Have you ever wanted to take Kiva with you - on your phone or into your favorite social network? Perhaps instead of visiting the Kiva website, you wish Kiva could come to you - bringing you updates about your loans or new entrepreneurs you might want to fund.
We've been working hard over the past few months to create a developer program at Kiva. This will be a place online where software engineers can get creative with Kiva and build applications that use Kiva in new ways. Perhaps someone will build a spiffy new tool to help you make a loan on your iPhone, or a text messaging service that notifies you when loans from your favorite country are available. A Facebook application that helps you keep up with new journals from your loans and share them with friends would be handy too. We're looking forward to seeing what innovative ideas developers worldwide come up with to share Kiva beyond www.kiva.org!
We wanted to take a second to point out that, as a part of this program, data from public Lender Pages would be available to developers, much the same way it is currently viewable on Kiva.org and in other formats (such as RSS feeds). This means if you have a public Lender Page on Kiva, any details you have included to be viewed on your page - e.g., your name, your photo, the entrepreneurs you have lent to, as well as other details from your lender page, may also show up in other Kiva-related applications. Of course, Kiva will only make available for a developer's use the information that is already publicly viewable on your Kiva Lender Page; this would not include your credit card or PayPal payment details, as such information is not a part of a Kiva Lender's lender page profile.
As a reminder, if you ever want to hide your profile from other Internet users, all you need to do is change your Lender Page status to "Anonymous" in your Portfolio settings. You can do this by logging into your Kiva account and clicking "My Portfolio" and then "My Lender Page." If your lender profile is marked "Anonymous" your lender details are kept from public view; while we can't prevent people from using information that you've made public in the past, we can stop your Lender Page information from being shared going forward.
The developer program will be rolled out in stages, and an announcement will be made on the Kiva Blog when the first phase is launched. In the meantime if you have any questions about the use of Kiva data with the program, please contact our customer service team. Thanks!
