Sazbean

Software Development Management

Main navigation

You are here: Home / Product Marketing Blog

Product Marketing Blog

/

Web 2.0 Expo – Designing API – Twitter

Twitter and Digg Labs (represented by Alex Payne and Michal Migurski, respectively) have some experience with API’s. You could say they are war hardened.

Their talk was a well intentioned, if a bit sanitized, version of the experiences they each had in implementing their Application Programming Interfaces. Alex was first, balancing his short talk with what worked and what did not. Here are some of the highlights;

  • Let is grow organically – This makes sense for a startup that doesn’t really expect to be the next big thing, though later on in his talk he contradicted this advice in the what-not-to-do section
  • Document – This ones a best practice that is both always mentioned and almost always ignored. API’s though kinda live and die on their documentation.
  • Support API community – They used the Google Groups app to build up the community.
    Scale from the API perspective – this is where organic doesn’t work. The deal is that if you don’t take the time to think through issues ahead of time, these issues will bite you in the ass.
  • Security issues – If users can think about a way to misuse your api, they will. Twitter users would get around caching schemes, rate limiting schemes and attributes in your data model will leak. Good cross domain not xml policy would help.

What mistakes they made

  • Didn’t start with api.twitter.com – Now all the twitter traffic intermingles, both api and http. The separation by domain is a good thing to do up front. This will be happening soon, according to Alex
  • Didn’t version API from the get-go – Here they found that growing organiclly meant that versioning wasn’t needed. Now, however, versions for depreciation is really a must have. It will be part of the domain move.
  • Didn’t make life easier for flash developers – Applications need visual people to be created. This was an eye-opener. Programmers admitting that they need someone else?? The skills of the Flash Developer, traditionally mocked by the programming elite, is really an important part of API tool design. The community that captures flash programmers will have cool looking tools
  • Didn’t automate to make life easier for us – Administrative view of active API customers, stats, and admin views isn’t real sexy code work. But is you go forward with your API without these views of how users are using your api, you’re going to be in the dark when tough questions start being asked of your company.

I will cover the second half of this presentation, Michal’s talk on Digg Labs, in a second post.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

/

Web 2.0 Expo – Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business

So you think you should add a social network or blog to your business website. What planning should you do to make this an effective undertaking and one with measurable ROI? Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research presented a simple strategy from their book Groundswell: POST.

  • P – People – Access your customer’s social activities. There are different roles people play on your website/community (from Forrester’s social technographics ladder): creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
  • O – Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish. Different departments in your company will probably have different objectives (research – listening, marketing – talking, sales – energizing, support – supporting, development – embracing).
  • S – Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change.
  • T – Technology – Decide which social technologies to use. Since you know the objectives these will be measurable.

To create a successful community you’ll need to engage your audience by creating a place they want/need to go regularly – asking them questions, listen to their ideas, create a place they can get advice and help each other. Start with your customers, choose objectives you can measure, line up front-office backing, get the naysayers on your side, and start small, but think big. Adding community to your business website can help you understand your customers and improve your products and services to increase sales.

Technorati Tags: , ,

/

Web 2.0 Expo – Real Time Web

Despite what TechCrunch may have said about Blaine Cook, his talk today on Real Time Web wasn’t delivered from under a rock.

He talked with the Web 2.0 expo crowd about how HTTP refreshing isn’t the right protocol for applications that use messaging, such as Twitter. His take is that the best messaging service out there, one that is open, free, web ready, standards based, easy to use, all these thing in one is the Jabber protocol

Jabber’s event driven messaging means that a service like twitter doesn’t have to constantly poll on status of customers when usually the result is ‘nothing new’ Event driven messaging like Jabber allows the service to ‘ping’ the Twitter service to say ‘hey, Im back’ or ‘Hey, I have a message’ Following this on, this means that the Twitter service to then send on that message to you, the subscriber once and only once when its fresh. Jabber is Client-Server not p2p, which is applicable here.

The use of jabber in Twitter makes perfect sense. What you can learn from Blaine’s experience is still a bit muddy, however. Twitter has known scalability issues, but how much of those were HTTP/Jabber problems? We just don’t know. The reality is that for the B2B business, you will likely never face their kind of subscription traffic issues. That means that Jabber should be looked at for the right projects that needs Presence, Subscription, and Messaging. It is XML and looks very much like email in its design. Look at Jabber as a choice for your Web Messaging needs.

Oh, he also laid the gauntlet by saying RSS is good for basic content subscription, but APIs should use ATOM due to parsing being cleaner. Evangelists are still liking RSS, so this was an interesting reveal.

Technorati Tags: , ,