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February 2007
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Tech Trends III - When and Why be Open?
2/12/07
2/10/07
2/8/07
2/7/07
2/5/07
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Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Continuing the tech trends blog posts in the month of February, I thought I would spend some time discussing the "whys and whens" to being "open." As we approach the one year anniversary of the Open AIM launch, I still over hear people at AOL talking about "why are we opening up our APIs?" I think there is some confusion surrounding the ideas of what "open" means at AOL and on the web in general. Some see it as offering all our services free of charge, while others see it as opening up all our protocols and open source all our software. Quite a wide spectrum as you can see. And when there is a wide spectrum, the tendency is to fall somewhere right down the middle.
"This middle you speak of...what is it?" Good question, and the answer goes something like this. It is the allowing of others to access content/service/data, without actually letting them see "the special sauce." Take AIM for example, we allow you access to and leverage our network via plugins, custom clients, bots, and web apis. We do not document the AIM protocol or the way we scale our backend, these two things would be considered part of our "special sauce" (though some folks outside AOL have tried to figure it out).
Whether or not you think what we did with AIM is truly open what we have accomplished is giving 3rd party developers the chance to build clients that we otherwise could not build. See Doppleganger's PCD Lounge, AIM Pro, or PlayLinc. Aggregation of things like users and photos, or events and groups is another huge part of what our APIs bring to the table, while at the same time protecting the integrity of our network.
Most people will say everything should be open, however, I take a contrarian view. Not every product should open up on the web these days. Does your product add value to the web community at large? Who will use your APIs? Who, internally, will support the 3rd party customer questions? I see these three questions as sort of a checklist before giving developers the keys to your castle. Someone like Mapquest clearly adds value to the web by having a robust API that allows for aggregation of pictures, local businesses, etc on their excellent mapping platform. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder how valuable Google Base Data API is considering its overall usage or aggreagtor APIs like EBay or Amazon's A3. How much aggregation is too much aggregation. The 3rd party support is the biggest challenge, heck we go through that on Open AIM. The Hall of Fame spot for 3rd party support definitely goes to Microsoft via MSDN. The rest of us are just trying to catch up.
I will spend some more time the first week of March revisiting the launch of Open AIM and to look back at what the past 12 months of being "open" have given our users and developers. Until then enjoy the snow.
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Tech Trends III - When and Why be Open?
"This middle you speak of...what is it?" Good question, and the answer goes something like this. It is the allowing of others to access content/service/data, without actually letting them see "the special sauce." Take AIM for example, we allow you access to and leverage our network via plugins, custom clients, bots, and web apis. We do not document the AIM protocol or the way we scale our backend, these two things would be considered part of our "special sauce" (though some folks outside AOL have tried to figure it out).
Whether or not you think what we did with AIM is truly open what we have accomplished is giving 3rd party developers the chance to build clients that we otherwise could not build. See Doppleganger's PCD Lounge, AIM Pro, or PlayLinc. Aggregation of things like users and photos, or events and groups is another huge part of what our APIs bring to the table, while at the same time protecting the integrity of our network.
Most people will say everything should be open, however, I take a contrarian view. Not every product should open up on the web these days. Does your product add value to the web community at large? Who will use your APIs? Who, internally, will support the 3rd party customer questions? I see these three questions as sort of a checklist before giving developers the keys to your castle. Someone like Mapquest clearly adds value to the web by having a robust API that allows for aggregation of pictures, local businesses, etc on their excellent mapping platform. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder how valuable Google Base Data API is considering its overall usage or aggreagtor APIs like EBay or Amazon's A3. How much aggregation is too much aggregation. The 3rd party support is the biggest challenge, heck we go through that on Open AIM. The Hall of Fame spot for 3rd party support definitely goes to Microsoft via MSDN. The rest of us are just trying to catch up.
I will spend some more time the first week of March revisiting the launch of Open AIM and to look back at what the past 12 months of being "open" have given our users and developers. Until then enjoy the snow.
gregsblog at 10:23:00 PM EST Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
2/15/07 12:11 PM