Hi Erik,

Are there any plans for Chess.com ever publishing a Web API for the website?

It would be great to let developers enhance the Chess.com experience by building Chess.com apps around it, such as an iPhone Chess.com client or many other cool ideas that might come up from the Chess.com dev community.

Cheers!

Good question demetrius... I also have interest in this API.

did you see one on Facebook?

here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2427617054

and I think they are working on iphone, not sure...

working on API. it's for our own iphone app but we may be interested in releasing the API to good developers with solid ideas. :)

great!! chess.com being web 2.0 as it is can't afford to go without a public API! :)

haha I was right kind of!

I am very interested in this topic, so I encourage all devs to post their ideas here so we can convince Erik to release an API. Here's my take on the issue.

If Erik, et al could give us an idea of the kind of information they might be willing to provide through an API, it would get the creative juices flowing. Certainly mine move like mud, so they need a kickstart. Here is about the only idea I've come up with so far.

Overview
Perhaps the site can support a simple plugin architecture for Game Analysis, Explorer, maybe even messages and notes. Players can choose which interface they wish to use to perform certain site features, instead of the site-provided default, which should always be available. In this way:

1. Users get variety - the spice of life
2. Developer-users of the site get a geekgasm to see people using their plugin
3. Chess.com staff can gather statistics on which plugins are most used to get a better handle on what the users want. This information can be used to either develop a better default, or if the 3rd party plugin is massively better, it could be donated/bought by/from the developer.

The Plugins
These plugins would be developed by devs in the community as web applications hosted on separately-owned websites. The web app would simply be a page that is looking for a game id in the querystring, as the site does now. The webapp will use the game id to retrieve whatever information is necesary about the game in order to perform its function.  The developer only need submit to chess.com the url to the page and a name for the plugin.

Usage
Users, in their preferences, will be able to choose which plugin to use for certain features of the site. As a concrete example, I will look at Game Analysis.
The user preferences might look like this.

Let's assme the user selects 'Andy's Analyse That!' plugin. On that user's game page, when he clicks the Analyze link, the popup will show Andy's web application page, with the game id passed in the querystring. Andy's webapp will use the game id to retrieve the moves list and render his implementation of a game analysis interface.

And that's my idea. Comments?