Is it possible to use Mailchimp API to subscribe emails to the lists of MY USERS' Mailchimp Accounts and not my own?
Basically I have a web app, and users collect emails of various subscribers through this app. I then want them to be able to click a button and subscribe all those emails to their lists.
I've looked at Mailchimp's API - particularly the /lists/subscribe and the /lists/batch-subscribe methods. However so far it appears that these will only work for your own Mailchimp account and not for remote users' accounts.
Can someone please tell me whether what I'm trying to achieve is possible with Mailchimp's API?
You would need to execute the api-calls with your users' api-key, which would mean that you execute the calls with their credentials.
There are three different ways to get their api keys, with different practicality levels.
You guess. They look like guids without dashes, and some information about which datacenter it is associated with. Some easy (and somewhat bad) calculations indicate that there are 2^128 api keys in every datacenter, so this will consume both cpu- and network-resources, and invoke the rage of the Mailchimp. The linked image shows him on a good day. He won't be as pleasant if you choose this alternative. Dont do this.
You ask, in an evil way, for their username/password. This is bad since it will give you to all accounts those credentials works with. This would also give you access to stuff that aren't available using api calls (like payment stuff). This wont work at all if your user is intelligent administrators that are using AlterEgo, the two-factory security alternative. This alternative is less bad than blindly guessing, but still provides too much access, if it works at all.
You ask, in a user-friendly way (with perhaps some quick tutorials), for the user to generate an api-key in mailchimp to provide to you. This is the Good Alternative (tm).
You may choose any implementation as long as you choose number three.
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I have a project where I'm required to predict future user location so that we can provide him with location specific services as well as collect data from his device that would be used to provide a service for another user etc...
I have already developed an android app that collects some data but as social media is the richest in terms of information, I would like to make use of that. For example, if the user checks in in a restaurant and gives it a good review (on fb for example) then he is likely to go back there. Or if he tweets a negative tweet about a place then he is unlikely to go back there... these are just examples I thought of.
So my main issue is: how do I even get access to that information? I mean it's not like the user is going to send me a copy of every social media activity they have so how do I get it and is that even possible? Because I know fb, twitter and other social medias have security policies so I initially thought it couldn't be done and that only facebook gets access to their users' information to predict their likes and dislikes and show them adds and sponsored posts accordingly but when googling it, I found a lot of tools that claim to be able to provide that sort of data. How did they even acquire it and is it possible for me to do the same?
Facebook, Twitter, etc. have well-documented APIs that may or may not allow you to access the data.
For the APIs, see the official documentation of each, because anything I write here will likely be outdated in a year or two, as their APIs change.
Don't rely on web scraping. The web sites change design more often than the API, and you will likely violate the terms-of-service.
I am wanting to pull all users in my company dropbox and then check to see if their accounts have MFA enabled. I read over the documentation for Dropbox api but did not see anything stand out where this was possible.
It's very sad to realize that a popular platform such as Dropbox doesn't expose A LOT of basic features through its API (and the SDK itself is far from being OK, compared to G-Suite). Anyway, there are two hacky methods you can use in order to pull out that information (with some limitations).
First method:
By analyzing the team events using team_members_list() you can filter out tfa_change_status_details events. When new_value=TfaConfiguration('[sms|other]', None) is specified - 2FA is enabled.
The information I found out that can be retrieved using this method is:
has_2fa - whether 2FA was ever configured.
is_tfa_enabled - whether 2FA is currently enabled.
tfa_type - whether 2FA is by SMS or by app.
However, keep in mind that you have to track changes constantly and also keep in mind that Dropbox saves team events for only two years.
Second method:
Using the front-end dashboard API this information can be retrieved (I can't remember the API name, I think that it is /2/get_multifactor and inside you'd find some information about its status and the organizational policy regarding 2FA). However, to use the front-end dashboard API (which is totally undocumented) you'd need to simulate a successful login (and correctly use the lid and jar cookies) and you'd also need to bypass the random captcha that appears when you abuse the service with too many requests.
To be honest, Dropbox's API is weak, neglected, and ugly. I wish I never had to use it. Anyway, I would recommend using the first method and pray for a significant update to the API
No, unfortunately the Dropbox API doesn't expose this. We'll consider it a feature request.
There's a feature request open for this one (https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-API-Support-Feedback/MFA-status-for-users/m-p/468564#M23886). But I wouldn't hold your breath, as #Aviv mentioned the Dropbox API seems surprisingly neglected at the moment.
In particular I'm interested in the possibility of getting an App Access Token with no expiration time, exactly as I do with Facebook.
I want to publish on behalf of the user via server, and I found very useful and convenient the Facebook's procedure in which we ask for the user permissions only the first time.
I have been working with this kind of social-networks interaction for merely three weeks, so I will be very happy to hear any type of suggestions or critics.
Google+ does not currently have a public write API. There are selected partners that they work with (such as HootSuite) that provide this feature, but they are making access to it available very slowly. See https://developers.google.com/+/api/pages-signup for further details.
Google+ does have a concept of Moments, which are activities that happen in your app that are reported to Google+ and which the user may later wish to share, or may make available to people in their circles on a limited non-notification basis. This is probably not what you want, but may serve some needs. See https://developers.google.com/+/api/latest/moments for more info and examples how to use it.
Simply, No there is no way to do that in Google+ in current time. In general, apps for Google plus is read only.
I have a website that revolves around transactions between two users. Each user needs to agree to the same terms. If I want an API so other websites can implement this into their own website, then I want to make sure that the other websites cannot mess with the process by including more fields in between or things that are irrelevant to my application. Is this possible?
If I was to implement such a thing, I would allow other websites to use tokens/URLs/widgets that would link them to my website. So, for example, website X wants to use my service to agree user A and B on the same terms. Their page will have an embedded form/frame which would be generated from my website and user B will also receive an email with link to my website's page (or a page of website X with a form/frame generated from my server).
Consider how different sites use eBay to enable users to pay. You buy everything on the site but when you are paying, either you are taken to ebay page and come back after payment, or the website has a small form/frame that is directly linked to ebay.
But this is my solution, one way of doing it. Hope this helps.
It depends on how your API is implemented. It takes considerably more work, thought, and engineering to build an API that can literally take any kind of data or to build an API that can take additional, named, key/value pairs as fields.
If you have implemented your API in this manner, then it's quite possible that users of this API could use it to extend functionality or build something slightly different by passing in additional data.
However, if your API is built to where specific values must be passed and these fields are required, then it becomes much more difficult for your API to be used in a manner that differs from what you originally intended.
For example, Google has many different API's for different purposes, and each API has a very specific number of required parameters that a developer must use in order to make a successful HTTP request. While the goal of these API's are to allow developers to extend functionality, they do allow access to only very specific pieces of data.
Lastly, you can use authentication to prevent unauthorized access to your API. The specific implementation details depend largely on the platform you're working with as well as how the API will be used. For instance, if users must login to use services provided by your API, then a form of OAuth may suffice. However, if other servers will consume your API, then the authorization will have to take place in the HTTP headers.
For more information on API best practices, see 7 Rules of Thumb When You Build an API, and a slideshow from a Google Engineer titled How to Design a Good API and Why That Matters.
I'm going to try to phrase this as a generic question.
A company runs a website that has a lot of valuable information on it. This information is queried from an internal private database. So technically, the information in the database is the valuable part.
If this company wished to develop an API that developers could use to access their database of valuable & useful information, what approach should the company take?
It's important to give developers what they need. But it is also important to keep competing websites from essentially using the API to steal everything and essentially steal all traffic from the company's website.
Is there was some way the API could be used in a way that drives traffic back to the original company's website somehow? Something that gives users a reason to keep going there.
This is a design consideration that my company is struggling with that I can imagine other web-based services have come across before.
Institute API keys - don't make it public. Maybe make the signup process more complex than "anyone with an e-mail address".
Rate limit the API based on keys. If you're running more than X requests a minute, you're likely mining the database.
Don't provide a "fetch everything" API. Make the users know something to get information on it. Don't reveal what you know.
I've seen a lot of companies giving out API keys and stating a TOS that all developers must adhere to. For example, any page that uses data from the API must include your logo and a link back to your website. If any developer is found breaking the rules, the API key can be cancelled and your data is safe again.
Who is meant to use the API?
A good general method of solving this problem is to limit access to the data to end users (rather than allow applications or developers at it). Provide applications and users with identification, each, and make sure that to access a subset of the data, a combination of both user and application key is required.
Following this pattern, each user will have access to a very limited subset of the data (presumably, the data that they require for their own specific use), and you can put measures in place to enforce this. Any attempts at data-mining will become obvious.
This type of approach meshes well with capability-type security models on the server side.