Clients

So what do we do with all this product data that we have in feeds? We make it available via our APIs to internet based clients that need product data. There are many platforms out there for developing and running clients that interact with nooked - simple styled web page widgets, mashups, feed readers, rich client applications, desktop widgets, social network applications and more.

Tracking Clients

One of the key benefits of syndicating your data via the nooked feed platform is that we provide APIs that you can use when developing your clients that help you to track client instances (a single installation of a client). Every nooked Client has a unique identifier and every instance of a nooked client can get a unique identifier

When instances interact with nooked feeds they can supply an instance identifier. (Note: when creating a feed in nooked, the feed owner can specify that clients must supply an instance identifier). The instance identifier in the API requests allows us to track all sorts of interesting statistics about how clients and feeds are behaving. We can show you (the feed or client owner)

• How clients are being distributed through the internet. When a new client instance is being created, it has to tell the platform what it's 'parent' instance identifier is. This allows us to build a directed tree model of how instances are distributing across the internet. We can show you the 'important' nodes in this graph, the rate of distribution, dormant sections of the graph and much, much more for each client.
• How clients are interacting with your feeds. Use this to learn more about the third parties that are developing applications that are consuming your feeds.
• The rate of click throughs and conversions for each entry (item) in your feeds. Cross referenced with client specific reports, you can see which clients are of the greatest commercial benefit.
• How categories in your feed data are performing. If your feed entries (items) are grouped into categories you can get a higher level view of how your product data is being used.

Note: the feed owner and the client owners may be two completely different nooked users, as long as the feed is shared (see Feed Settings page). The feed owner gets to see all sorts of interesting statistics about how their feed data is being used and each client developer gets to see statistics about how their clients (and individual instances of those clients) are performing. If the same user owns both the feed data and the clients then they get to see both views of what is happening at runtime.

Pull (Read Only) Clients

Clients that only pull from nooked feeds are the simplest type in that they typically only use a small subset of the nooked APIs. For example a simple client may,

• Use the Instance Registration API to register each new client instance (when it is first created/started)
• Get an account's AtomPub Service document to discover feeds dynamically
• Get the feeds in Atom or RSS format, ideally also presenting their instance id in order to facilitate tracking. A variety of filtering options are also available to search feed contents or only get a subset of categories of entries.

Push/Pull (Read-Write) Clients

These clients are the more sophisticated variety. In addition to the use of the APIs commonly used by simple clients advanced clients can do a lot more as nooked is fully AtomPub enabled. Advanced clients can also do things like:

• Use the Account Creation API to create new a nooked account for the end user
• Use the Feed (Collection) Creation API to create a public or private feed for the end user
• Use the Entry APIs to create, read, update or delete (CRUD) entries in feeds owned by the end user.
• Use the Source APIs to add remote source feeds (Atom or RSS) to a nooked feed (COMING SOON)
• It may get an account's AtomPub Service document to discover feeds dynamically
• It may get the feeds in Atom or RSS format, ideally also presenting their instance id in order to facilitate tracking. A variety of filtering options are also available to search feed contents or only get a subset of categories of entries.

How many APIs your client needs to use is really dependent on your use case - if you think something useful is missing let us know via or forums or contact us.