Earlier today, I was checking out the suggested connections provided by re-searchr (by James Ostheimer, @jostheim). A discussion arose around ranking suggested users and potentially using a measure like TunkRank as a part of that ranking. The prospect of James having to reimplement TunkRank encouraged me to implement a part of the TunkRank API I had been planning for a while: fetching a user’s TunkRank score.
Fortunately, Merb is a framework that makes it particularly easy to render a page in different formats without having to add a lot of new code. The end result is a very simple first step that returns the raw TunkRank score in JSON format. You can access it via the following RESTful url:
http://tunkrank.com/twitter_users/{username}.json
If the user has not had their TunkRank score calculated yet, the return value will be 0, otherwise it will be a number greater than or equal to one. New users are added to a queue and are ranked at various points throughout the day when usage is low. It’s on my TODO list to make this happen more frequently. I can only blame its neglect on forgetfulness.
Daniel already has a write-up on this fledgling API. I’ve been busy watching the first week of In Treatment on DVD — a show that is turning out to be very intriguing. I realize that has nothing to do with the rest of the post, but I liked the show so much I had to tell someone. :)
