Zynga one of the worlds largest creators of online and mobile games has made it clear they are willing to copy and steal ideas from other companies and individuals as they have done with Tiny Towers and a number of other popular game titles. However does this translate to bad business, turning huge profits from copying the ideas of others?

The real question that I would love to ask is would you rather be innovative and build a unique brand or would you rather copy ideas and make bigger profits?

I don’t think their is anything wrong with using successful models and ideas to help your business grow but I am not in favor blatantly copying ideas unless you add your own innovative ideas to make them unique to your brand.

Here is a letter the creators of Tiny Towers wrote to Zynga on copying their idea.

Why would you want to use their API?

Because they also allow you to sign up for daily deal affiliate programs and earn affiliate commissions while using their API. Currently there are only 15 affiliate programs that you can sign up for however those do include Groupon and Living Social the top 2 daily deal sites in the business.

So if you are interested in using their API you will need to sign up and get approval at Yipit. Once approved you will receive an API key that will give you access to the API. You can use specific tags to query the JSON formatted details of each offer.

Below is php example of how you can query such JSON calls to build your daily deals page. The code below only queries deals in Indianapolis. However you can easily update it to make the script work for you.

<?
$key = ‘your api key’;
$search = “http://api.yipit.com/v1/deals/?key=$key&division=indianapolis”;     
$search_init = curl_init();
curl_setopt($search_init, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array( ‘Expect:’ ) );
curl_setopt($search_init, CURLOPT_URL, $search);
curl_setopt($search_init, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$yipit = curl_exec($search_init);
$obj = json_decode($yipit,true);
$cnt=count($obj["response"]["deals"]);
for($i=0;$i<$cnt;$i++)
{

echo “<p>ID: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["id"].”<br>Date Added: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["date_added"].”<br>End Date: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["end_date"].”<br>Discount formatted: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["discount"]["formatted"].”<br>Price formatted: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["price"]["formatted"].”<br>Value formatted: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["value"]["formatted"].”<br>Purchased: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["purchased"].”<br>Yipit title: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["yipit_title"].”<br>Url: “. $obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["url"].”<br>Yipit url: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["yipit_url"].”<br>Mobile url: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["mobile_url"].”<br>Image big: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["images"]["image_big"].”<br>Image small: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["images"]["image_small"].”<br>Tag name: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["tags"][0]["name"].”<br>Tag slug: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["tags"][0]["slug"].”<br>Tag url: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["tags"][0]["url"].”<br>Business name: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["business"]["name"].”<br>Source name: “.$obj["response"]["deals"][$i]["source"]["name"].”</p>”;
}
?>

Twitter is loved by many but equally hated by others. Below is a great video by leelefever from you tube explaining twitter in plain english. Hopefully this can help the haters to get a better understanding of the power of twitter and why it is so important in today’s society.

There are a lot of free icons available but I have always struggled to find the perfect icon that I preferred for my sites. Check out the 35 free available icons from modny73.com.

Use one of these free icons or at least take a look and let the different social media icons inspire you on how you might want your link to look.

Check it out