Although chartbeat has always emphasized the value of real-time data, we know that past performance is really important for understanding what today’s numbers mean. It’s why we brought historical data into the new dashboard, showing how today is doing compared to last week, and how a given referrer, page, or other metric has trended over time.

Many of you have contacted us asking for programmatic access to this trend data for your own purposes, and in fact chartbeat has a philosophy of trying to release all the APIs we use to build our own interface. Although the APIs are still provisional, we’ve decided to release an early version for you to try out and provide feedback. You’ll find them on api.chartbeat.com: data_series and day_data_series.

As always, please feel free to offer suggestions or ask questions to via support emails or in the Google Group. We encourage anyone using our APIs to join the Group, which we will also use to announce any deprecations or changes.

Another note for the coders out there: our change last week to support bookmarking and back buttons of specific views in the dashboard has an interesting side effect. You can now build links straight into the dashboard for a particular page from your own internal tools. For example, you can use http://chartbeat.com/demo/#Page::/a_vc/mba-mondays/ to link straight to that page’s date on Fred Wilson’s dashboard.