users receive news stories within 1000 feet of their address within their Twitter accounts that look like this:
• via The Brooklyn Paper: Late Night Subway Mugging • http://bit.ly/HYBQK

The Outside.in News-Around-You API is available today. For more information, visit:
http://api.outside.in/

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