Describing it as "Swiss army knife" of APIs, the Infochimps API includes the following calls to their Twitter and Census datasets:
Infochimps have long been known for their data aggregation services, but now their API will provide a wealth of additional information and the potential for some pretty fascinating analyses of the ways in which we interact via social networks. Tracking what we talk (or tweet, rather) about, who we talk to, who listens to and who repeats what we say, and, of course, what Congressional District or neighborhood we tweet from seems like information that anyone involved in social media - businesses, scholars, statisticians - would want to know.
Pricing for the API is based on data usage and service, ranging from the free "Baboon" tier with a limit of 100,000 API calls per month to the "Golden Ape" tier that costs $4000 per month with a limit of 15 million monthly API calls. The datasets upon which these calls are based are updated monthly, although Infochimps indicates they will soon update these weekly. And Infochimps will continue to sell these and other datasets via their website.
Partners in this launch include PostRank, Flowtown, and the Yahoo Developer Network, whose services all plan to integrate the Infochimps API into their analytical tools.
In an interview with ReadWriteWeb in April, Infochimps co-founder Flip Kromer said that he hoped Infochimps can demonstrate the benefits of building "awesome stuff," including apps and analytics that can "democratize access" to information about users' interests and behaviors. With the release of the API today, it looks as though Infochimps has made a move to do just that.
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