Linking APIs
Monday – Session 5 - F
Convener: Rohit Khare
Notes-taker(s): Laurel Fan
A. Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:
Tags: APIs, interoperability, implementation
B. Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:
Rohit gave a brief description of his company's product: knx.to. The short description: it uses the APIs of various social networks the user is part of, and aggregates the user's social graph over all of them.
Next a round of introductions. Some projects represented:
Dreamboat - Mozilla Familysearch - geneology Opensocial foundation IBM services Amazon Games BT - social network aware telephony 43things - community site
Questions:
1. is there business value from linking data? 2. how? how to make it open and standard so anyone can do it? 3. combine graphs of people (the 'address book' metaphor is out of date -- relationships mean more than contact info) 4. as service providers, how to correlate identities using the partial data available (ie. is "Rohit K" the same as "Rohit Khare") 5. is there a policy layer -- "copy rights" for portability, reversibility
The list of APIs (some used by knx.to, some introduced in the session):
facebook linkedin twitter myspace gmail yahoo flickr msn/windows live hyves
see also the chart that Rohit should be emailing
Issues/problems when integrating with specific APIs:
- privacy settings are not computable (you can't calculate whether
you are allowed to share information you got from facebook -- you have to make another API call to ask them)
- you can't get email/phone numbers unless you are special
- it's hard to look up by email - the data retention policy is unknown -- they can audit you but the
policy is not well specified
- heavily throttled
yahoo
- short lived sessions: 30-60 minutes - user gets an email notification every time you get a new session
myspace
- friends list is first name only
One of the ways to implement the "which of my friends is on this site" is by searching by plaintext email. However, using plaintext email is overkill, since you don't need to reveal that information. Can use hashed email instead.
Webfinger is another way to interoperate between social networks using the email address as the key.
The problems to solve are: - technical - business - legal
