Really nice to seem directed edge is 'language agnostic' and has provided a lot of pre-cooked interfaces for their API. PHP, Ruby, Python and Java ready to go.
It wouldn't be a big deal for people competent enough to use the API in the first place to cook something up but it will definitely help speed up adoption and cut down on debugging time.
You should ask wheels about how much of a pain it was to write all the language bindings ;-)
Agree that it is a great idea to release language bindings for an API.
The big question in my mind is what else can you do to increase API adoption? One of the biggest advantages that twitter had was their massive developer and API support and I haven't seen anything that talks to how would you go about increasing developer adoption? Make something people want for sure, but make something developers want is perhaps a smaller subset of that axiom?
It is definitely a big deal to write scalable, fast and a good recommendation engine. Item level collaborative filtering is easy to write - but anything beyond that will require significant effort.
> It is definitely a big deal to write scalable, fast and a good recommendation engine.
I know, I've invested $30K US in to a dutch company that does this for one special interest field. It took them quite a bit of time to get it working perfectly. One very big reason why I'm so impressed with Directed Edge. And why I think they'll make it big.
Yup, providing easy to use API for developers to do recommendations can be a breakthrough. But I believe DirectedEdge has a ton of sales job to do in terms of convincing developers to take it up. They would need case studies and whitepapers where they demonstrate how plugging in their engine increased revenues by X% and engagement by Y and what ROI can they expect.
It wouldn't be a big deal for people competent enough to use the API in the first place to cook something up but it will definitely help speed up adoption and cut down on debugging time.