Like most startups, the team at Pinch Media is always trying to come up with ways to do more with less. We’ve got a list of product features the length of my arm, and at any one time we can work on about a fingertip’s worth. We want to do everything – especially the many requests that come from the thousands of developers in our network – but at the end of the day, we’ve got to ruthlessly prioritize.

At the same time, we look at startups like Twitter and marvel at the sheer amount of infrastructure surrounding them. I come across a new client, a new mashup, or a new tool that leverages their platform almost every day. And none of those tools were built by Twitter themselves. I’d argue that Twitter’s API contributes more to their success than their website.

You can tell where this is going – we’ve got a lot of great developers using our product and we simply can’t do everything for everybody ourselves, so today we’re releasing a full REST-based API to our entire developer base, so you can build whatever you like with it. (Here’s the overall documentation, along with the docs for our Application Service and Analytics Service.) We’ve been using this API internally for a while – for example, our iPhone-optimized site, which lives at iphone.pinchmedia.com, is built with it.

With our API, you could:

• Completely redo our user interface. Want to see the data presented in a different way? Go for it. Our interface not handling your thousands of actions so well? Build your own.
• Integrate with other systems. There’s absolutely no reason why our stats can’t appear in your reporting dashboard. You could even make Pinch Analytics a subset of your own product, which you offer to others.
• Roll out that Pinch Analytics iPhone application you’ve always wanted. (And if you use Pinch Analytics in it, you can build the first application that can see its own stats.)
• Use your stats to promote your application, by embedding automatically-updated usage statistics inside your own website or by sharing them with popular review sites.

I’m sure there’s a thousand other things I’m not thinking of – which is entirely the point of an API. If you build something awesome that others could use, let us know, and we’ll feature it. Happy coding!

I love my iPhone’s ubiquitous Internet connection and user-friendly browser. If I want or need to look something up online, I can do so immediately — I can barely remember what life was like prior to having one. Of course, now I want every site out there to have an iPhone-optimized version. It’s bothered everyone at Pinch Media that accessing our stats from the iPhone itself involved a lot of zooming and squinting — so we’re thrilled to roll out the new, iPhone-optimized version of the Pinch Media developer portal. Just point your iPhone to iphone.pinchmedia.com to access your applications’ reporting — no zooming required.

Like many things here at Pinch Media, our iPhone-optimized site is a work in progress — if you run into any issues, or have any feedback, please let us know.

UPDATE: We’ve added some screenshots, below.

As part of Pinch Media’s commitment to data portability, we’ve rolled out the first of a series of features today – downloadable reports. Now the aggregated statistics from every report on Pinch Media can be easily downloaded as a CSV file, for incorporation into your own spreadsheets and databases. This is just the beginning – look for more ways to share your data and promote your applications soon.

I’d also like to add that this is the first feature where the specification was written entirely by our product management intern, Nicole He. Nicole’s attention to detail produced the most thorough spec written at Pinch Media to date. Thanks to her work, if you can see it, you can download it, no matter where the data appears in our site.