Originally Posted by edgeprod

1. If used improperly, anything will lead to massive amounts of duplicate content. With Google handing out penalties like they're going out of style, that isn't good for anyone. When I invented morphing feeds for RSS, I never envisioned that people would make such shitty "morphing feeds" and try to pass them off as the real thing. Sadly, it ruined the effectiveness of what would have been a great tool. Still, no one does it even remotely like I had described initially, and people are so used to them being shit that it isn't even worth doing "right" now.

2. If you have programming knowledge, you'll avoid the pitfalls of #1. If not, you'll just be another people slapping shit together half-assed. A good compromise is to work with a programmer to utilize an API. Usually, it just needs to be set up once.

3. You sign up to use their API, yes. This allows them to keep tight control on how and where their content is being used. You can play a bit without their direct approval, but live usage with any sort of real functionality requires a full API key.




It's not something a novice should be playing with, in all honesty. You have to process the XML or JSON into something useful (HTML output, at the end of the day). It's not a 10/10 on the difficulty scale, but it's not for someone without programming knowledge, either.

Anyone can USE an API .. doing something USEFUL with it is something entirely different.

I notice you just got spammed by a dating API aggregator in this thread. Lead Wrench would actually be much more effective for you. It's a "Push API," meaning it takes YOUR data and PUTS it somewhere (in this case, it pushes it to dating sponsors who pay you for the input). A "Pull API" (what I am looking for in the other thread) is for getting data OUT, so that I can build sites.