ACTIVE Network API Developer Blog

Start Earning Commissions with the Activity Search API v2

A few months back, the beta version of Activity Search API v2 made its public debut at HACKTIVE, where developers and designers put the ACTIVE APIs to the test as they innovated new ways of getting people active. Today, ACTIVE Network is proud to announce the official launch of the new Activity Search API v2 with affiliate tracking! Now, third-party developers can begin earning commissions for registrations driven through this API. The current Activity APIs will remain online for six additional months, which will give you plenty of time to upgrade your applications to the new Activity Search API v2 (see API Transition Plan below for more details).

What Is the New Activity Search API v2?
The launch of this new Activity Search API v2 will unlock loads of data and flexibility for app developers. It processes simple HTTP GET requests and returns results in JSON.  The API supports keyword search against ACTIVE assets, result restriction to a particular location, and result filtering based on asset metadata. All activity registrations are completed online at ACTIVE.com. The reason this is so exciting is because we’ve also been working tirelessly to standardize our event and activity data across the company.

What Does That Mean To You?
We take event and activity data of any quality and completeness and utilize machine learning algorithms and text mining techniques to assess, clean, classify, and vastly improve the quality of the data to a form suitable for feeding into the comprehensive list of world-wide events and activities offered through Active.com.  The system also ensures proper naming, categorizing, and search optimization of each event, while breaking the data down into independent sub-components, each of which can be enhanced and accessed separately. Subsequent re-submissions of these events are detected upon ingestion, de-duplicated, and smartly re-assigned the prior final changes depending on what data is new for even faster time-to-live improved data on update. No longer will you need to remove duplicate events or create special “workarounds” to pull the correct data. Basically, there will be even more events in the database and you can find the events that you are looking for more easily via the Activity Search API v2.

Enhancements Galore
Here are some of the new features you’ll find in the Activity Search API v2:

  • Additional Events Available – All new events submitted to our database will be available through the Activity Search API v2. The existing Activity API will slowly receive fewer updates and less event volume. If you’re just starting to build your app, then make sure you’re building with the Activity Search API v2.
  • REST Service – Supports JSON results returned by the API
  • Expanded Data Set –Eliminates need for the Activity Details API making for a simpler integration
  • Extra Classifications and tags – assets  allow for more refined search capability using new parameters
  • Combined schema – services all activity types (e.g. Camps, Classes, Races, Events)
  • Standardized Attributes – e.g. Distance, Age Group
  • Improved geo-location – Much improved latitude/longitude values to aid in location-based searches

API Transition Plan
All applications need to update their implementation to use the new Activity Search API v2 by August 1st, 2014— approximately six months from now. To get there in the most effective manner, here is our migration plan:

  • Starting April 1st, 2014, all applications using the existing Activity API will have their rate limits slowly reduced as we have marked this API for end-of-life on August 1st, 2014.
  • A rate limit of 10K calls per day will be instituted on these API keys and will be decreased by 2K calls per month until the API is sunset.
  • If you register your existing (or new) application and start using the Activity Search API v2 now, you will _not_ be throttled/rate limited. We therefore highly encourage you to start using the new Activity Search API v2 keys as soon as possible.

Getting Started
Here is a quick start guide to the developer portal to help you begin building your application using an Activity Search API v2 key:

Register — http://developer.active.com/member/register
Documentation — http://developer.active.com/docs/
Interactive IO Docs — http://developer.active.com/io-docs
Developer Forum — http://developer.active.com/forum

We value our developer community and have thought about this API launch carefully. If you have any inquires, feedback, or issues related to the new API, please comment it in the forum and we’ll keep the discussion going there.