What’s Blockspring?
Blockspring is a really exciting, YC backed startup, who pitch themselves as “The world’s library of functions, accessible from everywhere you do work.” Their platform allows you to interact with a library of various APIs through a spreadsheet, simple code snippets and soon a chat interface.
The platform lets you run 1000+ functions directly from your spreadsheet or through simple code snippets for the more technically inclined. Accessing APIs with Blockspring is done through the concept of functions and they certainly have some cool APIs available to interact with in their library.
Where Blockspring gets really interesting though, is when you start to combine multiple functions. Your spreadsheet pretty much becomes a playpen where you can interact with one or multiple APIs and create powerful applications and “mashups”. Some of the examples of what can be done with Blockspring include, automating social activity and monitoring, gathering marketing data about user segments and usage, accessing public datasets, scraping websites and now even analyzing text and unstructured data all of which are really nicely showcased on their getting started page.
AYLIEN and Blockspring
Like Blockspring, we want to get the power of our API into the hands of anyone that can get value from it. We launched our own Text Analysis Add-on for google sheets last year. The add-on works in the same way as Blockspring, through simple functions and acts as an interface for our Text Analysis API. Integrating with Blockspring, however, means our users can now open up their use cases by combining our functions with other complementary APIs to create powerful tools and integrations.
All of the AYLIEN end-points are available through Blockspring as simple snippets or spreadsheet functions and getting started with AYLIEN and Blockspring is really easy.
It’s simple to get up and running:
Step 1.
Sign up to Blockspring
Step 2.
Grab your AYLIEN APP ID and API key and keep it handy. If you don’t have an AYLIEN account just sign up here.
Step 3.
Explore the getting started section to see examples of the functions and APIs available.
Step 4.
Try some of the different functions through their interactive docs to get a feel for how they work.
Step 5.
Go wild and start building and creating mashups of functions with code snippets or in Google Sheets.
PS: Don’t forget to add your AYLIEN keys to your Blockspring account in the Secrets section of your account settings. Once they’ve been added, you won’t have to do it again.
We’re really excited to see what the Blockspring community start to build with our various functions. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll also be showcasing some cool mashups that we’ve put together in Blockspring so keep your eyes peeled on the blog.