In the last year Prosper.com has introduced a series of developers to help build upon the platform. These tools allows users to acquire data about Propser loans in one of two ways: via an API (application programming interface) and a data export service.

The API is a web service based interface (SOAP) that allows for querying of the Prosper marketplace. This service enables retrieving data of things such as bidding, listing information and portfolio information.

The data mining service provides complete information on all listings, bids, users and specific loans that have ever been created on Prosper. This data is available in two formats, either as a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet and in raw XML. Prosper also has tools to import the XML data into different databases such as SQLServer, MySQL or Access.This data is useful for things such as building graphs, finding changes in the marketplace over time, and examining bidding patterns.

If you’d like to explore the Prosper developer tools, you can find the developers API here and the data export tools here.

In addition, to support developers, Prosper has a developers discussion forum and also an outlay of many different tools that have already been developed.