Дедушка Сюр и Ё тут ([info]dedushka_jo) wrote in [info]lj_dev,
@ 2006-04-07 23:26:00
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Interests API
Hi, I'm Israeli development consulter and working on some product that using LiveJournal.com API

I'm not sure, that's right place to ask, but I'm seeking for "interests" API for LJ. The only information found was regarding set_interests(setinterests) and get_interests(getinterests) in changelogs. Maybe members of this community can point me to the right way to figure information regarding this interface

Thank you

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[info]mart
2006-04-09 07:14 pm UTC (link)

If you just want to get the interests for a given user, you can fetch them from a URL like http://www.livejournal.com/misc/interestdata.bml?user=frank. The format of that output should hopefully be obvious from looking at it. Basically, ignore any lines starting with #, first character being ! indicates an error, everything else is a line of data in the format indicated in the comment on the second line of successful output.

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[info]dedushka_jo
2006-04-09 07:19 pm UTC (link)
Are there any interfaces like in case with friends and posts?

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[info]mart
2006-04-09 07:51 pm UTC (link)

In that same directory is fdata.bml which gives you a list of a user's friends. It works in much the same way as interestdata.bml. For journal entries, all you really have is the RSS and Atom feeds unless you know the user's username and password, in which case you can use the AtomAPI, XML-RPC or flat protocols.

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[info]dedushka_jo
2006-04-09 08:15 pm UTC (link)
Ok, Thank you. I'll check it.
But how can I edit own interest list?

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[info]mart
2006-04-10 06:51 am UTC (link)

I don't think there's an API for that right now.

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[info]dedushka_jo
2006-04-10 05:27 pm UTC (link)
:(

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[info]mauser
2006-04-16 08:10 pm UTC (link)
Funny you should mention this. I've just stared playing with a Perl script that I found that would parse the interests of your friends and make a list of the ones you had the most in common with. But my real goal is to eventually make a tool that parses your list of interests, and finds people unknown to you who share the most common interests. A "New Friend Finder" so to speak.

I remember the old way http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int= used to work, which for a "Screen Scraper" would have been useful, but the current version isn't so friendly to that technique.

I was made aware of http://www.livejournal.com/misc/interestdata.bml?user=username as I worked on this, and on a whim tried http://www.livejournal.com/misc/interestdata.bml?interest=interestname But unfortunately, that only gives up a total (And one that doesn't match the total of interests.bml).

Do you know of any page that would do what I want? Given an insterest, cough up a list of users (or communities) that list that interest? Much like the regular interest search results page without all the frills.N

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Finding people via interests
[info]xaosenkosmos
2006-04-16 09:58 pm UTC (link)
Raw co-occurance counting doesn't work so well. Weighting helps a lot; I've scribbled down the algorithm I designed, which seems to give reasonable results: FriendRecommend. My post on FriendRecommend includes links to a testbed user, so you can have a look-see at the results I got for myself if you'd like.

As for obtaining data... someone has an interests database, but I don't know if they're sharing it. Scraping interests data from here is ... painful. Like you, I don't know of any good interface, so I did something very naughty and unpleasant to walk interest edges for my dataset. It took me several hours to build up 25k users, based on 300 interest->user maps. Many of these 300 int->user maps were incomplete, due to restrictions on the way they were pulled. Thankfully, this was adequate for my little proof-of-concept/friending needs.

Thanks for the pointer to the int= argument to interests: having that count relatively easily accessible is actually really valuable if I do roll a FriendRecommend server at some point. (Right now I'm less-than-interested, since the scraping is so painful and there are other data freshness worries. It'd be a serious undertaking to make one that could stand the meme-assault it would face.)

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Re: Finding people via interests
[info]mauser
2006-04-17 01:29 am UTC (link)
Yeah, I mostly wanted it for my own nefarious purposes, rather than to create a Meme, since I don't have a host to run it on.

Clearly LJ HAS pre-compiled the data, since the Interests search works, and unique interests on a users page are not linked, they just need to be begged to make it easily digestable. (Anyone know whom to ask?)

I'm not sure if that count is accurate, given how it didn't match the regular search.

I see what you mean about weighting interests. Someone matching me on "Anime" for example, doesn't mean much since it's one of the top 50 interests IIRC, but someone matching me on something more obsure might be worth more, but Just for a first pass, maximum number of common interests is a good start. In a way, it's self-weighting because those with more obscure interests push themselves to the top based on the count of commons, and it's not necessarily true that someone with a similar interest in "Stale Orange Circus Peanuts" is likely to be your friend, even if he's the only other person to have it.

Someone once had a tool that would sort your interests into five categories of how common they were. I wonder where that script got is numbers.
P

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Re: Finding people via interests
[info]artdude75
2007-04-21 07:58 pm UTC (link)
Oh I would really like to know where this "sort your interests into five categories of how common they are" tool.

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