The lack of a corresponding announcement on their blog makes me worry about a Twitter account compromise and a malicious model. Any way to verify it’s really from them?
As a REST enthusiast I was excited to read this and learn a new perspective but this section
> The “benefits” REST is supposed to introduce
Is one of the more egregious straw men I’ve seen in a while. Never once in my twenty years have I heard anyone say it’s nice because “you don’t have to read the docs” or “it works in a browser”
REST helps with lots from thinking through clean data models to helping ensure consistency within an API.
Disclaimer up front; party in back: I'm about to discuss a freemium service that I built & operate related to this :)
I looked around for a solution like this for a while last year while building a new weekly email for Ramen[1]. I tried a bunch of services but ran up against a bunch of issues mentioned in this thread:
- GET query string character limit
- Stress around unreliability of free alternatives
- Need to be able to handle large spikes of image generation when sending emails
So I ended up building a service and turning it into a freemium product: ChartURL.com[2]
It is:
- Free for low usage w/ branding
- Based on C3.js[3] (for major flexibility)
- Supports datamaps.github.io[4]
- Has an API whereby you can POST huge datasets and get back a short URL that can be used in an img tag
- Supports retina & `srcset` via a `retina=1` option
You need to sign the URLs which means it's not a simple "just drop the data in the URL" but it's close.
I'll hang out in the comments here for a while if any of you want to ask questions about it.
We had a last-minute standoff with Facebook over some permissions issues. That delay meant that we weren't able to start asking our customers far enough in advance, and we could not delay our launch of Amplify because it was tied to announcing our Segment.com integration.
However, towards the bottom of the landing page, you can see how we were able to use the technique to trend on LinkedIn back when we launched our core product a couple months ago. Unfortunately, in that campaign, we were not tracking clicks correctly, so we can't share any hard data. Anecdotally, several companies told us they came across Ramen through that campaign, which is why we were confident that building and launching Amplify was the right move.
I look forward to a day when we can provide a great case study backed by data :)
EDIT: Forgot "announcing" before "our Segment.com..."
One of the guys who built Amplify here. We posted on Product Hunt yesterday, so some of you might have seen us there, but for those that haven't, some background:
Amplify is something that we've had in the back of our heads for a while. We built a hack version of it for our own launches, and when we told other founders, marketers, and product people about it, we got lots of "huh... yeah that's awesome... can I use it?" type responses.
While there are other services out there like that allow "group social scheduling" like Thunderclap & GaggleAmp, Amplify differentiates itself in that it focuses on the product/customer relationship.
We've had success internally with a previous version of Amplify, and now we're happy to offer it to the world.
Yeah interesting. They really fly through the product. The use of angles and animations makes it so that you don't even try to spend time trying to read what's on the screen. You just flow through everything really quick and get a holistic sense for what's possible.
Mentor whiplash gets the founders all frothy that they need to do X, Y, and Z _immediately_ or their company will fall apart. Unfortunately, it changes to A, B, and C a week later after meetings with another 30 people. These founders aren't bad people. They just have no idea what they're doing. They got shoved into this crazy new accelerator experience, and they're being told by their heroes that they need to XYZ and ABC immediately, and they freak out and they make decisions too quickly.
Founders joining accelerators, do yourself a favor: the minute you think you NEED to hire one of those first employees, wait a week. Wait 2. Chat with some people informally. Don't setup a coffee meeting and ambush them with your whole team. Just breathe and take your time. Building your team is the most important thing you are ever going to do. This is not cliche. The process of building one, especially that initial core team, should be respected. Talk to some people. Do some contracts with them. Take it slow.
guybrushT, this sucks for you more than most given that you (and your wife!) were moving from another country. The founders should have been more careful. If you still wanna move to the states, I'd more than happy to introduce you to a bunch of startups in Boulder. We're always looking for developers here. Shoot me an email: ryan at ramen dot is.
Haven't wrapped my brain completely around this yet, but I wonder if it's going to allow for some cool (and/or dangerous?) crossover write-once-run-in-browser-or-locally apps.