Many of our tech-savvy users have been asking us for an API for quite a while, and we’re happy to announce that it’s now available! This first release will let you browse users and rooms as well as send messages to rooms (the most requested feature). Here are some of the useful notifications our API testers have been sending to their rooms:

• Whenever a new user signs up for their website
• When an engineer checks in new code
• Alerts about important services having trouble
• New posts on the company blog (via our WordPress plugin)
• Results of nightly maintenance tasks
• When a bug tracker ticket is added or fixed
• When they do software releases

API messages will show up with a yellow background

Please check out the API documentation and client libraries to get started.

We’d love to hear what you think about the current API and what you’d like to see in the future. We’re also looking for people to help write client libraries in Perl, Python, Ruby, or any other language.

Use GitHub? We’re trying to get HipChat added as a GitHub service hook so you can get push notifications like in the screenshot above. Please show your support by commenting on this issue.