Inopia

My Data, Your Service - The thin red line of User Data Access APIs (LinkedIn shuts out BranchOut and Others)

Today's news that Linked in has shut off API access to Branch Out, BeKnown, Visible.Me and a number of others once again illustrates the tension between openning data and controlling monetization (in a similar way to Twitter's service changes recently). LinkedIn's reason for shutting down the access is primarily that these companies may be planning premium services which draw on LinkedIn's data (and potentially be a threat to LinkedIn's own monetisation plans).

 

It would be easy to say that this is a mistake on LinkedIn's part (because of the chilling effect it will almost certainly have on usage of the API) or that it's a no-brainer since other companies are getting (free) access to LinkedIn's prized asset. However, there is another factor to take into account which is neatly put in BranchOut's response to LinkedIn:

"we believe user data should be owned by the user, and that people should be allowed to share their data with the new services and contexts that provide the most utility."

While this may appear a little self serving, LinkedIn profiles are curated by the owners - LinkedIn is effectively the channel for these profiles to reach an audience. Although LinkedIn's terms of service may have all manner of restrictions within them and LinkedIn adds a large amount of value this still raises the question - is LinkedIn an effective channel for distribution of my profile information if it chooses to exclude a broad range of uses of it's API?

In other words, as a LinkedIn user one of my greatest utilities is that I can point people to my profile, have them find me and connect to keep in touch. This is not disimilar to Tweets on Twitter - the fact that Twitter pushes tweets to others by many channels is one of it's major value adds. Shuting off API access actually reduces that value and might make me seek alternatives. 

So how can this circle be squared? 

I'd argue that rather than shutting off access, LinkedIn should instead;

• Put a price on this access above a certain volume.
• Potentially even as a %age of revenue that value added services earn.
• Set rules such as "no caching" beyond a strict time limit to ensure data cannot be entirely replicated.
• See these services as a value add that will actually drive more users to add profiles to LinkedIn because distribution is wider.
• Set clear rules of engagement and not change them over time.

Might some of the services conflict with LinkedIn's own plans? Possibly, but as long as the price is right, this may even be a net gain. 

Facebook seems to be ahead of both LinkedIn and Twitter in this respect - it's 30/70% revenue split with Zynga and other games already ensures that there is always cashback for innovation that draws on it's platform.

BranchOut's statement that the loss of API Access is not a big deal ring a little hollow, however LinkedIn's actions certainly mean that people may begin to seek other places to host their professional profiles that allow more distribution.

 

 

 

 

 

Twitter client restrictions - bad for everybody (including Twitter)

It's a shame to see Twitter putting restrictions on client development via their API (more on GigaOm here). Obviously there's speculation as to what the business reasons might be - and the effect on the ecosystem - the move seems more than likely to be about controlling advertising real estate. The original post is here. 

The post makes some valid points about privacy and no doubt Twitters transition to the consumer mainstream has promted some of this, but it still seems to be unfortunate step.

Quote from Ryan Carver (via techcrunch): 

“We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.  This is already happening organically – the number and market share of consumer client apps that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking,” he writes.

While that might make some sense - mostly likely because it gives Twitter closer control over the Ad real estate associated with the last milimetre to the customer - the twitter client is (almost) the new browser. No doubt this is a major driver - Facebooks monetisation prospects w.r.t. Twitter are simply so much greater simply because most people experience Facebook on almost entirely Facebook controlled real estate. 

Promoted tweets may be one way of advertising but they are annoying for users and interupt the application itself - whereas "out of band" ads on the side of a device attract less ire and can be omni-present. 

The question is - does this make good business sense? and does it signal bad news for "open API" strategies?

The twitter team are smart and no doubt a lot of thought has gone into this change and the perceived economic benefits must have outweighed the risks/negatives (developer anger, loss of innovation and goodwill). However firstly it seems unlikely that this means bad news for the open strategy (that's what got twitter here in the first place and this restricts one dimension of the APIs usage), further for a couple of reasons I think it's a bad move for twitter itself: 

• The loss of developer trust and confidence is not to be underestimated - and although this would seem not to affect "niche" clients for specialist devices/environments (which Twitter will never likely cover), people will be much less free with their innovation.
• The move defacto forces existing twitter clients to integrate other services in addition to twitter - when many might have been content to stay twitter only. 
• Twitter is betting on it's clients being one of the "goto" apps on any device going forward (alongside facebook, the email client, google search etc.) but this is by no means a given - particularly if the number of twitter client options drops. Over time there is a significant risk the facebook and others squeeze twitter into the background (particularly if they offer a channel to twitter).  

There seems to me to be no good reason why Twitter could not have continued to innovate heavily on it's own clients while giving everybody else free reign - if they were better, they'd get more audience. In fact it's precisely the biggest reach clients like TweetDeck which Twitter hasn't restricted. 

So given there is money to be made from ads and the last milimeter to the user, what should Twitter do other than what it has? In my view the right strategy would be to permit and even encourage client innovation but to add revenue share restrictions and requirements on openning up ad real-estate where possible. E.g. 

1. Allow development of twitter clients and use of the API.
2. Provide additional APIs for advertising feeds (potentially provided by 3rd party ad networks).
3. Require clients seeing any kind of volume to either carry ad inventory or pay pay volume fees. 

This is obviously harder to enforce than a blanket "ban", however Twitter's current approach is likely to lead to a "smaller" pie with more for twitter rather than a "larger pie" with more creativity in terms of business models. 

Hopefully in time the decision will get reversed and API innovation will flow once more!

 

 

What Foursquare should do to compete with Facebook - "Go Public"

I'm sure the foursquare team has their strategy well in hand after the announcement of Facebook places and maybe this is way off base anyway, but I was suprised to see little real press analysis on what paths they might take (instead is was mainly doom and gloom - (TNW, CNN)). But it seems to me there are clear paths and one of the them could be to yank the steering wheel to one side and "Go Public" (not in the IPO sense - in the social network model sense!). 

To explain this, one of the things that always struck me as the *key* difference between twitter and facebook is: twitter is public broadcast, facebook is group narrowcast. I.e. twitter has asymmetric relations, facebooks are symmetric.

So facebook (although there is a public mode) requires both parties to friend.

This makes twitter and facebook fundamentally different - and I think means that twitter can and will continue to grow very strongly. Because of the type of data shared on facebook it's simply difficult for them to push asymetric relationships.

On location I could see the same thing happening. The "normal" way of thinking about location is "I share with my friends" - symmetric relationships. This also makes sense for security in some sense.

So it seems to me that if foursquare is able to push it's asymetric relationships - i.e. anybody can follow anyone for location information:

• it would make a big change to the service 
• but it would give it a much different utility to facebook.

broadcasting location publically has the chance to create chance meetings, to interact with locations / brands in a way narrowcasting to friends doesn't. Also facebook is unlikely to open the privacy settings much (or make the defaults public) because it is already embroilled in various privacy issues.

An example would be, people checking into a bar in Barcelona - they might post on facebook so their friends know, but they might also post on foursquare so "everybody" knows (basically this is equivalent to posting "I'm at Harry's Bar in Barcelona" on Twitter). Facebook places may allow you to do this also but the focus is different and theres a big risk of confusion between public and private settings. 

Basically a foursquare which focused on a twitter like public broadcast of location could provide a much different platform to facebook places and become the basis of different types of location aware services. You may post there "less" but you'll post there when there is some real utility to doing so like meeting new people in a bar, collecting coupons & points, getting timely information etc. 

Open APIs and Open Standards

John Borthwick has been advising companies for a while now to build APIs that mimic the Twitter API. His reasoning is that if your API look and feels similar to the Twitter API then third party developers will have an easier time adopting it and building to it. Makes sense to me.

via www.avc.com

There was a great thread on AVC this week on the impact of twitter's API being specs being reused by others (check out the lengthy comments thread as well).  I think this is the beginning of a trend and we'll see a lot more of it in different types of apps:

• APIs for different content types are likely to come in similar forms (there just aren't that many ways to build a half-way efficient blogging API).
• Familiarity helps adoption and reduces friction for everybody 
• Although different services often have unique features there's likely to be a "common core"

Actual standardization (W3C et. al.) is probably not on the cards right now but some convergence looks inevitable and beneficial to all. There are two interesting dimensions to look at: 

• Convergence by application/content type: where you could see standard patterns emerging to for video, audio, messaging, blog posting, news etc. 
• Convergence by individual type of operation: e.g. user account creation, payment, creation of relationships (friend, follow...), search etc.

In the second case building blocks can be recompiled into complete APIs. 

I hope we see more moves in this direction since it will reduce friction in API provision and usage - making it easier for everybody to focus on the business of building great apps with third party APIs. 

Google Wave - A power play to change Content and Communication for the Web

3scale was lucky enough to have a sandbox slot at Google I/O in May - and an awesome event it was for us too (check out Martin talking technology here!). Things have been hellishly busy since - but now a lot of the hype died down, there's a chance to comment on the biggest announcement at the event: the launch of Google Wave (see the wave keynote here - watch if all if you haven't already).

There's been loads of Wave coverage - most of it just after announcement (Mashable, Techcrunch, ...) and Dion Hinchliffe already has some trademark great diagrams available. There are plenty of posts which commented on the boldness of the vision and a lot of others which focused on the technical breakthroughs.

While I think the technology is a true achievement, more than anything I'm still staggered by the strategic move which is being played out here. The Wave team has clearly done an awesome job - both in engineering but also in "re-imagining" the web (see the blog post which announces wave) - credit to Google's management as well for giving vent to this imagination. The keynote and the blog post very much present Wave as a kind of skunk works effort - which no doubt it is - but I'm pretty sure there is a very hard nosed, long term strategy backed in here.

Success for Wave would mean nothing less than rewriting the nuts and bolts of the Web as we know it - rewriting all the rules about how content is created, exchanged and managed. The demo is really a peek at the future which will inevitably come - and Google is making a strong play to be the organisation which tkes a defining role in that future. Why say that?:

• Wave would do away with the need for IMAP, SMTP, FTP and a whole bunch of other protocols.
• The cool demos which show a nice interplay between an online blog and a Wave users "inbox" are a key indicator of what's already happening - content anytime, anyplace - separated from design (and possibly context) - how often will you visit your favorite blog's homepage once it flows into your inbox? comments included? Ads not included?
• The content objects exchange will no doubt morph to include all sorts of generic structures - making spreadsheets, docs and other formats fodder for your communications inbox - again power to Google and Google docs (where is Office live?)
• Wave providers could potentially become massive repositories of structured data and communications information (is this is the ultimate cloud?) - all of it indexable - and Google being the biggest of all. 
• The play for wider adoption of the protocol could tempt large swathes of the largest content generators to get on board - watch Blogger "go Wave" at some point in the not too distant future - Will Sixapart and co have to follow?
• Google's push for HTML5, Android and Chrome all seem to gel perfectly - a new world of content with flexible browsers (with no more need for Flash?) and other apps to seemlessly consume this content.

Effectively Wave could do for Content and Communication what openID, openAuth etc. are doing for identity - it's that big.

Google's play to make the protocol and server open is also incredibly smart and beneficial to the web as a whole. There's no doubt that some of Google's competitors will see this as the ultimate poison chalice but it creates some very positive dynamics:

• If we (the people) could reinvent the way the web works - how would we do it? As a debae starter Google Wave is great.
• A powerful trend towards unification of content interchange standards (how long has it taken for IM networks to interoperate?)

The open strategy, if genuinely persued, also benefits Google hugely since it will be hard for others to fight it - even proposing another standard is joining the conversation. My guess is that the low key "it's a skunk works project" launch was very deliberate to get the ball rolling, build critical mass while Google's competitors most likely do nothing and then suddenly find themseleves facing a groundswell of developers adopting wave. Announcing an initiative which spanned the major players at this stage would likely simply have been impossible and killed the protocol stone dead (actually trying to coordinate such an annoucement would have killed it).

We've had plenty of fun in the team trying to work out who should fear Google Wave most amongst Google's competitors and who it's aimed at - Microsoft, Yahoo, Adobe and Facebook etc. Facebook created a lot of debate - consensus opinion was that Wave is a direct attack on Facebook's rise - my take is a little different: Facebook is showing an uncanny knack of holding a growing its user base - this is unlikely to change. At some point in the future if Wave really did made inroads it could simply become a Wave provider and its users would have even less reason to leave their facebook pages - all their content would be held by facebook yet, they'd be able to participate in any conversation. Potentially this even suits Google since it needs competition to avoid being seen as a monopolist.

Still, making wave stick is a major challenge - the opening pitch as a developer project is a perfect opening but there is a long road to travel. If Google doesn't waver however, they are perhaps the only company that can pull it off. The move creates so many unkowns (even for Google's own revenue engine - Adwords - what happens to Ad revenue if all content can be consumed in the inbox?) but if this is really a major strategy pilar they'll likely push through on it. If it eventually comes off, we'll probably see all the following stages:

• Disbelief that it will work and technical objections (lots of interesting debate already). 
• Denial (see Steve Balmer do this for the iPhone and Android - Ray Ozzie already did it for Wave).
• Grudging acceptance (but "it's just the small guys ...").
• Capitulation (Looks like we'll have to adopt this).
• Leverage (people working out smart things to do with it).

It's still a hard thing to pull off and plenty of things could go wrong - but Wave is the boldest vision of a new Web which we've seen in a long time, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out. The smartest companies might be the ones that work out how to leverage before going through some of the other steps (denial, acceptance, capitulation, ...).

The bottom line is that I think we saw a vision of the future Internet on the 28th May which you don't often see. It's one of those moments in which you see the world shift briefly before settling back to its orginal perspective - the comfort zone is to think "nothing happened here, move along..." - the opportunity zone is to hold the moment and figure out what can be done in this new world!

No doubt things wont work out quite as planned - but what's clear is that should Wave get traction, there'll be a huge range of things which get turned inside-out. Congrats to Google for taking the bold steps and throwing down the challenge to everybody to move the Web forward!