March 31st, 2006

Patricia Seybold on Mashups

In a post entitled Why “Mash Ups” Matter Patricia Seybold applies her customer-centric perspective to the topic of mashups. She begins by giving some background on the topic and then getting into the core of her points which are that mashups enable customers to creatively consume your brand experience and that if you build them they will come.

In the middle is a bit of “daydreaming” on what classes of mashups might be useful along with some hypothetical examples.

• Financial Services: a personal net worth meter that combines your own financial data from a greater variety of personally-relevant sources than you can from say Quicken. (This is a type that a few people were discussing at Mashup Camp).
• Travel Services: a trip planning mashup with flights, itineraries, schedules, transit routes, personal calendar integration, group coordination functions, and of course photos.
• Business and Consumer Services: ranging from local truck tracking to ways for matching wishes of grandchildren to new product announcements.

In the end she argues that:

What’s different now is that you don’t need to figure out what kinds of applications end customers would value and use. You don’t have to design and host those applications. You don’t always need to create an end-to-end customer experience. All you need to do is to take much of the data-driven information you already have (inventory, order status, promotions, pricing, diagnostics, branch and plant locations, people and vehicle movements, market data, etc.) and expose that information as services–both for other applications to use (within and outside your organization) and for lead users, and eventually end customers, to use in combination with services they select from other companies.

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Posted by John Musser as Money, Press at 12:17 AM | No Comments »

March 29th, 2006

Learning Virtual Earth

Here’s a couple of new Virtual Earth articles. First is this good one from Jonathan Hawkins on how he built a mashup of US national parks using Virtual Earth and Altas, the Microsoft’s Ajax framework. Detailed step-by-step instructions with lots of code and screenshots.

The second is this article from MP2K Magazine interviewing the folks from Fresh Logic Studios, creators of the slick Virtual Earth mashup they call Atlas.

I will be updating the /howto guide by next week with these and a variety of other good articles that have come-in over the past month. Actually, next week I’ll be updating the whole site.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, HowTo, Mapping, Microsoft at 12:47 AM | No Comments »

The Basecamp API

37signals, creators of the innovative and instantly successful BaseCamp, this week unveiled an API for it. The fairly thorough API is REST-based and is quite similar to their existing Backpack API.

See their blog and forum for more details.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Enterprise at 12:46 AM | No Comments »

March 27th, 2006

Tim Berners-Lee on Mashups

The father of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee in this recent interview with the UK’s BCS gives his take on mashups:

Mash-ups are called Web 2.0, but they are data integrations - taking a piece of display technology like a map application and doing a handcrafted data integration. I’ve yet to see a mash-up that uses semantic Web data and crafts it - the fact that everyone has their own mash-up tells the story.

What I’ve always wanted to do is take an arbitrary thing, a data file, and if it’s got something that can be mapped, drop it into a map and see what occurs without programming.

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Posted by John Musser as News at 12:05 AM | 2 Comments »

March 24th, 2006

Windows Live Dev Center

Windows Live Developer Center from Microsoft is now online. A bit sparse at the moment, but, gotta start somewhere. For now it mostly aggregates links to a few of the Live branded APIs and tools: Messenger Activity SDK, Gadgets, Live Custom Domains and ideas.live.com. Interesting Business Opportunities Page. Over the years Microsoft has a good track record of supporting developers and so they do indeed start rolling-out a slew of Live-family APIs this will become a key technical resource.

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Posted by John Musser as Microsoft, News at 1:02 AM | No Comments »

March 21st, 2006

scrAPIs

What’s a scrAPI? A scrAPI, which at this point is more of an idea than a thing, was recently described by Thor Muller in his blog as a type of community-built API that provides a programming layer above web sites that don’t otherwise have an API. This intermediate layer, which exists independently of the destination web site, in turn does the dirty work of screen-scraping of raw HTML from the source and returns just the relevant data in some cleaner XML format. Thus a collaboratively built and maintained set of code for data access from any source.

It’s an interesting idea. Many complications of course. Not the least of which is that many companies object to scraping, be it for reasons of load, stability, or copyright. Good example being Craigslist vs. Oodle.

In this follow-up post Thor notes that the original coiner of the term was Paul Bausch back in 2002. Which in turn was in reference to scraping Amazon data. And interestingly, it was just this sort of scraping that was a key driver in leading Amazon to subsequently build a real API: people are going to do it anyway, let’s formalize and leverage it.

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Posted by John Musser as Issues, Law at 11:45 PM | 7 Comments »

March 20th, 2006

How Much Revenue via APIs?

Following-up on discussions last week about mashup business models, I was curious to look at the other side and see if API providers had disclosed any details about revenue or volume numbers directly attributable to their API-based services. While the direct dollar figures are not always available, here are a few related numbers:

• Salesforce.com: Reported on their blog on Jan 8th of this year that over 40% of all of Salesforce.com traffic comes from their API.
• Amazon: Has 140,000 registered developers. In an Information Week article last October reported that third-party sellers generated 28% of Amazon’s second-quarter unit sales, or $490 million. A percentage of those earnings are attributable to their web services APIs, but unfortunately they do not disclose what that percentage is. Also, if you want more on their services, check out these good slides (PDF) from a presentation Jeff Barr gave at Affiliates Summit 06.
• eBay: Has somewhere over 25,000 developers with 1,900 certified applications. This little TechWeb story notes that during the fourth quarter in 2005, the eBay Platform handled more than 8 billion Web service requests, up from less than 1 billion for the entire year of 2002. The number of eBay Web Services transactions through APIs increased 84 percent annually.

If anyone has better or more recent numbers let me know.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Amazon, Enterprise, Money, Salesforce at 12:09 AM | 7 Comments »

March 16th, 2006

Mashup Business Models

In a well-written summary, Richard MacManus outlines a set of possible mashup business models including: advertising, lead generation and affiliate programs, transactional mashups, as well as noting other potential models of subscriptions, pay-per-transaction, premium services, charging business not individuals. He notes that for most part these remain to be proven in any significant way.

For more ideas on mashup business models see these discussion notes from last month’s excellent Mashup Camp.

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Posted by John Musser as Examples, Money at 6:18 AM | No Comments »

March 15th, 2006

Where are the Noncommercial APIs?

Dan Cohen over at George Mason University looked that APIs listed here and asked a good question: Where Are the Noncommercial APIs?. He makes a number of valid points here:

One of my pet peeves as someone trying to develop software tools for scholars, teachers, and students is the lack of application programming interfaces (APIs) for educational resources…Now a clearing house for APIs [ProgrammableWeb] shows the extent to which noncommercial resources—and especially those in the humanities—have been left out in the cold in this promising new phase of the web. Count with me the total number of noncommercial, educationally-oriented APIs out of the nearly 200 listed on Programmable Web.

That’s right, for the humanities the answer is one: the Library of Congress’s somewhat clunky SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL). Maybe in a broader definition you could count the API from the BBC archive, though it seems to be more about current events. The Internet Archive’s API is currently focused on facilitating uploads into its system rather than, say, historical data mining of the web. A potentially rich API for finding book information, ISBNdb.com, seems promising, but shouldn’t there be a noncommercial entity offering this service (I assume ISSNdb.com will eventually charge or limit this important service)?

By my count the only other noncommercial APIs are from large U.S. government scientific institutions such as NASA, NIH, and NOAA. Surely this long list is missing some other APIs out there, such as one for OAI-PMH. If so, let Programmable Web know—most “Web 2.0″ developers are looking here first to get ideas for services, and we don’t need more mashups focusing on the real estate market.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Gov, Nonprofit at 1:22 AM | No Comments »

March 14th, 2006

The New Amazon S3 API

The big API news today is that the web as platform now has a new world-class storage system designed specifically for developers: Amazon S3, their Simple Storage Service. Amazon has basically taken the online storage infrastructure behind their core online services and provided a public, fee-based interface to it. There’s now a viable “storage cloud” out there for you to use.

Storage isn’t sexy, but as anyone in IT can tell you: almost nothing’s more important than a reliable storage infrastructure. So it’s good news for web platform developers to have this class of storage service available for whatever they need it for. Here is a key part of your virtual data center.

Yesterday I spoke with Adam Selipsky, Amazon’s Web Services VP of Product Management, and Dave Barth, the Product Manager for Amazon S3. They emphasized that that API was designed to a focus on a core set of functions and do them well.

A couple of examples cited in Amazon’s announcement may trigger ideas on what it might be used for:

• University of California Berkeley “Stardust@Homeâ€? Team: Saved money by using Amazon S3 to store and deliver the 60,000 images that represent the data collected from their dust particle aerogel experiment. These images will be delivered to 100,000 volunteers around the world who scan the images looking for dust particles from comet Wild2. Since this phase of the project needs the storage for just a few months they were able to ramp up and back down with less investment.
• CastingWords: This small startup offering podcast transcription services were able to save effort and time by using S3 to store and retrieve the original audio files and the transcribed texts.
• BitTorrent: Oh yes, and there is even a section in the online documentation on how to use S3 for BitTorrent files. For publishers of large, popular files the amount of data actually supplied by S3 can be substantially lower than what it would have been serving the same clients via client/server download. Less data transferred means lower costs for the publisher of the object.

Note also what this isn’t: it’s not an online storage service in the same vein as what you’d get from box.net or their competitors. It is a service for developers and not end users. Here, not only there is no friendly user interface, there is no UI at all. For now you can only get to it via code. It is completely and solely for developers to build tools and applications on top of. Thus eventually there will be pretty tools, OS desktop integration, and so on. Amazon pioneered a bit of this API-only model with their unique Mechanical Turk API.

Nor is it like hacks people have built on top of GMail, those are just handy hacks for some power users (speaking of which, it could be that the often rumored GDrive will provide a comparable API but that remains to be seen and Amazon’s API is live now). And while Amazon is first out of the gate in this league there will certainly be some serious competition from the usual suspects.

What does it cost? It’s $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred. This model is nice because you only pay for what you use, no more, no less, with no setup fees or monthly minimums.

Technical details? It supports both REST and SOAP, but both score high on simplicity. No fancy extras, just core file services: store, retrieve, delete. No nonessential services. The REST API maps these functions directly to the core HTTP RFC 2616 requests: GET, PUT and DELETE. Everything is an Object which is opaque to Amazon. For more details see their site or the Amazon S3 entry here at ProgrammableWeb.

How reliable is the service and is there an SLA? Amazon says this is a four-nines service with 99.99% uptime and that you can trust it because it’s the same platform they run amazon.com on. There is no written SLA in the same form you would get from your ISP. For some this might be an issue, although certainly many SLAs have no teeth anyway. Given the issues that Salesforce.com has encountered, reliability is a key success factor for Amazon. It would be nice someday if they have some form of a service status dashboard similar to the Salesforce.com’s status.salesforce.com/.

The idea that secure, reliable storage for any given application will just “be there up in the cloud” is powerful and this is a big step in that direction.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Amazon, Money, News at 6:20 AM | 2 Comments »