The slides from my RSS/Atom Feeds Best Practices talk from lunch today are up now. There was a good discussion afterwards and hopefully we'll put up a podcast. I'm more convinced than ever that the key to a successful presentation is: free food.
There's a particular discovery problem for open and distributed protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and OpenSocial. It seems like a trivial problem, but it's one of the stumbling blocks that slows mass adoption. We need to fix it. So first, I'm going to name it:
The Personal Web Discovery Problem: Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses?
This does sound trivial, doesn't it? And it is easy as long as you're service-centric; if you're building on top of social network X, there is no discovery problem, or at least only a trivial one that can be solved with proprietary APIs. But what if you want to build on top of X,Y, and Z? Well, you write code to make the user log in to each one so you can call those proprietary APIs... which means the user has to tell you their identity (and probably password) on each one... and the user has already clicked the Back button because this is complicated and annoying.
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The Personal Web Discovery Problem: Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses?
This does sound trivial, doesn't it? And it is easy as long as you're service-centric; if you're building on top of social network X, there is no discovery problem, or at least only a trivial one that can be solved with proprietary APIs. But what if you want to build on top of X,Y, and Z? Well, you write code to make the user log in to each one so you can call those proprietary APIs... which means the user has to tell you their identity (and probably password) on each one... and the user has already clicked the Back button because this is complicated and annoying.
…
Well, the other proven enticements are forbidden to us by the Standards of Business Conduct. -- Joe
ReplyDeleteJohn,
ReplyDeleteExcellent slides. I'll keep them very handy for development. Maybe you should turn them into a checklist. I posted on one of your bullets that caught my attention.
http://torrez.us/archives/2006/08/02/476/
Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
-Elias
Hey John! I enjoyed the slides. I commented a bit here, and added a couple of user-experience-centric suggestions: http://soldierant.net/archives/2006/10/best_practices.html
ReplyDelete