Alex Barnett blog : Attention, APIs, mydata

Among the dynamos, My Data and advice for startups.

alexbarnett — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:41:00 GMT

SaaS / DaaS / WaaS (Whatever As a Service) and Mashups

Nick Carr quotes Henry Adams in Among the dynamos

“One lingered long among the dynamos,” he wrote, “for they were new, and they gave to history a new phase.

Pointing to SaaS Platforms trends, Clive Keyte write about "SaaS Management Platforms"

"Force.com is not on it’s own offering ‘cloud development facilities for SaaS applications though, there are a plethora of smaller companies entering into the fray including Bungee Connect"

Among the dynamos indeed...

And SaaS by the numbers: Salesforce.com: 24 Billion API Calls So Far

"This statistic along with others like 130 million transactions daily, 61,200 custom applications, and 750 AppExchange apps"

Bray Forrest informs us even Your Car Gets An API

"At the end of the month the Dash will get a RESTful API. At the user's initiative lat/long coordinates can be sent to a server. The Dash will consume a GeoRSS feed. This is just the first release. In the future they may add HTML pages, search and even the ability to poll. The device I saw did not have any API-driven apps loaded, but I can imagine great ones (update my location and finding out who from my YASN contacts are nearby)."

So what will we do with all these APIs? Mashups of course! What is a MashUp?

"Potatoes + beans + a little bit of beef + pork, and then you pour Smithwicks over the top of it."

Ah...Microsoft Research project alert: Rotunda: Profiling the Cloud

"the goal of the project is to be able to profile the performance of a Web application from the time a user clicks on a link and triggers an event in the browser—which triggers a database lookup—through each point of the resolution of the transaction."

Sounds a lot like Bungee Connect instrumentation designed to measure every transactions from user's browser interactions and server-side roundtrips, through to the app's service calls, triggers, events, response times, etc...You see, our business model demands we and our developers know this...we have this today :-)

My Data

The UK gets some relief from the ID Card madness, for a while anyway...turns out National ID cards scheme will delayed until 2012:

"The Government’s national identity card scheme was “in the intensive care ward” after leaked documents showed plans to issue UK citizens with the cards have been delayed until after the next election."

Phew! Seeing stories like this seems to be knocking sense to those who are living in cloud-cuckoo land...

On the other end of the "my data" equation: cries of "we want our data, when we want it and where we want it" are getting heard...

Here's video intro to DataPortability.org initiative: DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix.

"DataPortability gathers existing open standards into a blueprint for a social, open, remixable web where your online identity, media, contacts and content can follow you wherever you go."

Niall Kennedy's take on Data Portability, Authentication, and Authorization.

"Data authorization is the first step in data portability."

Enter OpenID and OAuth.

How will DataPortability.org keep from being hijacked by Microsoft? Now Microsoft has joined the fray, so does the inevitable questioning begin:

"So is the nascent DataPortability.org group at such risk from Redmond? Not according to a source inside the group."

News of Last.fm's on demand since CBS's acquisition hit the mainstream tech media yesterday. But what next? CBS Will Try To Convert Last.FM Acquisition To Video Value

“One of the reasons we liked the idea of buying it is, if we can develop a great social networking site around this music content, why couldn’t this extend in to entertainment, in to news sports, all businesses that we’re in"

Kaching!

Martin Plaehn's Quick Hits: Do's and Dont's of Entrepreneurship. 16 pieces of advice for start-ups.

"6. Do always accumulate choice; two by definition, three of four is better; then make decisions and have a back-up"

More Investments Into Open Source

News that Alfresco Gets Another $9M for Open Source Content Management

"Alfresco Software, an open source content management alternative to software created for large companies, has received an additional $9 million in a third round of financing, led by SAP Ventures and existing investors Accel Partners and Mayfield Fund"

However, not all the shareholders are happy with the Alfresco deal...Matt Asay wrote in New open source venture funding and the importance of SAP Ventures and Intel Capital

"But since we didn't need the money (not even remotely) and I didn't want the dilution, it's not my favorite news of the day."

Amen to that.

Uh Oh...

Mobile phone radiation wrecks your sleep

"Radiation from mobile phones delays and reduces sleep, and causes headaches and confusion, according to a new study, reports The Independent"

LibraryThing again

alexbarnett — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 06:27:00 GMT

I ended the day re-visiting my LibraryThing. Glad I did...I had forgotten how damn good it is.

Time to update my catalog with about a year's lot of books. Worth doing since I can get my data out and re-use elsewhere. Otherwise, why would I bother?

Closed is Still the Old Closed.

alexbarnett — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:45:00 GMT

Kim Cameron, Microsoft's Chief Architect and the man behind Windows Cardspace (was infoCard), has shared his perspective the question of whether or not OpenID would make customers' lives better on social networks. There appears to be a general agreement that allowing a Single Sign On (SSO) service across properties (think "social networks", email services, and anything else that requires authentication / authorization) is good for the customer. There's no question that from customer's (or prospective customer's) point of view that idea of not having to create multiple accounts, usernames, passwords, etc has to be an appealing prospect. There doesn't seem to be much controversy here.

The controversial questions are: would the net effect be positive or negative for the online property owner if

a) they supported SSO and,

b) let competing services leverage "their data" - data generated by customers using while using their service.

The old way of thinking is the "walled garden" way of thinking. The logic goes something like this: Why would FaceBook, MySpace, x-socialnetwork or x-service make it easy for other properties or services to extract user profile information (i.e. "my data") from their service? Because openness is great? Yeah…right.

Kim's answer to these two questions are the right answers in my opinion. His view is that the net effect would be positive.

I'll quote myself from my 20 Thoughts on Attention post as to some of the reasons why I agree with Kim's point of view:

People care about the portability and security of their data.

Software and services that allow customers to take their data with them will do better than those that don't.

Letting customers share and take their data with them will be a competitive feature of successful online services.

New entrants into markets are more likely to allow customers to take their data with them than the existing market leaders.

Market leaders want to lock-in their customers by locking in their data.

Customers won't want their data locked-in.

Markets leaders will have to follow the trend of letting their customers take their data with them in order to grow their customer base.

Multiple online identities is the norm, not the exception. Attention data reading will need to account for multiple identities and contexts.

These are assertions, and I could spend ages providing data and examples as to why I believe in these, but the bottom line is this: the whole revolution we're witnessing where "consumer" properties are investing heavily in the provision API services that allow "their" customer's data to be retrieved and leveraged by potentially competing properties is driven by the acceptance of these assertions. Contrary to what Seth might think ("Closed is the New Open"), Closed is NOT the new Open, Closed is Still the Old Closed.

Companies providing these APIs "get" the future and they are benefiting in the here and now. They realize it is a two-way street and that the barriers to new customer acquisition will be lowered if

a) they interoperate with multiple ID systems (via something like OpenID)

b) allow customers to immediately leverage their existing data generated and residing on external properties / services

c) the data created and residing within their own service / property can be leverage elsewhere.

On point c), Facebook's latest "opening up" where the social network is allowing their ~~users~~ customers to extract their Facebook updates is yet another incremental step in this 2-way direction.