The Social API we really need.
The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
--Marshall McLuhan
Now here's the thing: I'm on Twitter; I like it because I can follow anybody I want, and although there is an awful lot of moronic "noise" (e.g., "I have a hangover and my cat just threw up"), there is also some interesting stuff that lets you find out where others in your particular "groove" are going, what they are working on, what they're thinking about. You can even post a request for help and occasionally somebody that's following you will give you a helpful idea.
The problem is, this is just a "teaser" of what it really could be, and it's totally disconnected from all the other "social" apps. It doesn't connect you to opening an IM chat (which is realtime, and often a lot more useful), there's no easy way to make it really integrate into a forum / messageboard (which is more permanent, and searchable), or del.ico.us (which helps with organizing and tagging resources that are shared with others), or a hybrid short url / spidering / social tagging site like my ittyurl.net, or a blog post with comments, or email notification of something I am following and on which I need up - to - date information when new "stuff" appears on the subject.
I view this entire "space" as a social community that needs to be fully integrated in a single API: twittering, chat / IM, forums, short urls, resource tagging - spidering, and more. It needs to be an API because as a developer, that's what I want. I don't particularly care that twitter.com is a "website" or that del.icio.us is a website -- with an integrated API available, I can build my own UI's and social applications to interface with the parts that I need / want. And so can others. Sure, you could still have a website that represents some sort of gateway into all this, but it still needs to be an API. A single, INTEGRATED API.
The advantages of having a single, integrated, standards-based social application API that incorporates all these features should be obvious, I'm not even going to start on the subject.
Then you have the Live Mesh (MOE - Mesh Operating Environment) concept where you are actually synchronizing and sharing resources (files, documents). As long as it's not proprietary (e.g. you "have to" use LiveID authentication), this needs to be in there, too. It would need to have some filters or some sort of admin moderation capability to prevent spammers from ruining it.
Am i being "visionary" for thinking like this? I doubt it - all this is just common sense to me.
I'm willing to put in some time to work on this. I know people who are smarter than I who probably have good ideas and skills to contribute. If people are interested we could start a codeplex.com project for it. I'd like to see OpenID authentication, a Twitter-like service (µblogging), a del.icio.us - like facility (but more robust like what I've done - spider the resource and do automatic semantic tagging and indexing), forums, IM/ chat, email notification, live-mesh sharing and sync of "stuff", and more. It should be free; it could possibly be supported by advertising. The possibilities really start to sing once you "get" the gestalt concept of integration of all the features in a single API.
Are you up for this, man? Let me know. You can comment here or send me an email to pbromberg at yahoo dot com.
Oh man I would LOVE to do something like that... it's an awesome idea, I just don't have the time right now (baby due in 3 weeks!). I'll definitely be keeping an eye on anything that gets started though!
ReplyDeleteThat's a great idea Peter, but an ambitious one I think.
ReplyDeleteTwo issues I see: Getting enough momentum on something like this is going to be hard because there are already so many alternatives - scattered as they may be - with momentum out there. Twitter is 'it' right now, it'll be something else next month. If there's no momentum or following that at least grabs everyone in your target group (let's say .NET developers or Web Developers) than the whole thing becomes moot quickly.
The other issue is if you throw all of this together you got a massive project on your hands.
If you look the past where tools or companies try to combine sort of umbrella APIs most of this stuff fails because generally the APIs are not compatible or there's not enough overlap between mechanisms. In the end you may end up wishy washy API that's not helping anybody.
You didn't mention it in the post, but: What do you want to do with this umbrella API? Just because you have access doesn't mean it's immediately useful for practical purposes.
Rick,
ReplyDeleteYes it's ambitious, and hence the post - I have enough sense not to try to do something like this unless I see others are interested.
From a usefulness standpoint, an API like this with the infrastructure behind it (.NET I hope, not ROR!) gives developers the tools to build much richer social-space applications. Remember - I'm focusing on an API first. If somebody wants to build a front-end to go with it, that's fine. Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
.NET? Wouldn't you have to buy a bunch of server space then? Why not use something like Google's App Engine? Does MS offer something like that for C# code?
ReplyDelete@Joshua,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I follow the ".NET?" comment. You need server hosting for any platform. But server space is cheap - about $8.50 / mo for ASP.NET 2.0 with SQL Server 2005 at places like gate.com. The real issue is getting a group of developers together to build the API and stick with it. This is a project for a 5 person team over a good six months or so.
This is indeed something needed. I was contemplating just making a "sub-blog" RSS feed which is limited to 140 chars that could be consumed nd redirected by all these social networks.
ReplyDeleteThe mechanism is there (RSS), a more social aggregator is not, however Twitterfeed is working fairly well for me, it just doesn't hookup my other social sites.
What I want is control over my own prior posts and a place to hold interesting things other people say or point to. Digg and delicious don't cut it for me.
So what would your proposed API provide that OpenSocial API doesn't provide already?
@Steele,
ReplyDeleteOpenSocial has four APIs for social software applications to access data and core functions on participating social networks. It is an API that ties together "stuff" from existing social apps. What I want to see is an API that "IS" an app, with everything in ONE place and one codebase. You build *your* application based on this API.
Peter, my mind is in the cloud. After seeing Google App Engine, which handles the scalability issue for you, I think that it would be a lot less work to create a restful service on the GAE platform, then to worry about the servers and scalability yourself. You get to persist data in BigTable. Have you checked out GAE? Would the functionality of this API your are proposing not fit their offering?
ReplyDelete@joshua,
ReplyDeleteThe GAE is fine as long as you feel competent in Python, are happy with their SQL-like query language called GQL, and don't expect to be too popular -- or you'll overrun their quota for number of requests.
This is definitly needed. I can see numerous ways this can be useful. For one, it would be great to see a complete search on specified search terms. For instance, if someone was talking about your toolset, you'd like to see all those comments in one place. It would be cool to also post to all types of accounts at once. It doesn't need to be a huge umbrella, but capturing search, posts, and maybe followers/friends would be a big help.
ReplyDelete