Doodle now has an API – Win a Trip to Zurich!

[Trigami-Review]

The Doodle team has recently announced the launch of their new API (Application programming interface).

The Doodle API is RESTful and supports the OAuth, the promising protocol to allow secure authorization of web services.

The API allows a programmer to start a new Doodle Poll, view results and participants and much more. I recommend that you check out the documentation.
RESTfulDoodle PDF – general documentation
AAforRESTfulDoodle PDF – authentication with OAuth
DoodleWizard PDF – overview about Doodle Polls

Contest

The goal that Doodle has for their API, are great tools and software that interact with their platform. And to make people more interested in the API and to create great implementations, Doodle started a contest.

Prizes

• 1st: A trip to Zurich including a meet-up with the Doodle team and some of our friends at Sun Microsystems. We’ll cover the trip to Zurich and 5 overnight stays.
• 2nd: One Conference Pass for the 2009 JavaOne Conference
• 3rd: One Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

The jury is packed with great people, innovators and business folks – but no hackers or programmers.

• Suhas Gopinath, Young Global Leader, Founder and CEO, Globals Inc.
• Alexander Hüsing, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, deutsche-startups.de
• Manuel Jaffrin, EMEA Business Development Manager, Sun Microsystems
• Oliver Reichenstein, Founder and CEO, Information Architects
• Gina Trapani, Founding Editor, Smarterware, Lifehacker

Your only task is to have a neat idea and develop it with the Doodle API.

What to develop
Anything! A Blackberry application to access the MyDoodle dashboard, a facility for recurring polls, an iPhone app, a Windows desktop widget…

Or create a mash up with another API. This always creates great and useful tools.

More Doodle news

Further Doodle announced the launch of “Branded Doodle“. This allows to brand your polls with your logo. There are 3 levels of pricing:

1. Branding: Customize Doodle with the logo of your company or organization, free!
2. Optionally ads-free, costs CHF 25.- (approx. USD 22.00, EUR 17.00). Your polls will also have an access control list you define.
3. Optionally encrypted, CHF 25.- (approx. USD 22.00, EUR 17.00). Polls are being protected with SSL.

I have been using the branded feature for a little while now. You can check out it on this poll and give some feedback.

Another new Doodle feature is Doodle Outlook Plugin

And my new favorite Doodle feature is the “MyDoodle ICS Calendar Feed“. I organize my life in iCal. Every event is in there and synchronized to my mobile phone. Before I had to add my Doodles manually to the calendar. But now I can subscribe to my personal ICS feed and dates are added automatically. Magic! This feature required a MyDoodle account – which is free – and you have to be logged in if you participated in a doodle.