Today marks our first feature update to the Kiva API. It is appropriate, perhaps, that part of this release is a way for you to track future updates we make to the system. You may have noticed a new section on the front page of build.kiva.org this evening which shows the current API status and the release number and age of the current build. This way, if things seem to have changed since you last tested your app, you'll know if it was us. The build number of the API will always change if we push new code (coincidentally, this applies to changes to the Kiva website too, for now). As you might expect, info on the current release is also available as an API method. Now on to things more exciting... This big change in this release is video! You've heard it here first. Starting today, our partners and volunteers will start uploading video to entrepreneur profiles and journals so it is important that your application can handle this as well. Actually, we made it easy for your old application to work with this since every business with a video also has a thumbnail image which doubles as the primary image for the loan. However, users may start to see iconography in these images which clues them in to the presence of video, and they may expect to be able to click through to the new content. To help you make the transition to video with us we updated the media section of the documentation. Since our video is hosted at YouTube, it also helps to be a bit familiar with the YouTube API. Finally, we made a small change to the Kiva website to help out application developers; lenders can now find their Lender ID (previously called UID) at http://www.kiva.org/myLenderId. Previously, there wasn't a good way for you to point lenders to this information making it difficult for most users to take advantage of apps that required this bit of information. The suggestion for this feature actually came from Jason via the discussion group, so we're stoked that the community is already helping guide how the API and developer tools evolve. Let us what you think in the comments below or in the forum...
