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So, what is nooked?

nooked is a standards based API web service for enabling a variety of internet e-commerce scenarios by distributing products, offers and deals between many retailers, publishers and consumers. nooked uses standard feed publication and syndication formats and protocols to deliver content to widgets, social network applications, mashups - basically anything on the internet or in the mobile world.

Merchants, publishers, consumers and nooked

nooked allows merchants to:

• Create, populate and validate product feeds that contain their product data
• Manage and measure the performance and usage of product feeds
• Negotiate and control revenue sharing with publishers

We work with publishers such as widget developers, affiliate marketers and blog owners to:

• Engage with retailers whose product data they wish to promote
• Create widgets to promote/sell products on their site or other sites if the publisher is an affiliate
• Manage and measure the performance of campaigns and individual widgets

Consumers like social network users, blog owners and web site readers don't usually see nooked but they do use us to find and install widgets that deliver product information they are interested in. What's in it for the consumer?

• They get regular notification of offers and deals that are directly relevant to their needs
• The automatically get widget updates from the publishers server
• They can personalise widgets and share them with others, perhaps leading to a small revenue share or credit/discount with the retailer
• They can use the widgets as a form of self-expression, allowing online shopping to be a more social experience than previously possible. Consumers can participate in social shopping via widgets, for example sharing recommendations with their friends through the widget

For each of the 3 main network constituents feed syndication and publishing standards are the primary plumbing mechanism used for communication.

nooked is a scalable feed publishing/syndication platform that can service data to millions of clients (widgets, mashups, readers etc) on the internet. We provide a rich statistics/analytics system that presents the data owner with detailed information regarding the use of their data by clients. Example metrics are click through (CPC), actions (CPA), trends vs industry etc.

APIs

nooked offers standards based APIs to allow ease of publication and syndication of arbritrary data in RSS/Atom formats - de-facto formats for machine readable data. nooked is AtomPub enabled and supports OpenSearch sharing of search results.

At nooked we believe in the utility of simple web service APIs. We provide them for everything in our platform - publishing/syndicating feed data, creating accounts and feeds and getting analytics data. Simple RESTful APIs are key - we don't use complex WSDL/SOAP/WS-* software stacks. Instead you will find a set of RESTful APIs that most internet client languages (Javascript, flash etc.) can talk to with little or no additional library support. Back end systems can talk to it using simple HTTP support built into every scripting language under the sun. We will, in time, be providing more wrapper libraries for most popular languages to interact with our platform.

The Atom Publishing Protocol

The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) is a recently approved specification that was developed to tackle the problem of updating feeds in a standard way. It is already gaining significant traction from major players such as Google (OpenSocial APIs are AtomPub based), Microsoft (LiveWriter is an AtomPub client), Wordpress (has AtomPub support) and Movable Type (has AtomPub support).

This unique feature of nooked allows online merchants systems to update feed entries (i.e. product data) on a one-by-one basis if they want to. This real-time update capability can be vital for time sensitive product itinerary.

Sources

As well as allowing use of AtomPub to add entries to yout nooked feeds you can also tell your nooked feeds to aggregate content from existing feeds elsewhere on the internet. We call these remote feeds sources. nooked will pull conent from these sources periodically to batch upload and update product data into the nooked feed platform. An important thing to remember is that a single nooked feed can aggregate content from many remote source feeds in addition to also containing entries created or edited via AtomPub APIs. This allows a single nooked feed to act as a 'river of news' (or 'river of products') that can be presented in a variety of ways.

Sources can be merchants or affiliate data files that contain product data via a variety of formats and protocols. RSS and Atom are the norm, accessed via HTTP but we can add support for other formats if required.

Security

nooked support creation of both public world-readable feeds and private user-readable feeds that require authentication in order to be accessed. Access to nooked statistics data related to feed and client usage also requires authentication.

Scalability

Dealing with millions of clients is our business so scaling our service is a task we are always working on. Our platform architecture allows us to scale horizontally by adding more commodity hosts to our server cluster

nooked is also designed to serve feed content in a manner that allows intermediate internet backbone cache servers to serve content when it has not been changed.

Availability

We recognize that uptime for a service like ours is a key measure of utility and dependability. We deploy our platform into an environment that meets the high availability requirements of commercial internet based web services.