Network Programming in .NET

AvatarAPI.com is a service that can obtain a name and profile picture from an email address, it offers an API, such that you can include this functionality into your own systems, be it your CRM system, or marketing platform.

One of the key features of the API, is that you can select which providers to use, when searching for sources. Some sources are more expensive than others, in terms of credits, and the more sources you add, the slower the search will be. Therefore, if you are looking for a very responsive API, you will have to make a trade-off between coverage and speed. Associating a profile picture with an email may be a nice-to-have, but shouldn’t interupt the flow of work, either for your users or staff.

Illustrated above is the list of providers available to AvatarAPI, and the average time in millisecods (1000 ms = 1 second), per request. If all providers are used, and nothing was found by any of them, the complete search would take of 16 seconds, which is probably unaccepable in an interactive environment, but maybe reasonable for batch-processing. However, given that manu of the providers have a low <1% chance of hitting a match, they can be removed, in order to optimize the processing speed.

In the above example, using only Google and Skype, one could achieve 94% of the matches of all providers combined, in 3.7 seconds rather than 16 seconds.

The default set, is the set of providers used when none are specified, and this is calibrated to roughly 10 seconds, although this may be subject to review.