Infochimps, the marketplace for using, buying and selling data, has released two new API calls and a series of updates. The new API’s offer deeper insight into various demographic groups and their social activity.
MaxMind GeoLite is for the IP-Census and has 16 fields regarding a person’s neighborhood, looking across income, gender, age and housing information, to say the least. Strong Links, the second new API, looks at a Twitter user’s top corespondents. This will also help predict which users are best to recommend.
Some use cases for MaxMind GeoLite:
* Advertisers/marketers targeting specific Twitter users based on their demographic profiles; filtering by demographics for researchers also.
* For political campaigners, can use the census data to understand your audience on the web.
* If doing AB testing, can test different pages and offers against different demographics.
* If an online advertiser, can better target visitors with display ads.
* If in real estate, which users are in your geographic area and thus should be targeted.
Moving swiftly into the monetization of data as a service, Infochimps has gone from its beta launch to multiple API calls in less than a year. Sticking to the primary data sets for location-based social interaction, Infochimps also has the benefit of leveraging pools that can be consistently repurposed.
The regular API updates from Infochimp address increasingly specific needs of developers and advertisers. It boils down to data sets being used to answer people’s questions and serve their needs.
These data sets, as focused as they are, end up reaching every market. Local businesses, search engines and online retailers all need the niche data sets being created by Infochimps and others. Demand is only heightened as the digital world’s gold rush entices from the hills of location-based, mobile marketing.
Twitter has been finding more ways to repurpose its own data, adding recommended members to follow along the right-hand side of its website. Google has made similar moves, announcing the Predictions API at Google I/O this year, while services like Wolfram Alpha grow in consumer relevance.
Infochimps’ data marketplace offers tiered sets, ranging from free to a few thousand per month. Its range of data plans and tools for data experimentation provide an on-ramp for developers looking to create applications around social and local behavior.
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