Social ranking platform PeerIndex rolls out ‘topical influence’ with its new API

Algorithmic social ranking service PeerIndex has announced that its API (application programming interface) is to be boosted to incorporate ‘topical PeerIndex’ (TPI) scores and category-filtering for developers in vertical markets, including customer-relationship management (CRM), social media monitoring, Twitter clients, sentiment scoring and crisis management.

To date, over 500 developers have signed up to use the PeerIndex API since it was launched early last year, and some of the new features have already been available to a handful of PeerIndex’s partners, but they are now being rolled out publicly.

We’ve written about PeerIndex on a number of occasions in the past, for example when it launched PeerIndex Groups last March, and integrated with SocialBro just before Christmas. PeerIndex’s algorithmic technology examines social activity across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and other sites, evaluating users’ online ‘social capital’ based on the activity of the individual across the social sphere.

Topical PeerIndex scores measure influence and resonance within a given topic. For example, Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr has a PeerIndex score of 61, but when speaking on Cloud Computing he has a TPI score of 80 (out of a possible 100). This means he speaks regularly and often with authority on cloud computing and has significant influence in the Cloud Computing sphere.

Granular insights

The API upgrade opens up a slew of potential uses and enables more ‘granular’ insights, including:

• Media aggregator and curation platforms to decide which content should ‘rise to the top’ based on TPI scores
• Customer-relation management (CRM) platforms can now categorise in-bound leads by topic interest
• Social stream readers can sift discussions to create topic-oriented forums that highlight commentary from specialists
• Social media platforms can organise users by TPI influence and provide tracking to build communities

The new API provides three sets of data per user, including an overall PeerIndex score, ‘Benchmark’ TPI scores (across 8 categories) and ‘Niche’ TPI scores covering 5 micro-topics.

“Our efforts to develop a responsive service oriented architecture will help many different industries, who rely on our data points, strengthen their value proposition,” says Azeem Azhar, CEO of PeerIndex. “But more importantly, it will empower consumers by providing insight into their unique influence on the Internet.”

PeerIndex is providing the API service to developers for free (with attribution) for up to 10,000 ‘calls’ per day, with larger scale commercial users also available upon request.