Note: I'm aware of this question, but it's slightly different, and in my view is talking about the Stack Overflow folks coming up with an API themselves. I'm talking about a community-developed one, hopefully with approval from the Powers that Be.

Currently I'm aware of three ways of accessing Stack Overflow programmatically:

• Screenscraping HTML (painful and fragile)
• RSS (doesn't provide very much information)
• The JSON returned by a URL of http://stackoverflow.com/users/USERID/FROM-MS/TO-MS

I would personally be interested in:

• All aspects of user activity. What have I done, when, and what were the results? What reputation did I gain when? Where was I voted down? What proportion of my answers have been accepted?
• Activity on specific questions and answers - in particular any that I've contributed to (including asking a question, adding an answer, making a comment, or even just voting)
• Potentially posting in an automated fashion. I can imagine a thick client Stack Overflow application, with offline access, simple lookup of known API resources (e.g. MSDN and Javadoc) and a bunch of other things people might find useful.

The JSON feed is incredibly easy to use - but the others are more of a pain. I suspect if we can put together good use cases for certain aspects of data, we'd have more of a chance of getting a little bit of Stack Overflow developer time to enable certain URLs for JSON data.

I'd be interested in developing this personally, in C#. If there's enough interest it could become multi-language, of course - and obviously it would be an open source project. There are various tools already out there - it would be good to draw the experience together and come up with an API for people to use in interesting ways.

So, what are the other things you'd want an API to be able to do?

Note: I'm aware of this question, but it's slightly different, and in my view is talking about the Stack Overflow folks coming up with an API themselves. I'm talking about a community-developed one, hopefully with approval from the Powers that Be.

Currently I'm aware of three ways of accessing Stack Overflow programmatically:

• Screenscraping HTML (painful and fragile)
• RSS (doesn't provide very much information)
• The JSON returned by a URL of https://stackoverflow.com/users/USERID/FROM-MS/TO-MS

I would personally be interested in:

• All aspects of user activity. What have I done, when, and what were the results? What reputation did I gain when? Where was I voted down? What proportion of my answers have been accepted?
• Activity on specific questions and answers - in particular any that I've contributed to (including asking a question, adding an answer, making a comment, or even just voting)
• Potentially posting in an automated fashion. I can imagine a thick client Stack Overflow application, with offline access, simple lookup of known API resources (e.g. MSDN and Javadoc) and a bunch of other things people might find useful.

The JSON feed is incredibly easy to use - but the others are more of a pain. I suspect if we can put together good use cases for certain aspects of data, we'd have more of a chance of getting a little bit of Stack Overflow developer time to enable certain URLs for JSON data.

I'd be interested in developing this personally, in C#. If there's enough interest it could become multi-language, of course - and obviously it would be an open source project. There are various tools already out there - it would be good to draw the experience together and come up with an API for people to use in interesting ways.

So, what are the other things you'd want an API to be able to do?

Note: I'm aware of this question, but it's slightly different, and in my view is talking about the StackOverflow folks coming up with an API themselves. I'm talking about a community-developed one, hopefully with approval from the Powers that Be.

Currently I'm aware of three ways of accessing StackOverflow programmatically:

• Screenscraping HTML (painful and fragile)
• RSS (doesn't provide very much information)
• The JSON returned by a URL of http://stackoverflow.com/users/USERID/FROM-MS/TO-MS

I would personally be interested in:

• All aspects of user activity. What have I done, when, and what were the results? What reputation did I gain when? Where was I voted down? What proportion of my answers have been accepted?
• Activity on specific questions and answers - in particular any that I've contributed to (including asking a question, adding an answer, making a comment, or even just voting)
• Potentially posting in an automated fashion. I can imagine a thick client StackOverflow app, with offline access, simple lookup of known API resources (e.g. MSDN and JavaDoc) and a bunch of other things people might find useful.

The JSON feed is incredibly easy to use - but the others are more of a pain. I suspect if we can put together good use cases for certain aspects of data, we'd have more of a chance of getting a little bit of SO developer time to enable certain URLs for JSON data.

I'd be interested in developing this personally, in C#. If there's enough interest it could become multi-language, of course - and obviously it would be an open source project. There are various tools already out there - it would be good to draw the experience together and come up with an API for people to use in interesting ways.

So, what are the other things you'd want an API to be able to do?

Note: I'm aware of this question, but it's slightly different, and in my view is talking about the Stack Overflow folks coming up with an API themselves. I'm talking about a community-developed one, hopefully with approval from the Powers that Be.

Currently I'm aware of three ways of accessing Stack Overflow programmatically:

• Screenscraping HTML (painful and fragile)
• RSS (doesn't provide very much information)
• The JSON returned by a URL of http://stackoverflow.com/users/USERID/FROM-MS/TO-MS

I would personally be interested in:

• All aspects of user activity. What have I done, when, and what were the results? What reputation did I gain when? Where was I voted down? What proportion of my answers have been accepted?
• Activity on specific questions and answers - in particular any that I've contributed to (including asking a question, adding an answer, making a comment, or even just voting)
• Potentially posting in an automated fashion. I can imagine a thick client Stack Overflow application, with offline access, simple lookup of known API resources (e.g. MSDN and Javadoc) and a bunch of other things people might find useful.

The JSON feed is incredibly easy to use - but the others are more of a pain. I suspect if we can put together good use cases for certain aspects of data, we'd have more of a chance of getting a little bit of Stack Overflow developer time to enable certain URLs for JSON data.

I'd be interested in developing this personally, in C#. If there's enough interest it could become multi-language, of course - and obviously it would be an open source project. There are various tools already out there - it would be good to draw the experience together and come up with an API for people to use in interesting ways.

So, what are the other things you'd want an API to be able to do?