The purpose of this post is to solicit feedback from the developers in the ChinesePod community before we finalize the project requirements document for the ChinesePod API project.

Project Objective

In line with our vision of "Learning on Your Terms", we have always aspired to be 'channel-agnostic' as we help connect students with their learning materials, teachers and fellow students. Originally, these channels were the core website (http://www.chinesepod.com) and iTunes. Then in 2009, we added iPhone and Android applications.  With the proliferation of different platforms (Blackberry, Windows, Facebook, etc.) it makes sense for us to open up key ChinesePod services to the community so that they can help us support all these new platforms and make some of our existing apps even better!

Use Cases

Going forward, we feel that whatever can be done with our iPhone or Android applications should be available in the API. In terms of requests for the API, it would be helpful to understand the specific use cases developers have rather than just feature requests (please let us know in the comments of this post).

ChinesePod currently cooperates with the good people at Skritter and AISpeech to provide different tools to help people study Chinese. AISpeech is currently running a demo on ChinesePod (http://chinesepod.com/tools/addons/tone), but would like to allow ChinesePod subscribers to be able to import their ChinesePod vocabulary lists directly into AISpeech. In this case, they have requested that our API support basic OAuth account integration and the ability to both read and write to user vocabulary lists. Developer requests in a similar format as above would better help us make sure that the future API fits your specific needs.

Developer Support

To better support developers going forward we are currently planning:

• a wiki to store API documentation (we are looking at http://apiwiki.twitter.com for inspiration here)
• a Google Group for developer-specific discussion
• a directory of third-party tools on ChinesePod.com to help introduce the apps to ChinesePod users

This is a new type of initiative for us here so if there are any suggestions on how to run it better please let me know.

Thanks,

Hank.