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A Personal API

x.naveen.com

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Re: A Personal API

#91

Post by skybrian »

abraininavat wrote: post #13

I was about to dismiss this but have thought about it a bit more, and there's something interesting here. There are already APIs built on top of you. There are the ones you know about, like Facebook and Twitter. There are the ones we know exist but have no direct access to, such as Amazon's backend or your police record. And there are the ones we may never know about, such as the NSA bot scanning this post right now…

I think this is a very libertarian notion that misses out on the social aspects of reputation. What you claim about yourself is often less valuable to a third party than what someone else claims about you. Perhaps you could store signed endorsements made by other people. But then you need support for revocation, and what about negative claims? Free speech includes the ability to say negative things about others.

Social software is very complicated because of issues like this. Something like a personal dropbox is straightforward - single customer, no community. You only have to worry about people hacking you, not what they do to each other. Anyone who gets into social software inevitably sets themselves up for making rules and judging disputes, and that often requires hard decisions.

Or compare email with social messaging; the rights and responsibilities are different and it's due to the software. Personal servers only support setting ground rules in a certain way (for example, the inability to revoke or prevent copies). Centralized services can support communities with different rules, for better or worse.

Re: A Personal API

#92

Post by groby_b »

naveenium wrote: post #54
groby_b wrote: post #29

I've been spending a bit of time thinking about this lately, too. Here are the things that I think need to be answered for this to be truly useful. * Secure access. It's great you decided to share everything publicly. I'm looking at fairly confidential data like blood tests, though. * How do you express permissions? It's likely you'd give out sets of data, not per-url permissions. (I.e. my photos from date A to date…

you're totally right on all these points: for the time being, i've only put out information that's okay being 'public', but i imagine when you do want to share a set with a small group (let's say your physicians), you'll want an additional layer of access control.

Oh, I didn't mean it as criticism. I admire that you went ahead and just created a v0 - that's further than I've gotten on my project, that's for sure :)

Re: A Personal API

#93

Post by graue »

abraininavat wrote: post #13

I was about to dismiss this but have thought about it a bit more, and there's something interesting here. There are already APIs built on top of you. There are the ones you know about, like Facebook and Twitter. There are the ones we know exist but have no direct access to, such as Amazon's backend or your police record. And there are the ones we may never know about, such as the NSA bot scanning this post right now…

> Imagine if the wealth of data collected about you all went to one place, and, most importantly, was controlled by you. Imagine if Company X had to pay you to know about your Amazon spending habits instead of paying Amazon.

Even more than Project VRM linked above, this is precisely the eventual goal of Tent: https://tent.io/

That said, I'm skeptical of these projects', or anyone's, ability to achieve this utopia. Why would Amazon or Google adopt such a system? Your shopping/searching history is valuable data that gives them a business advantage.

Also, while a personal data store that you control may be a geek's wet dream, for an average nontechnical person, it would likely be difficult to use, insecure and offer no clear benefits. And if it ends up just a toy for geeks, the lack of scale would make it even harder to do anything interesting with it or get any companies of significant size to play ball.

I do hope ideas like this surface in some form, but I'm skeptical of the personal data store ever really becoming a thing.

Re: A Personal API

#94

Post by wslh »

quantumpotato_ wrote: post #85
wslh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my spare time I am doing something like it. It's called Egont (No Ego OR Ego New Technology). If you liked this article, you might like: i) Egont, a web orchestration language: http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-... ii) Egont part II: http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/ iii) Parsing s-expressions in C# using OMeta: http://blog.databigbang.com/parsing-s-expressions-in-c-using... Beca…

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph ? Can you explain more for us layfolk?

Yes, An s-expression is a tree. Imagine that you want to know the average score of a list of films like: (average listOfFilms) and someone else like the same average for the same list. You will end up with two trees that indeed are the same and can be calculated only once. A DAG is a way to represent dependencies, so if two cells are linked to the same cell (average listOfFilm).

Re: A Personal API

#95

Post by [deleted] »

quantumpotato_ wrote: post #85
wslh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my spare time I am doing something like it. It's called Egont (No Ego OR Ego New Technology). If you liked this article, you might like: i) Egont, a web orchestration language: http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-... ii) Egont part II: http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/ iii) Parsing s-expressions in C# using OMeta: http://blog.databigbang.com/parsing-s-expressions-in-c-using... Beca…

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph ? Can you explain more for us layfolk?

[deleted]

Re: A Personal API

#96

Post by [deleted] »

quantumpotato_ wrote: post #85
wslh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my spare time I am doing something like it. It's called Egont (No Ego OR Ego New Technology). If you liked this article, you might like: i) Egont, a web orchestration language: http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-... ii) Egont part II: http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/ iii) Parsing s-expressions in C# using OMeta: http://blog.databigbang.com/parsing-s-expressions-in-c-using... Beca…

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph ? Can you explain more for us layfolk?

[deleted]

Re: A Personal API

#98

Post by [deleted] »

naveenium wrote: post #62
psycr wrote: post #24

I have been working on an open source version of this idea: http://www.quantify.io Right now, things are fairly sparse. You can check the repo out here: https://github.com/jdjkelly/bodyimage An open source Rails API to track "quantified self" data. Right now, the hardware companies in this space are storing your data in closed systems. Let's change that. Take the Withings WiFi scale or the FitBit, for example. Both a…

this goes very deep; i like it. i'll drop you a note soon.

[deleted]

Re: A Personal API

#100

Post by cpg »

spdy wrote: post #69

One day we will own our own node. Where we have control over everything, what we want to share with whom and why. All we need is a place for storage and we add services like apps. With ipv6 around the corner everyone will get his personal ip attached anyway so we can build upon that. Many of us have this idea but no one made a breakthrough so far but it will emerge. We have not figured it out quite yet we have the te…

I have been working on something like this. A home server (called Amahi). See my profile. There is one app that one can run in a home server that is sticking out for this kind of behavior is ownCloud. We have packaged it for distribution in Amahi servers and it's resonating well with the users. I am not sure it has all the elements you would want, but many of them are there.
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