Announcing: New streams and group dues

[Doug Tangren]

We've been busy and would like announce two new public API streams for more real time Meetup data.

1) Open Venues Stream

http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/stream/2/open_venues

This stream pushes out new public Venues and changes make to existing public Meetup venues. This is a useful complement to another new feature called stream trickling. If you are syncing Meetup venues with venue data in other services, you can connect to the /2/open_venues stream passing in a "trickle" request parameter to get pushed all public Meetup venue data in chunks. Once you've consumed all public Meetup venue data you can keep your database in sync with the /2/open_venues stream (without the trickle parameter).

2) Event Comments Stream

http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/stream/2/event_comments/

This stream pushes out event comment posts in public Meetup groups in real time. If you've ever wanted to build real time Meetup chat into your apps, this would be a good place to start. You can filter this stream by event_id to limit the messages to one public event. Since this stream only contains data for public groups, no authentication is required.

If you are writing a browser client, you can get started quickly using our mu.js script, http://static2.meetupstatic.com/24087933819704228/script/api/mu.js, which pre-packages websocket server communication which falls back on long polling for browsers that do not yet support websockets.

Getting started with the event comment stream can be as easy as adding the following to your page

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://static2.meetupstatic.com/24087933819704228/script/api/mu.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  mu.Comments(function(comment) {
    // do something with the event comment
  }, { event_id, "yourevent"});
</script>

Additionally, we've also updated some of our rest API's

Organizers and members that have paid dues can now see what dues members for their group have paid by passing the value of membership_dues to the optional fields param in the /2/profiles method

http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/docs/2/profiles/#params

This will append information on the last payment made, visible only if you, the authorized user, are the member or if you, the authorized user, are the organizer of the group.

Let us know what you think.

Also, if you've had a chance to try out our embeddable RSVP button, http://www.meetup.com/meetup_api/buttons/, let us know how things are going. We want to make that experience as simple and easy as possible.

Doug Tangren
Meetup
API Team