Betrayed by LinkedIn

I'm getting an error with a really nice description:

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later. Error message

PDOException: SQLSTATE[40001]: Serialization failure: 1213 Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction: DELETE FROM {semaphore} WHERE (name = :db_condition_placeholder_0) AND (value = :db_condition_placeholder_1) AND (expire variable_init [:db_condition_placeholder_1] => 203428328950f00b0bbd0484.53523159 [:db_condition_placeholder_2] => 1357908748.7708 ) in lock_may_be_available() (line 181 of /export/content/data/dlc/shared/www/developer/includes/lock.inc).

If you rely on a 3rd party for your business, then the 3rd party is in control of your company future.

In that regard, its not about risk. Yes, using 3rd party API for your business model is risky, but thats a secondary effect. The major issue is than the future of the company, and any promises and investments done is completely dependent on that third-partys' whims. To some degree, your even in less control than if you were employed for the 3rd party company, as there are employment laws to protect employees, but no laws in place to protect you against changes by the 3rd party to the API.

Linkedin is behaving perfectly reasonably, it makes sense that for privacy reasons you want to restrict access to the work history of connections.

Imagine someone you're connected to using linkedin on a recruiter's website giving them access their linkedin account. That recruiter now has full access to your work history, do you consider that acceptable ?

It's sort of ridiculous how little information you can get from LinkedIn via their API. Case in point, I don't think you can get Twitter handles from even first-tier connections any more. I made the appropriate API calls, waved my hands, and all I got were empty values. The docs do clearly state that you should be able to download every Twitter handle associated with an account, so WTH? It looks like they've revoked this functionality without changing the docs?

More broadly, it would be cool for a developer-oriented company to de-risk their API by adding some guarantees that they won't pull this kind of stuff. Right now developer agreements pretty well only restrict what the developer can do; adding conditions to limit how the interface can change would be a big selling point. The problem is, as long as VCs keep throwing money at companies that exist at the mercy of LinkedIn et al, there's no reason for them to. They get to open up the platform, watch for popular apps, then consume or copy them and lock down the API again to prevent competition.

I just started reading "the signal and the noise" [0], and he talks about the difference between "risk" and "uncertainty": "Risk" is a known factor, something you can calculate with. Something might be risky (50% chance of failure) but at least you can calculate and reason about it. "Uncertainty" is "worse" because you can't easily reason about it. We often assign numbers to uncertain events anyway, but they might be off by several orders of magnitude.

He goes on to say something like: Risk fuels capitalism and the marked, uncertainty grinds it to a halt

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver#Book

Edit: I forgot to tie this in to what we where talking about :) As I see it, relying on someone else (with out any guarantees) is not just risky but uncertain. You can't really know how likely it is that they will change down the road. Doesn't mean it can't work out though..