31–40 of 77 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your FB and Twitter logins are both busted!
That's... not unlikely. Like I said (or should have said) -- I haven't done any testing in the least, nor am I even at what I'd call an alpha version. That said, I'm seeing people log in successfully. What sort of errors are you getting? Mind shooting me an email on it? I'll make it up to you, somehow.
And an side: API's should not be patentable or copyrightable, no more than a language is. Because that's exactly what API's are. Common languages for machines to speak to each other.
This is incredibly interesting. According to some people we're looking at unprecedented growth in the space. Right now there's roughly 9k public APIs. By 2019 that number could be over 100,000. The question becomes though who does the integrations? Not everyone is a developer. The world needs plumbers for toilets and electricians for lights. I think the future of web development looks a lot like these industries. If…
If only this were more true. API's for most things are...lacking. A dearth of API's is particularly bad in computer security. Vendors: We have this great new device to monitor ___ and alert on it! Customers: We'd like to integrate that with our other devices, and this Hadoop cluster... Vendors: We integrate with all kinds of stuff! Customers: Can you show me? Vendors: You just go to our shitty web front end and click…
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…
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/)
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…
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 met…
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.
EdiT: P.S. Sincerely, thanks for the feedback.
Web 1.0:
That guy is bright. He knows everything about the solar system. You can ask him any question about it, and chances are that he knows the answer.
He's also quite good at explaining this stuff, and it's much more accessible than reading these complicated books about space.
He won't listen to others, though. He only trust his books.
Web 2.0:
That girl is popular. She has so many friends, and she's always the first to know about any gossip. Heck, that's all she does.
Tell her something, and it's quite likely that the whole school will know about it the next day. She keeps track of every rumor in her journal, to make sure to remember every detail.
She's a bit naive, though, and tend to believe every rumor she hears.
Web 2.5 (APIs):
That guy is serious. He doesn't play games. You want something? He'll make sure you get it.
Don't bother calling or meeting him though, it's not worth his time. Here's a form you can fill to let him know exactly what you want. Sure, it looks a bit complex at first sight, but you'll get used to it. The first time is always the most difficult. You can call his assistant if you need help filling the form, though.
Once you hand him the form, it's a matter of hours before you get what you asked for. He's that fast.
Web 3.0 (semantic web):
Where is everybody? That's right, they're all at the bulletin board. What is it you ask? It's where all the cool kids hangout.
Want to let the world know something? Anything? Just pin something there. You have to follow the rules, though. You can't just write some gibberish on a piece of paper, you must communicate using the proper syntax, and learn to call things by their unique names (nobody's going to take you seriously if you make some ambiguous statements).
Once you learn the drill, though, it's fantastic. You can find ANYTHING you want there, as long as you know how to navigate it. No need to ask anything to anyone, no need to learn a bunch of different ways to say the same things (it's so annoying when that other astronomy kid use different terms to describe the same thing as the first guy I told you about). I used to be limited by what individual people I met wanted to talk about. With that board, there's no such limit. I can communicate anything, get there the next day and see an answer.
"The only limit is yourself" - Zombo.com
Conclusion:
The web 2.5 (API web) is limited by what the service let you do. You want to do something that is outside the scope of that particular service? Too bad, you gotta create your own company and ultimately face failure.
These services are too rigid (lack flexibility), they're opinionated and non-standard (you have to learn every service all over again, 10 extremely similar services will have totally different APIs and ways to call and model things), and ultimately, you have to level-down your solution based on the limitations of the service. It's not a proper way to live.
Sure, it's nice and all that we agreed to all communicate using voice and ears, but we still all speak different languages, and having to learn the language of anyone I want to talk to is painful.
We must unify semantics, not just the medium (JSON/XML). Over are the days where you model your classes yourself.