The final sentence in the article really struck a chord with me...
> Where there is paper to push, a call to answer, or a purchase to approve, there is an API coming to replace it.
I've made a pretty decent living in life by following the old mantra that anywhere you see an Excel spreadsheet being used in a business process, there's an opportunity to exploit.
That idiom has now moved even further, at this point, and I don't know why I'm surprised to read in print what I think we've all probably intuited for some time now.
I've been attempting to embrace this for awhile, but I think it hit home the most last week, when I saw Joshua Beckman's article on a Personal API, and then started building one for everybody else[1].
It's been a fairly profound experience, and every subtle feature that I add, the more certain I am that it's the right path to be taking. Around every turn, I think of a new use case, or a new way to extend it, or a new type of service to integrate with -- and it baffles me that it takes us so long to make switches in thinking like this, even though we literally do it all the time as technologists.
[1] - I shouldn't be sharing the link, as the code isn't done, and it's likely to set your house on fire, but because it's relevant, the Personal API service is at http://personable.me. If you use it and it gives you herpes or something, shoot me an email (contact in my profile) and let me know. If it doesn't give you herpes, you can let me know that too.
This is a very interesting idea - a formalized representation of contact information would help a lot in fighting the walled-garden effect of Facebook/etc.
Unfortunately, as currently implemented, this seems to be yet another centralized service that that is a single point of failure.
Would you consider taking a moment to write up a (draft) protocol first? Core features of the internet (representation of personal metadata could easily count a a "core feature") became popular because the protocol was there first in the RFCs for anybody to implement and interface with.
Link your RFC describing the protocol on the front page, and many people will jump on it. Without that, it's just a service that could fail. (I'll never understand why business choose to rely on services without first establishing a /second source/)
Admittedly, I was in something of a rush to throw it together, and altogether skipped that step. As you'd expect, the result was a bunch of second guessing, and false starts.
That said, I'm absolutely trending that direction, but I felt like there was enough that I didn't know that attempting a spec out of the gate would have led to a bad spec and a bad implementation, and the way that I've always worked, it's easier for me to spot errors in implementation that I don't catch in a design phase, which is frustrating for both me and some of the product managers I've worked with.
What I can tell you in the meantime is that the source, sloppy and unworked as it is, is currently available on Github @ github.com/bmelton/personable, and that some form of a specification is forthcoming, at least in a solid draft state.
The thing that's been really bugging me though is that, my best guess is that in order for it to work as I envision, it would have to be implemented as an oAuth provider (think oAuth, but with a bunch of extra_data fields) which, at least initially, felt very out of scope for the project, but is now starting to feel like more and more of a necessity in getting adoption rates greater than I'd expect to see from an altogether new thing.
I did, but I really see this as closer to 'finger'... perhaps even indistinguishable from it at this early stage. FOAF has been around awhile (tho obviously not as long as finger), and I've just never seen anybody use it, or was blind to it when I saw it.
I definitely see some kind of 'friend' association with Personable in the future, but it's not a social network, so I'm totally vague on how those associations might work.
Seems most useful for information that changes often. Say, for example, you move around a lot and I want to know when you're in town. I could poll your API (and others like you) and see who's in town this week.
Or maybe, as a freelancer it could be used to signal that you have free time. And the consumer could then find 5 rails programmers, who also know whatever, with at least a week of free time coming up.
Sort of responding to you and Nick Lothian (nl) at the same time, but that's the main difference I see between something like this and webfinger, is the ease of updating.
Further, I see a distinction between Personable (the site) and the "Personal API", is that I see Personable as also having services that actively monitor other social sites and update Personable automatically. Checkins to Foursquare, Facebook, etc could be automatically read in to Personable, which would show your 'current location' as whichever the most current update is, regardless of which provider you used.
Same thing with RSS feeds, Youtube videos, etc., etc.
Perhaps not much of a distinction, but that's my thought process anyway.
> Where there is paper to push, a call to answer, or a purchase to approve, there is an API coming to replace it.
I've made a pretty decent living in life by following the old mantra that anywhere you see an Excel spreadsheet being used in a business process, there's an opportunity to exploit.
That idiom has now moved even further, at this point, and I don't know why I'm surprised to read in print what I think we've all probably intuited for some time now.
I've been attempting to embrace this for awhile, but I think it hit home the most last week, when I saw Joshua Beckman's article on a Personal API, and then started building one for everybody else[1].
It's been a fairly profound experience, and every subtle feature that I add, the more certain I am that it's the right path to be taking. Around every turn, I think of a new use case, or a new way to extend it, or a new type of service to integrate with -- and it baffles me that it takes us so long to make switches in thinking like this, even though we literally do it all the time as technologists.
[1] - I shouldn't be sharing the link, as the code isn't done, and it's likely to set your house on fire, but because it's relevant, the Personal API service is at http://personable.me. If you use it and it gives you herpes or something, shoot me an email (contact in my profile) and let me know. If it doesn't give you herpes, you can let me know that too.