Links, please? What I'm talking about is an open API like twitter or flickr's, so that people may make 3rd party apps or website that can do anything the website can.

Pretty much, I think it would be best for everyone to let people make reddit (or private reddits) the back-end infrastructure of all sites like news.YC, slashdot (just like flickr is a back-end for other people's sites).

This was submitted as a request well over a year ago:

http://www.reddit.com/info/1jhma/comments/

It's interesting that you commented on that thread, saying:

  adding the display templates is easy. what i'd be really concerned about is the db load, but that's solvable as well.

and also:

  We'd certainly do it. It just takes time, and that's a scarce resource at the moment.

It's been a year and two months since then... how much longer do you need? The data you have comes from the community... why not open automated access to it?