By popular demand, Quora released a minimal, JSON-based API for browser extension developers last week. Quora’s Charlie Cheever had previously written, on Quora no less, that the company was holding off on releasing an API for a number of reasons.
However, following two third-party browser extensions for Quora, the company has decided to release an official API in alpha to support those efforts. The new API will provide basic information for the currently logged users, including notifications and unread message count.
Cheever wrote in December 2009:
When there are enough users and content on Quora that an API would be really useful, we’ll almost certainly add one.
For right now, we’ll probably focus on the web interface since that’s how we think most people will use the product, at least to start. Another reason we probably won’t do an API for a little while is that the interface into the product is changing frequently in big ways right now (ex. We added “thanks” a few days ago and we’re not sure if we’ll keep that or not,) and APIs that aren’t stable are hard to use effectively.
The release of Andrew Brown‘s Chrome extension and Jason Wiener‘s Firefox extension seems to have pushed Quora into finally releasing an API, albiet a simple one.
The API can access a logged-in users inbox, followers, following and notifications.
