The prisoner forging his own chains.
You DON'T have a public Bio-API? What the hell kind of deviant behavior are you trying to hide?! Freak.
A Personal API
101–110 of 119 posts
Re: A Personal API
#102I enjoyed the post very much. Just out of curiosity, though, why did you choose not to capitalize any words?
Because he's tuned his body and mind to machine-like efficiency and calculated that hitting the shift key is an unnecessary ancient relic of the past.
Basically he's disrupting capitalization, which I've been thinking about a lot lately.
Re: A Personal API
#103This is so cool. Somebody should turn this into a platform - a mobile app that at least helps you record the stats you want, paired with an API platform that lets you grant and request permission for other "personal APIs". Then other API calls can be built on top of individual people - College students in the US, citizens of India, etc. The possibilities are pretty endless.
The Biggest Loser - play along at home! Be the "biggest loser" in [your region] to [acquire swag], etc. Sorry, maybe I'm being a bit facetious. There's definitely a lot of cool stuff that could be done with a personal API though. But how do you get people on-board? You have to have equipment to track/update stats right? Are people willing to buy into this potential network?
Do you think people might spend a million in the next year on weight loss? Then do this!
Re: A Personal API
#104I 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. Wh…
Why would Amazon or Google adopt such a system
I could imagine laws requiring that personal data be controlled by the subjects.
it would likely be difficult to use, insecure... Who says? How can you assume this?
and offer no clear benefits Some would consider the ability to keep your information private at will a benefit. Others would consider the ability to sell said information a benefit.
the lack of scale would make it even harder to do anything interesting Lack of scale? An individual's data would be controlled by that individual, but the system would scale across all of humanity. I don't think you're thinking big enough -- I'm not talking about each person running his personal EC2.
Re: A Personal API
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you read Jaron Laniers new book "Who Owns the Future"? You have similar ideas ("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.") It's a thought provoking book.. and slightly worrisome to boot (about the state of things at the moment, with…
Jaron Lanier looks and behaves like a total eccentric, and his ideas can seem pretty out there, but I found his latest book to be a really interesting read. This idea is not the same thing though, because the data ends up being more or less public and demonetized. Companies are already collecting lots of data about you. This, in theory, just gives them even more of it, free of charge.
Your point is of course correct. I was trying to point out the similarity in viewpoint of some of what abraininavat had replied to the OP (not the OP himself).
Ignoring how JL looks and behaves (which is not really germane to the point), the commoditisation of everyone's data by a select few "Siren Servers" (to use Laniers term) without any payment to the originators themselves is - in the long term - not a viable strategy.
Regardless, I stand by my point that his book is thought-provoking and worrisome, though it does not give any concrete answers.. that of course is up to us as a tech "community" to fix (before we all merrily cut off our noses to spite our faces).
edit: corrected the username i was referring to, and spelling.
Re: A Personal API
#106I'm also working on something similar as my weekend project. It's called Pokelog.
https://pokelog.com/
Re: A Personal API
#107Narcissism reaches a new level (or low, depending on how you see it).
Narcissism: 1. Excessive or erotic interest in oneself and one's physical appearance 2. Extreme selfishness, with a grandiose view of one's own talents and a craving for admiration So explain to me; what does quantified self have to do with narcissism?
Well in defense of this snarky comment, I have to say that the social sharing part of personal data like this can come across in this way (doesn't make it narcissism but still...).
The thing I like about personal data collection and cool new apis is what it could do for the individual, i.e. offer new insight, movitivation, encourage better behaviours.
But I hate the sharing part because it opens the door to over-sharing. Not just in terms of corporations having all kinds of data and using it in their interests, but also just simply the noise that gets added by people sharing information that frankly, has very little relevance.
I don't really care if someone just completed a 2 mile run and I certainly don't go to twitter to read automatically generated tweets about it.
Re: A Personal API
#108One 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'm working on exactly the kind of thing you're describing. Except ipv6 isn't really going to solve the connectivity problem as all the NATs and middleboxes on the network aren't going anywhere. We'll be using DNS instead as the 'identity' piece. Since you said you would pay for such a thing, can you elaborate how much and what you'd expect (in terms of functionality)?
I would pay for storage videos/pictures/documents etc. This could be one monetization stone. My gut feeling maybe around $9.99 / month or $50 / year.
The basis everyone would except are normal social network features sharing of "items" galleries friend system feeds and groups. Maybe this part should be an open source solution like for example diaspora.
On top of that you can build an app/service network. Maybe something like app.net.
Important on all parts is that you own the data and you should be able to pull it at will from any part of the network.
Re: A Personal API
#109Earlier 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?
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Re: A Personal API
#110I've had a similar idea for a while but never executed it well. I wanted to have my personal website merge all of my various feeds from other services into posts on my site to be the "one feed" of things happening in my life.
I suppose API access to that would be a logical extension - this is very cool.