We’re glad to announce that our API is now available and ready to be used by your applications. We’ve had an API for quite a while, but unfortunately only the website itself was able to take advantage of it. Apart from the RSS feeds that we mentioned on the blog a few months ago the only way to access the API was using a cookie based authentication method, i.e. your user session. There was also no documentation at all for what you could do with those. The first of those issues has now been completely solved. We are now ready to offer access to our API through the OAuth protocol. OAuth is a really great way to offer authenticated web services that allows users to give applications access to their data without having to hand over their username and password. It also allows users to take back those rights at a later time so that applications cannot continue to access their data for longer than they want.
Our OAuth service can be accessed by hitting the address http://mapme.at/oauth. This is the address that you use to register your applications and is also the address that users will go to when they grant access to their data. To register a new application you will need to have an account on mapme.at. Simply make sure you’re logged in and then head over to http://mapme.at/oauth to get started with registering your new apps.
The second issue mentioned above – documentation – is still being worked on, but for now we’ll give you information about a few calls that you can use to get you started. We’ll be developing the API and the documentation over the next few months.
All of the API methods are accessed via the /api path on the site, there’s methods for updating a user’s location, reading a user’s location and for managing a user’s favourite locations and contacts. For now take a look at the following two links which show you how to update a user’s location and how to read their current and past locations.
Reading a user’s location history
We ask that you are careful about how often you ping the server, if we find that any single app appears to be taking advantage then we may decide to block its access. If you think you have a valid reason for making large numbers of request then please get in touch with us to discuss this. Generally you shouldn’t need to do this though as we will be storing history and you should only need to check from time to time to query this history.