Digg Lets Loose Public API

Digg held a party Thursday evening, and we weren’t invited. That’s okay, we’re sure the invitation just got lost in the mail. Maybe we should’ve double-checked our spam folders. They may have been “accidentally” sidetracked onto a route reserved for outcasts and unwanteds. Yikes. Anyhow, it’s cool, no hard feelings. We’ll still wave to Rose and Adelson and gang in the hallway, only maybe a half-mast for a little while.

The party hosted by Digg was first and foremost held to give geeks another reason to drink [heavily] to a milestone reached by the company: one million registered users. (Over at TechCrunch, Arrington said that Digg’s CEO disclosed the real facts in a hush-hush (not really) convo that they’ve actually catalogued one-point-two million registered users, but what’s a couple hundred thou, eh?)

The company also decided that the party was a good place to mention another company first: the release of a public API. A pretty substantial byline, we think. We’re now trying to figure out whether the liberalization of all that special code is simply to gauge whether strangers from outside San Francisco can produce cooler things than the in-house team, and if so, to fire staff and cut salaries where such measures are deemed appropriate.

Alright, that’s like a complete fabrication, but still, the launch of the API is big deal, and to make things interesting, Digg has begun a contest (open to you and I and anyone else for that matter who’s got decent programming chops) in which they’re looking “for the most creative and innovative visualizations and applications” to arise from feverish late-night keyboard work with the API and a Flash toolkit as the basics on which to build.

Out of all submissions, ten finalists will be chosen. Grand prize? A Falcon Northwest gaming PC, every single one of EA’s PC games, and Adobe CS3 Master Collection.

Nope, no cash. But hey, if you need green, you can probably get some by putting up the PC and the game boxes for sale. You’ll certainly get a hefty sum for the bundle. We’d advise keeping CS3, though, considering the software package might help you develop more great stuff in the future.

It’s about time that Digg gives the masses a chance to contribute not only the millions of links on the site, but to make the aggregator do more interesting things with Flash, Java, XML, and more. It’s not that the regular amenities on Digg aren’t good enough. It’s just that APIs are very “in” nowadays, and it wouldn’t be like a popular aggregator like Digg to keep closed forever.

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