What is the Daylife Platform all about?

Daylife began with this question: What could you do if you had access to the world’s news, and had a standardized and rational way to get quick responses to rich queries about what’s happening in the world? What could you build if you could incorporate dynamic, global, continually refreshed, high quality content into your applications, widgets, and websites?

We’re just getting started of course, in the creation of a platform that responds to this question and in terms of our own exploration of the potential offered by this platform. You can see some of our early thinking on Daylife.com, in our Universe application, and so on.

We’ve created an enabling technology, and now we’re letting that technology loose into the world, so that publishers and content creators and bloggers and developers and everyone can try their hand at developing new experiences around the news, and at extending the experiences of their customers by levering news based content.

So, what can I do with the DayPI?

Daylife lets you enhance your website with relevant content from around the world, to:

• Extend your readers' experience of your site, showing them related content from your archives and from around the world
• Let your editors create applications based on news content, delivering fresh content to your audience with the minimum of day-to-day effort for by your team.

The DayPI provides you access to the horsepower in the Daylife platform. As such, the DayPI lets you:

• Enhance your news and put it in context by adding related links and headlines – on any topic - to support your content.
• Conduct and display new kinds of analysis on news subjects.
• Generate new content about content – provide headlines, links, quotes, photos, or charts on a person or organization.
• Produce bold new visual expressions about the world, using existing news data.
• Recirculate content from a affiliate publications, and find related content from around the web
• Create fluid, engaging news experiences, such as indexes showing what topics are rising or falling in the media’s consciousness

What do I get with the DayPI?

The DayPI provides a rich, web based interface for asking questions of the Daylife platform. This enables you to incorporate news content In your publication or your application, with few technological constraints.

Is this software you send me, or some kind of a CMS?

Hmm. Neither really. What you get is documentation and samples that show you how to interact with the news content that Daylife offers via the DayPI. Everything happens over the web: you ask a question and get data back in response. Your application is responsible for posing questions and for formatting, processing, and manipulating the responses. You can run the returned data through your CMS, if you like, or you can format it along side your published content.

Does using the DayPI require some special skills? How do I deploy the DayPI?

Deploying the DayPI requires the same sort of skills that it takes to write a simple interactive application on the web. PHP, RUBY, Cold Fusion, .NET level scripting skills are all it takes. It’s a bit heavier than straight HTML, but not crazy complicated.

If you need help, you can ask us. We’ll point you to someone who can work with you to deploy your DayPI based solution.

If you’re planning on using Daylife’s Premium Platform, our direct assistance will be part of the package, if you like.

I’m no programmer, though. Do you offer any Plug and Play components?

Over the next couple of months, we’ll be providing some drop in components that will get you started without programming. Right now, it’s just you and the DayPI.

Can you do thing X? Can you add Feature Y?

Yes! Well, probably. Our platform is flexible and general, so a huge range of tasks can be accomplished with what we’ve already built. Of course, we have a boatload of stuff in the works, too. And, finally, our near term roadmap is very strongly guided by our customers.
This is a long way of saying, if you’re not sure how to do something with the DayPI, ask! We’ll point you in the right direction, or let you know when you’ll be able to do what you like, or (maybe) put your request in the next release!

Does Daylife index everything on the web?

No. Daylife indexes thousands of quality news oriented publications. Our first customers were looking for straight up news, so that’s what we’ve got. We’re adding new sources all the time; when we sign up new customers, their favorite sources start getting indexed in a hurry!

I want to get my site indexed by Daylife?

Ask!

Or, become a customer...

How can you give away your stuff for free? What’s the difference between the Free DayPI and the Premium DayPI?

You’re sweet for caring about us!

We get paid to make the Premium DayPI available, on an unlimited basis, under commercial terms. The Premium DayPI runs on more highly available infrastructure, and is directly and synchronously supported by the Daylife Team. If you're interested in investigating a Premium DayPI License, contact us.

We do make the DayPI available free of charge, subject to our Terms of Use and with generous but capped limitations on usage. Users of the free Developer Edition of the DayPI must also adhere to Daylife's Branding Requirements.

You need to rely on the community and on asynchronous (mail and forum) support for the FreeAPI.

Finally, although we don't do this now, we may in the future serve promotional messages alongside API data.

What's the difference between a partner and a customer?

This is a tricky question. You’ll have to ask Tom.

Can I control which sources I query? Or eliminate certain sources from the results I receive?

Yes! Also, and yes!

Does the Daylife Platform support Spanish? Arabic? Mandarin?

No, the Daylife Platform is tuned for English for the time being.

Does the DayPI provide images? How does that work license-wise?

That’s a darned good question.
We can and do reference images via DayPI calls.

You are allowed to display images for any sources that you have agreements with.
There are several high-quality sources for which Daylife can grant limited licensed use, provided that you agree to certain restrictions on use and meet certain minimal requirements. Ask us about this if you want to make images part of your application.

Can I redistribute content I get from the DayPI?

As a user of the Free DayPI, you may not redistribute Daylife enabled content directly. You may serve it from your site, but you can’t proxy the DayPI or otherwise re-serve Daylife provided data. See our terms of use for details.
Users of the Premium DayPI have broader rights to redistribute Daylife provided data.

Does the DayPI automatically create pages?

You can create hundreds of thousands of unique, dynamic pages using the DayPI. But the DayPI provides data. You’re on the hook to configure your webserver to display those pages.