First, people do vote, just for the sake of voting, second, understanding what an API can is fairly important for understanding how this could be used. The entire thread is people voting no because of the based idea of looking at others inventories. So we don't use the API just because of that? I 100 promise you, if VMK was still a game today, this API would be being used. There's so many things that could be done with it, from the obvious things, like being able to easily output your own inventory into a list, to others, like a smart phone app that lets you manage things like pins, Magic and trading.
The problem with the poll is it's not very helpful if you like part of the idea, but not public inventories. Of course we shouldn't have publicly viewable inventories. That's pretty obvious. But why shouldn't I be able to view my own? Why couldn't I use this tool to get my inventory, tick various items I want to be for trade, and then use that, along with a searchable list of the database, to pick items I'm trading things I have for. Worried about newbies? Simple to solve. Don't allow it to be used by players who have joined recently, or put up a warning about being careful of sharing your inventory with others. It's not that hard.
Using what I stated in my previous paragraph, if we wanted to invest a bit more time, and depending on how robust the API is, you could probably also develop an automatic trade system. For example, I want to trade my Bird Hat for Dream Ears. I could put up a trade that will automatically do that. This could be done publicly, where it's a request for that trade, or privately, where it only auto-trades when someone offers at least a Dream Ears. And since this is an external API, and not part of the game, I assume this entire theoretical trade could have taken place on the smartphone app you all desperately want.
Think about that if you think the game is too focused on trading, and you are worried this would make it worse. This wouldn't make it worse, it'd reduce the amount of time you need to invest in it. It would make it so you could spend more of your time in VMK actually playing mini-games and hanging out with friends, or building rooms. If you'd normally be spending 10-20 minutes in a trading room to wait until that person who want to do the deal you want comes in, you can just pop it down on here, and let the application taking advantage of the API do it for you.
And here's the other thing. I'm guessing creating things like I said that would use this API wouldn't eat of time that could better be devoted to the game. Other people here, who's skills lie in developing things for things other that Shockwave could do it, while Amy is working hard on the game. This is the joy of it.
This is why I say a new tread should be done eventually. The game does work. The API does exist. You are accomplishing nothing at all by saying no.
