Fellow Nestorbrants,
Recently we’ve been spending a bit of time working on the Nestoria API. This got us exploring the wonderful world of APIs in general (BTW a great way to stay on top of things is via the delightful blog programmableweb). One project we’ve had our eye on for some time, and wanted to highlight here, is Yahoo’s YQL effort. YQL is effectively an “API of APIs”. It allows anyone to pull in any number of datasources via a well-known SQL-like syntax. All sorts of datasets are available, and it’s not hard to add more. Best of all the Nestoria API is also accessible via YQL, for which we have Sam Pullara and Francisco Jesús Jordano Jiménez to thank. Nice work guys! Here’s an example query. But to see the true power you should spend some time playing with Yahoo’s online console (you need to be logged in, so no link). If you’d like to learn more (which I highly recommend) Yahoo! developer advocate Chris Heilmann gave a great presentation showing the potential of YQL. It’s well worth checking out. Overall YQL is a great innovation as it moves us yet another step closer to the internet of “small things, loosely joined”. It’s great to see Yahoo! driving these efforts. On a related note, for our German-speaking friends, here’s our interview with Christian a few months back.Tag Archive for 'API'
Fellow Nestorzoans,
a quick post – we’ve gone live with version 1.17 of the API. This release exposes a few fields that our friends down south seem to like. But more on that another time. As always full technical details can be found on in the Nestoria API change log.Fellow Nestorholics!
A few months back we reported on the iProperty app for Apple’s iPhone. Today I’m pleased to report that the pace of innovation remains relentless and several others have taken advantage of the Nestoria API to create their own apps that make searching for property on the go even simpler. The winner, as we had hoped, is you the user in that these apps are even better and cheaper (ie free!). First and formost we’d like to feature Sten Hiedel’s excellent UK Property app.
http://www.propertynearme.com and magic happens.
Many thanks to everyone who uses the API, and even more thanks to those of you out there who find and report bugs. Keep innovating! We’ll keep making things better, you can expect some tweaks in the coming weeks.
As someone who’s been working on the internet for over a decade it’s great to see the promise of high-speed, affordable, personalised internet access while on the go finally happening. Actually, not just happening but happening via an absolute explosion in innovation and creativity.
Meanwhile, if this post has whetted your technical appetite and you’re looking for a challenge, we’d love to see someone whip up a nice app using our average house price data As always, we close by wishing you happy house hunting.Fellow Nestornards!
just a quick post to announce that we just went live with v1.16 of the Nestoria API. We had some feedback from a user asking why we didn’t allow filtering by number of bathrooms. Lame! So now we’ve added it. Apologies for the oversight. Enjoy. As always, full technical docs and release notes can be found here. Thanks for your feedback.Fellow Nestorianos,
apologies for the lack of notice, but yesterday evening we deprecated several old versions of our API. If you have not yet already, please upgrade to version 1.14, or, even better, don’t specify a version at all in your request and get the newest version by default. Again, apologies for the impromptu switch. circumstances necessitated it. In fairness, version 1.14 has been the stable version for almost 10 months now. As always, please feel free to send us any feedback you have about the Nestoria API or Nestoria generally.Last night, MTM and myself went in for a bit of matchmaking. A local software guru organized an event for start-ups looking for developers and developers looking for start-ups. It was a bit like speed dating for the nerdcore set. Nestoria are currently in the market for talented contractors to help us build some new and experimental applications on top of our API. We need people that are technically capable (can build and host online applications) and have excellent design and UI development skills (CSS, JS, HTML). The ideal person or team would be based in London and have a serious fetish for neo-cartography. We are of course open to working with those that are more geographically remote and/or less personally intense about maps. The event helped us to generate a number of good leads but if you know anybody that fits the bill and is looking for work please drop us a line.
Greetings fellow members of the Nestorinese Empire,
today we need your help. As we announced a few weeks ago, we now offer historic house price data via our API. As an addition to the existing Nestoria house price widget – which shows the current average asking price for an area – we will soon be launching a widget that shows historic price trends for any area. The problem we face is the same one we are confronted with in designing our property search results page: on the one hand we have a wealth of information, on the other hand we need a simple intuitive way to present it for the benefit of users. Thus, we turn to you, our loyal blog readers, for some help. Please let us know what you think of the following potential designs (note that the data is made up in all cases).
Greetings fellow Nestorites!
We know that one of the biggest complaints about searching for property on the internet is that the dream house you find is then gone when you contact the estate agent. This issue, we refer to it as freshness is a very difficult challenge. Without going into too much detail, the problem is not so much technical as it is simply refective of the dynamics of the industry. Nevertheless, we are doing our part to solve it. We clearly label all of our listings with an indication of how old they are and a few months ago we began allowing users to sort listings by age. We know this doesn’t solve the actual problem, but we hope it’s a start. Today we’ve extended the information we have about the listings age to our API. Each listing requested via the API now returns a fieldupdated_in_days which is a number representing how many days since the listing last had a significant update like a change in price. The number is rounded to the nearest 12 hours (ie 0.5 would mean the listing is less than half a day old).
As ever, the full technical details can be found on our property search API help pages. Please contact us with any questions you have regarding the API (or anything else for that matter)
Enjoy!
Greetings Nestoronians!
A few updates about the Nestoria API. Specifically, the average house price data we launched a few months ago has now been augmented in two ways. First of all, we now return not just monthly price averages, but also quarterly price averages. Secondly we are now returning data for multiple months. This means it would now be easy to make cool graphs showing price trends over time, using the new Google Charts API or YUI Charts library (or, obviously, some other visualization technology of your choice). We’ve seen some interesting experiments with the average house price data, the most notable of which is Precio de vivienda by Jesús Barrio in Spain. His tool uses our API to allow anyone to compare house prices in any two cities in Spain and displays them via a Google Chart. A very nice and useful site well worth checking out, and one we’d love to see someone emulate for the UK. Here’s a screenshot:
Nestoria search results always ready and updated on your PC at the stroke of a key?
That is now possible with the new Nestoria Yahoo! Widget created by Oleg Lavrovsky unsing the Nestoria API. (Thanks a lot Oleg!)
Apple-computer users already know the Apple Dashboard. The Yahoo! Widgets are very similar *), but they work for both MS Windows and Apple computers. Once installed you also get a clock, calculator, weather, stock quotes and hundreds of other install-able applications accessible on your desktop. Oh, and the by pressing ‘F8′ on your keyboard you can show and hide them (I did say ’stroke of a key’ 
).
The Nestoria Yahoo! Widget version 1 got downloaded 949 times. To install the new widget go to the Yahoo! Widget Gallery and search for ‘nestoria’. You will see a large yellow ‘Get it!’ button. Click it.
The widget can be minimized (just the searchbox), mini-view (shows 3 results) and full-view (shows 8 results). It allows sorting results by price, newest, relevancy and keeps a list of your previous searches.
All feedback is welcome.
*) There is some controversy if Apple just copied the ideas from Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets)
