New year, new API features...

Dear Nestovelopers,

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the new year did not bring much to our API. Quite to the contrary, in fact. Over the festive break we’ve been busy adding two useful API features.

Are you sure it is where you say it is?

We believe that location is the key component for property search and we put lot of work in our geolocation algorithms. As anyone who has ever used address data to put a pin on a map will tell you, this is not as trivial problem as it may sound. 

We have long since known that not all listings can be located with the same degree of certainty. In order to shield our users from poorly-geolocated listings we have long been showing only those listings for which we are fairly confident that we have located them accurately. 

However, we have since realized that this might not be enough information for those developers using our API. In some use scenarios developers might want to use only the most-accurately located listings or they might want to implement their application logic based on the location accuracy.

To enable this level of granularity, from version 1.19 we are passing location_accuracy field with each listing requested through our API. This parameter gives an indication of how accurate the latitude and longitude provided are. The value returned ranges from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best, although we typically withhold listings with low location accuracy anyway.

Would you like your rent warm or cold?

Second improvement relates to the addition of “Cold Rent” price field to our API. This change will not be applicable to all countries that we currently operate, but it will be very handy for those developing applications for German market. 

For those that are not familiar with the concept - Cold Rent denotes the basic portion of the rent, paid just for the space rented and therefore exclusive of other standing charges and fees. We have recently added this feature to our core product and wanted to make it available through the API as well.

Nestoria API - all the features, all the time

We are very keen to expose all Nestoria functionality through the API. These two new features just show that we are constantly updating Nestoria API in order to align it with our core functionality.

We are hoping that this will encourage you to build amazing applications on top of our data. Why don’t you have a look at the documentation and have a go yourself! 

 

Copyright, Classifieds and Open Data

One of the benefits of running a global web service is that there's relevant news coming in from around the world. Just yesterday, for example, our Australian colleagues mentioned an interesting court case playing out in the Australian Federal Court. 

Australian press reported that Telstra, the local ex-nationalised telecommunications provider, has lost its attempt to continue protecting telephone directories under copyright.

To be more specific, Australian Chief Justices dismissed Telstra’s appeal to overturn the Federal Court’s previous ruling which stated that telephone directories are not subject to copyright. The court found that the directories do not represent an “inependent intellectual effort”, on the basis that they are a by-product of an entirely automated process. As such, the court maintains, telephone directories should not be protected by the copyright. 

The repercussions of this ruling could be broad. Granted, the process remains un-concluded, as Telstra could still appeal the decision in the Hight Court.

The ruling is specific to Australia. However, if it's successfully passed, similar principles might be applied to a number of other sectors of the publishing industry, and online classifieds in particular. Creating an environment in which the content could be gathered from any source. An environment that would then favour those providers presenting and organising the content in the best way, not those who merely control access to it.

We at Nestoria will continue to keep an eye on the developments in this and other relevant cases worldwide. Yet, we can’t help but point out that all data residing on Nestoria can already be accessed freely though our API, so one has any need to covet it.

We believe in the Open Data principles. This means we intend to continue to develop tools that will make it easier for third party developers to interact with Nestoria.

So, have a look at our API, create something amazing and don’t forget to let us know what have you built so we can add it to our gallery!

 

Nestoria API - version 1.18 - response status handling

Hello, Nestovelopers,

We have some good news - the version 1.18 of Nestoria API is out! I grant you that a release version number reaching the age of majority might not provoke universal excitement, but we believe we have added a few handy features in the 1.18 release (for the full history, check Nestoria API - Version History).

The notable additions in the 1.18 version of Nestoria API are two response fields that return API response status:

• "application_status_code"; and
  
• "application_status_text". 

You can find more details about response field implementation in the Nestoria API - Return Codes page.

As a result, the requests made through Nestoria API can get similar level of status feedback as provided by our native code. The improved response status reporting should help developers handle request exceptions, making it easier to develop cool applications that use API to access Nestoria property listings and average house prices.

For example, applications using Nestoria API to request listings by location will now receive notification of misspelled, ambiguous or unknown locations. This will allow applications using our API to present meaningful status updates to their user and carry out appropriate compensating actions. Moreover, if the location search via Nestoria API does return listings, developers could persist unique listing IDs locally, and then use the response codes added in 1.18 iteration to check if the given unique listing IDs are still available for retrieval.

Of course, the work on APIs is never done. We’ll make sure to let you know when we release the next iteration and we'd love to hear any feedback you have.

Nestoria API - version 1.12 - property metadata

Greetings Nestorlinians,

we've just pushed live an upgrade to our API that now allows you to not only request information about specific properties, but also to request 'meta' information about an area like average prices. The data comes from the properties in the Nestoria databases (in the UK we have about 450,000 properties, in Spain we have over 700,000 properties)

Here's an example XML query for 'average property prices in Chelsea'. You can see the average cost over the last month of buying a one bed flat is £576,995. Yikes!

For now we only show data from the last month, but over time the data available will grow making time trends possible.

Many people have asked for this information over the last year, and we're happy to finally be able to offer it. We look forward to seeing what you come up with. As usual we'd love to hear any feedback you have. As with all new features there will no doubt be some fine tuning necessary.

One obvious question - when will you see property meta data like average house prices for an area on Nestoria search results page? Soon, very soon.

A final note, as mentioned last week this upgrade does mean older versions of the API will no longer be supported. Please upgrade, it should be very painless.

OK, enough blog reading, go forth and bask in the glory that is metadata. The detailed technical API specs are here. Well, actually if you do want some more blog reading, take a look at some early covrage over at TechCrunch and the Rat and Mouse.

Nestoria API: deprecating old versions

Dearest Nestoria API users,

Good news: we will very shortly be releasing version 1.12 of the API which will give you access to all sorts of new data. More detail soon.

Bad news: we're a very small team with limited resources. So that we can focus our effort on rolling out new features and improvements, we need to minimize the amount of code we have to maintain. As a result we're going to turn off all version of the API prior to v1.11 soon. Please upgrade to newer versions. Upgrading should be very easy - the interface has not changed, only new features have been added. The easiest thing to do is to not specify a version explicitly in your request at all and you'll automatically get the most recent version.

Old news: our API technical help page remains the 'source of truth' for all things API related.

On a final note, big thanks to everyone who's using the API. Please keep the feedback coming. We hope you'll like the enhancement we're about to roll out.

Nestoria API: updated python library

Fellow Nestormanos,

Good news for those of you using python to access the Nestoria property search API. The publicly available library has been updated to be compatible with the newest version of the API.

In other API business, one question that seems to come up repeatedly is whether there was a way to randomly select listings. There is, just search for the place name of "random". This will generate a response with a location name chosen at random from our database of UK or Spanish placenames (depending on which country you query).

Enjoy, and please keep the questions coming.

Nestoria API - version 1.11

Fellow Nestorianiacs,

We've just pushed live a minor change to our API. You can now request properties via the API and have them sorted by date, similar to the new feature we're currently testing with some users.

Full details of the Nestoria API, including change notes are available here.

Have fun.

Nestoria API - version 1.10

Nestoria People!

Due to popular demand we've just upgraded our property listings API to version 1.10. You are now able to specify a centre point and a radius (in kilometers or miles) within which you want to see listings.

As ever, all details of the API are available on the technical details page

Enjoy.

Nestoria API - version 1.09

Dearest Nestofarians,

in heated anticipation of this week's quasi-official Nestoria Hack contest (to be held at Yahoo! Hack Day) we've just upgraded our API to version 1.09.

"What's new?" you ask. First up, a friendly developer pointed out that we inexplicitly have never returned the number of bathrooms for a property (doh!), so we've added that. The bigger change is that we've added the ability to do JSON callbacks, a simple technique to make using JSON calls via javascript a bit easier. There's a great discussion of the merits of this approach over on Yahoo's Developer Network

As always you can learn more over in the Nestoria API technical docs

Enjoy, and happy hacking.

Nestoria API - version 1.08

Aloha friends, we've just pushed out a minor upgrade to the Nestoria property search API, bumping things up to v1.08. At the request of a friendly developer, we've introduced a new method that allows you to query for a list of all valid keywords that you can use to filter listings. Big thanks for the suggestion.

Also, the Nestoria API perl module was recently upgraded as well.

The details are on the located, as ever, on the API technical details page. We look forward to meeting some API users at the Google Developer Day on Thursday.