One of our core goals at ImpactStory has always been to make altmetrics data open and accessible–to help it flow like water amongst providers, applications and platforms. We’re excited today to be announcing two new features pushing us further toward that goal.

First, we’re relaunching our embeddable widget, which shows ImpactStory badges right next to your content. This new version reflects months of coding, testing, and–most importantly–talking to users. It’s lighter, faster, and more robust. You can also embed multiple widgets per page, making it perfect for online CVs or other product lists.

The widget is also way more customizable: you can control size, logo, layout, and other display characteristics. We’ll be rolling out even more display options in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

Along with the new widget, we’re also formally releasing Version 1 of our REST API. We’ve been testing this for several weeks now with some of our partners including the recently launched eLife. The new version adds some convenience methods and prunes some unused ones. It also comes with improved documentation at Apiary.io. We love that Apiary lets you see examples of API calls in multiple languages, and even run them right there.

As part of announcing v1, we’re also now announcing that the v0 API is deprecated, and will not be supported after  January 1. Let us know if you have any questions or need help moving to the new v1; most of the calls are the same, so should just take a few minutes.

We’d love to have your feedback on both the widget and v1 API. To take either one for a test spin, just drop by our documentation page and request a free API key. And if you’re not already, follow @ImpactStory on Twitter for real-time updates and downtime reports.

Update: we’re no longer offering API keys; the API has been deprecated and turned off. We hope to offer an API again in the near future, one that’s more fully spec’ed out.