Comments on: A “Personal API” could be a modularized, standardized interface for collaboration.

By: Be on Point: How to stop doing things that don’t matter | Taylor Davidson (@tdavidson)

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:07:21 +0000

[...] Slide 12: A “Personal API” could be a modularized, standardized interface for collaboration. [...]

By: Five cultural and technological frames shaping new business opportunities. | Taylor Davidson (@tdavidson)

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:16:55 +0000

[...] a conceptual level, a “personal API” describes how we can create mediums and methods of exchange to reduce inter-personal interaction [...]

By: Taylor Davidson

Taylor Davidson — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:21:23 +0000

Thinking about the components, to make it happen would require an individual's data store, a set of common rules (the API) set by the marketplace, and a network and marketplace that aggregated the access and exchange rules.

This could be stored at a social network site, but really work, it would need to outside the traditional silos and accessible from anywhere.

Latest thinking on the topic: http://www.taylordavidson.com/writing/2009/11/1...

By: Powering Social Search through Personal APIs | Taylor Davidson

Powering Social Search through Personal APIs | Taylor Davidson — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:12:14 +0000

[...] the stores of information in our heads VRM and personal APIs offer two sides of the coin to reduce the time in the exchange and match giver and receiver of [...]

By: facebook-820157

facebook-820157 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:08:43 +0000

I was thinking about what a service that provides personal APIs would look like if not Facebook or a similar social app. Then I thought it would be a great way to provide social network sites data. It would allow the user to control their data, unfortunately only until the feed is picked up and stored. Some sort of control on the data allowing the owner to delete the data at a later time would be useful.

By: SXSW 2010 Panel Idea: Personal APIs: Better Living Through Collaboration | Taylor Davidson

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:09:50 +0000

[...] you’re read past posts about my thinking behind personal APIs, you’re probably tired of the idea. But if you’re interested in helping develop the [...]

By: Valuing our personal externalities in an ambiently intimate world. | Taylor Davidson

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:17:07 +0000

[...] There is a market failure in communication; positive social gestures abound, but where are the public gestures that allow us to communicate constructive criticism? The absence of positive feedback is not the same as negative feedback, yet without negative social gestures it’s hard for us to discern. Perhaps constructive criticism has to be communicated privately: but what a loss of a rich data set, information ready to be structured into knowledge, interactions waiting to be scaled. [...]

By: Taylor Davidson

Taylor Davidson — Mon, 18 May 2009 22:40:54 +0000

Yep, Chris has been leading a variety of efforts in this space for years, and he has been a great champion of data portability and service interoperability; but OpenID and other efforts are primarily about content and data portability; when I mention "personal APIs" I'm talking about interactions and exchanges of value; for example, knowledge rather than just data, multiple back-and-forth interactions rather than a single exchange of data.

Actually, the stock photo portfolio on your site is a great example of how we can deliver, at scale, products; instead of someone having to ask you for a photo, they can just go to the site, search for keywords, and purchase the photo (print and license) without you ever being involved.

That type of exchange is easy with information, it's more difficult with knowledge, and that's the opportunity. Still working out how to do it; the XLS business model available for download is a start, but I've thinking about ways to change that so that more of the trade-offs, judgments and analysis can be baked into the model for automatic exchange, rather than having to come from my head every time.

---

One last note: I think you'd love to dig into VRM: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/ and http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page

By: David Sanger

David Sanger — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:56:51 +0000

Chris Messina on personal profile APIs

One consequence is that companies like Google, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Facebook are clambering over each other to meet this need, each providing convenient URLs for people to print on business cards and share with friends.........even [if] I’m not able to self-host my own identity and connect with these services, there is much work being done to establish APIs that at least allow services to connect with one another — affording roaming, multi-homing, data portability, and service substitutability.

The Open Social Web

By: Taylor Davidson

Taylor Davidson — Sat, 09 May 2009 11:37:24 +0000

I'm hopeful that the mass of incremental innovations will lead to something more substantial, whether that's a more substantial ecosystem or a more substantial single service is something we are seeing play out in the web in general at the moment.

And yes, anything that can be spammed (and is worthwhile to spam) will be spammed