API

FlipKart Affiliate API

At last FlipKart has introduced its Affiliate Application Programming Interface(API) to all its affiliates.

Update:
We developed a sample application using Flipkart API, you can take a look at MobiSphere.in

I’m excited to see a wide range of innovative applications which make use of these e-commerce APIs to facilitate/help the end users with their smart buying decisions.

The API generates the response in the following 2 formats:
1. JSON: JavaScript Object Notation (Recommended)
2. XML: Extensible Markup Language

With this initial API release FlipKart is providing Product Base Info and Product Shipping Info. Product Base Info contains all the basic attributes of the product which includes title, category, price etc. Product Shipping Info contains shipping related information regarding the product.

For more details, log into your FlipKart affiliate account and visit the link: FlipKart Affiliate API

I’m happy to see Indian e-commerce site providing API facility. I’ve been mailing FlipKart support team asking for this from years now. I’m very happy to see this coming and more excited to see developers innovate with their product ideas.

Now you will start seeing more and more product comparison sites and ready-made scripts which you can purchase and host to start a comparison site instantly!

Would love to know if you have any innovative ideas which you want to see developed ..if something seems worth, will try to develop it.

For now, my best wishes too all developers who will start testing the API’s immediately.

Get Free ReTweets: TwitFever!

We all know how important it is as a blogger or a business owner to connect with people in the right way on social networking sites these days. These social sites are easy tools to get out messages to your customers..and also to listen to their feedback.

The Problem:
To reach out to as many people, in as less time as possible.

Our Solution
To help you spread your message to a wider audience, we have built a tool called TwitFever, which lets you help each other(members).

How it works?
We accept people who have atleast 1000 followers.
If you get at the least 10 tweets, then there is a minimum chance of your message reaching to
10 x 1000 = 10, 000 people minimum.
The chances are almost endless.

Update: You must have atleast 199 followers to become eligible.
[ Changed this after a lot of requests. ]

Rules
1. Do not tweet about sales pages and affiliate links.
2. Make sure to submit those tweets which contain informative and interesting content.
3. DO NOT retweet the tweets which contains promotional stuffs, and affiliate links in it.
4. Please make sure to visit on a regular basis and be a active member.
5. You must have atleast 1000 followers. ( Can’t help it. It is in place to help you get maximum value out of the tool. )

YOU Are Special
TwitFever.com is still in its early beta, but I’m inviting YOU( Technotip.org blog readers ), as you are special and a priority.

Some Insider Story
I’m making use of Twitter API for this app, so the loading may take some time, if enough people start using it. But I’ll be upgrading the servers soon, so that will not be a problem.

If you find any errors, bugs, please take a screenshot and post about it on our official forum at Technotip.com under TwitFever Section. Your suggestions and queries are highly appreciated. Our forum is open and waiting for you!

I’m passionate about building these kind of web applications that help solve problems. Along with that I also need to consider the reality that I will have to pay the bills, of server, domain, coding cost, my time. ( My Mom will be really angry if I don’t take care of all these bills / expenses myself. )

As a matter of fact, I can get a lot of businesses which could be interested in sponsorship. But honestly, I want to concentrate only on coding and other stuffs that I absolutely love. Finding sponsors, negotiating, getting paid and recursively doing this month after month..will take considerable amount of time and energy.

So I’ve decided to have 1 adsense ad inside the app, which I hope could compensate a bit. And a big thanks to you all for understanding.

Features:
1. You can retweet others tweets.
2. Submit your own tweets.
3. See the number of retweets.
4. See who retweeted the tweets.
5. See a separate list of tweets submitted by you so far and its retweet count and the people who retweeted it.
..lot more features coming soon, stay tuned, stay active and participate regularly.

Recommendation
Spend some time ReTweeting others tweets, use the pagination to browse through more tweets.

I would love to see people take maximum advantage of this smart marketing tool, which will save you a lot of time.

Being Smart in your marketing approach, is always better.
Invest your time more on the things you really love and on things that matters the most.

Is your a/c used to SPAM Twitter?

Have you ever noticed a Tweet from your Twitter account, which you did not tweet!

When people come across such situation they straight away think that their account has been hacked. But its not the case always.

There are many services built around Twitter and most of them use Twitter API for log in or authentication purpose. While using such services, be careful while you share your Twitter ID and Password. Read the policy properly. Recently I saw a service which required my Twitter ID and Password, to let me use their service. With curiosity I read their policy page. There they had clearly mentioned that, they will periodically use our Twitter account to Tweet about their service, for promotional purpose!

After reading this policy, I started searching for the policy page of “Instantly Increase your Twitter Followers” kind of services. And found that many of them had the same policy. After reading this policy, I started noticing those automated, promotional tweets from some peoples or tweeples account. Most of them never know that their Twitter account is being used by others.

If the service you are using is intentionally evil, then they will not let you remove yourself from that service. In such case, use your Twitter account settings > Connections tab page to disallow any of these services from using your account. And change your password, for more security.

The above image is just an example and it doesn’t showcase any fraud or scam companies that are trying to misuse your Twitter a/c.
Of course, not all services that use Twitter API for authentication are bad. Most of these services respect users privacy, but some services are misusing this facility. So do not hesitate to kick them off, from accessing your account.

Even worst cases, have you shared your Twitter username and password with any service, which do not use Twitter API for authentication? If yes, then first change your password without fail and never give your username and password again.

Twitter allows only trusted parties to use their API, but still no system is 100% perfect, so no exception to Twitter.

Using #tags[HashTags] in Twitter

For those of you who do not know twitter here is a video to explain Twitter in simple, plain English.

Now a days you might have seen bloggers around the world announcing twitter contests, wherein the person who want to participate in the contest has to follow the blogger and tweet one of the message to his followers, like:

#200giveaway Just entered the Technotip.org $200 giveaway contest. You can win by following @technotip and retweet. http://xr.com/giveaway

Ever wondered how they track your tweets?
There are two methods widely used to track them.
Hash tags and Search.

Search is simple and most of you know about it. If not, then use Tweetag to search for any keyword being discussed by twitter members. To easy the job Tweetag itself tracks and displays the 40 most frequent topics being discussed on Twitter.

What is a #Hashtag?
Tweeples using “#“signs in front of “Keywords” or “Groups” and “Locations“ [This works almost similar to the tags in flickr and other services.]
For Example: recently Thin Air Summit held a conference and called their Hashtag #TAS08 for Thin Air Summit 2008.

These so called # groups are called “Hashtags“ .

Hashtags by definition are used to create real time track records of creating groups on twitter. Placing the # sign in front of keywords or targeted groups, makes it easier to track all conversations in the twitter time line via search.
The hashtag (#hashtag) provides a way for a tweet to be directed at a group and disseminated to people in that group.

Now assume that you have created a (hashtag)group #Google. If you search for keyword Google, you will get thousands of results. But if you search for #Google, you will get the messages of your group only. So this is a big advantage in tracking the tweets of your group.

I recommend using either one tag at the very beginning or at the very end in most cases and try not to put tags in the middle of the tweet – for easy and accurate tracking.

And the popular services that help you to track hashtagged tweets are hashtags.org and twittgroups.

To get started:
Follow @hashtags on Twitter. They will follow you back automatically, and your hashtags will be tracked in Hashtags.org

Its a good feature in twitter, but if used extensively it will surly spoil the twitter environment, by making it look spamy. And some spammers can also take advantage of it, by using some automated scripts(which work using twitter API) to post frequent hashtagged tweets.

You can follow us on twitter @technotip.