Anyway I got inspired last weekend to spend a little while coding up a primitive Top Explorers implementation that would run over the API and on top of Pig. And as part of that I resorted to one of my favorite hacks for visualizing Flickr API results, the “standard photo response as slideshow” hack.

Not sure it was ever documented, but you can call it with the form:

http://www.flickr.com/show.gne?api_method=$method_name&method_params=param1|paramvalue1;param2|paramvalue2

The canonical example of this is kittens from galleries, but I was just using it to help visualize variations on recent photos sorted by interestingness.

With any luck I’ll actually have some interesting Top Explorers results soon as well.

Got me thinking about standards. I wrote back a rant to a mailing list of fellow senior hacker, and coders types. Below I’ve included that rant, largely verbatim. I’d been meaning to turn it into a more reasoned blog post, maybe something suitable for posting on a more official outlet, but life is short, and Rod’s post about Quora reminded me to get on it.

As software engineers, as social software engineers, it’s important to have standards. You can debate the how much of what we do can be called engineering, even charitably, but the code we write determines the rules that govern the spaces more and more people spend time in, and while “First, do no harm” might be reaching, a few standards that you should be embarrassed to not meet seem appropriate.

One of those is around data access, data ownership, and sharecropping. This is something Flickr takes very seriously.

The Minimum

With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system.

Every photo, in every size, plus the completely untouched original. (which we store for you indefinitely, whether or not you pay us) Every tag, every comment, every note, every people tag, every fave. Also your stats, view counts, and referers.

Not the most recent N, not a subset of the data. All of it.

It’s your data, and you’ve granted us a limited license to use it.

Additionally we provide a moderately competently built API that allows you to access your data at rates roughly 500x faster then the rate that will get you banned from Twitter.

Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal. Flickr helped pioneer “Web 2.0″, and personal data ownership is a key piece of that vision. Just because the wider public hasn’t caught on yet to all the nuances around data access, data privacy, data ownership, and data fidelity, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be embarrassed to be failing to deliver a quality product.

The ability to get out the data you put in is the bare minimum. All of it, at high fidelity, in a reasonable amount of time.

The bare minimum that you should be building, bare minimum that you should be using, and absolutely the bare minimum you should be looking for in tools you allow and encourage people who aren’t builders to use.

A Reasonable Exchange of Value

Flickr actually goes a bit farther, not only can you get your data out, but it gets enriched as it passes through the system.

If you use the geotagging feature, you don’t just get the lat/long out you put in, but your photo comes back with a whole hierarchy of geographic descriptors, that are pointers into a publicly available gazetteer (Y! GeoPlanet). It would be good if there were pointers into other publicly available gazetteers (if for example Google ever released one) but there isn’t a good concordance service yet (but it’s being worked on)

You get structured access to all the metadata that people have added to your photos, with proper attribution available. (of course there is a working privacy model, so your “friends” aren’t getting data they aren’t supposed to, like your friend requests, and chat logs)

If you used our machine tags vocab, you get extra information pulled in from 3rd party APIs like Open Street Maps, Open Library, Last.fm, various transit administrations, and Foursquare.

Additionally you also have access to the data that was created in aggregate using the data you shared with us, like tag clusters, and the Creative Commons licensed neighborhood shape boundaries.

This isn’t the exhaustive list, just a few of the things Flickr does to respect, and collaborate with the people who share their time and data with us.

I’d certainly love to get a fraction of this data back from other services I use. Imagine getting access to all the data Google has about you, and everything they’ve learned partially based on observing you. I’ve gotten used to being disappointed by most of my fellow practitioners, but I still dream about using good tools that treat me with respect and want to collaborate.

Thanks go to Jesse Vincent, for the useful sharecropping metaphor.

(and I’ll state the obvious this is my personal blog, nothing I post here should be taken as official Flickr or Yahoo communication or policy, unless otherwise noted, that isn’t what they pay me to do.)

Aaron’s FlickrApp is a brain dead easy to use subclass of webapp.RequestHandler that turns Flickr into an single-sign on service for Google AppEngine.

As a bonus, you get a valid Flickr auth_token for every signed in user. This makes writing Flickr API apps about the simplest thing ever.

Case in point, I wrote the largely mis-named photosthatmatter app last night in slightly less then 20 minutes, while waiting for dinner to simmer. Shows the most interesting photo from each for your contact in a given time period. Great for catching up on things you missed as they flowed by the first time.

YMMV, but it works for me.

I don’t have much to add that the New York Times hasn’t already said about their Article Search API. Its an amazing corpus to be searchable, both in breadth, and scope, and for sheer richness of the classification. I can’t think of an remotely comparable dataset with such a rich API.

Couple of things I noticed that I wanted to call out.

Get info about an article/Search by URL

Positioned as a search API, it also doubles as a “getInfo”-style API, as article URL is one of the searchable fields.

?query=url:$article_url

Just make sure to remove the various query string bits that the Times appends, as these aren’t indexed. Should make a “find the history of this topic being discussed” Greasemonkey script a snap.

Expert’s attention information

One of my less comprehensible requests to the NYTimes developer team at OSCON last year was to make sure their APIs exposed the “attention information of [their] editors.” Age of amateur, citizen journalism, and radical decentralization are all awesome, but the NYTimes’ editors job is to think about what is important and interesting full time; and that’s information worth mining.

And they did!

The page_facet, and nytd_section_facet both allow you to gauge some degree of relative weight given to a story. (section_page_facet seems like it ought to do the same thing, but I couldn’t get it to work)

?query=flickr nytd_section_facet:[Front Page]

Gives you articles mentioning “flickr” featured on the NYTimes front page. (of which it only finds 3, alas)

API Design

Good stuff:

• Clean hackable URLs, you can play with it in your browser and see what you’re going to get.
• The getList + extras (called fields in the NYTimes API) is the house wisdom at Flickr, and I’m glad to see it elsewhere
• The parsed tokens block is neat, and I can see it being incredibly useful for working with such a large, varied corpus
• The sure amount of searchable/indexable metadata and the granularity is really unprecedented, great to see them go out with such a rich, “here’s the data do something great” approach.

Visualizations

The graphic at the top of this blog post is a “visualization of the frequency of occurrence of the words ‘sex’ and ‘scandal’ in the New York Times, since 1981.”, part of a set of visualizations by blprnt_van built with the article search API, and Processing.

http://laughingmeme.org/code/flickr.simple.php.txt

Just putting a note here for the next time I’m working with the Yahoo! GeoPlanet APIs.

The conudrum: a HTTP GET on a given resource (http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/23511846?appid=$appid) works in the browser, and works with wget from the command line, but fails from within PHP with a 406 Not Acceptable.

The solution, append format=XML to the resource URL, because the service is blowing out its brains on a missing Accepts header.

And that folks is the magic of REST.

update 2008/12/04: quick scan of my referer logs suggests this is biting folks using lwp-simple and wget particularly hard.

• REST, Atom, and Javascript APIs? CHECK
• Access to personal information using OAuth? CHECK
• Developer blog? CHECK
• API Explorer? CHECK (though why it’s a Firefox plugin, I can only guess)

Also versioned documentation, and a quite reasonable set of branding guidelines.

The Netflix Web APIs provide the ability for you to integrate Netflix user services into your application. The APIs provide the following capabilities:

• Performing searches of movies, TV series, cast members, and directors
• Retrieving catalog titles, including details about the title such as name, box art, director, cast, etc.
• Determining the subscriber’s relationship to a specific title, e.g, in queue, saved, available on DVD, etc.
• Managing and displaying queues for users
• Providing conveniences such as auto-completion of partial search terms typed by a user.
• Displaying a user’s ratings and reviews.
• Including functional Add and Play buttons in your web application.

Congratulations to Netflix, and Mashery.

http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/09/04/whos-on-first/

http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/08/25/api-responses-as-feeds/

XMPP

But I’ve never run into an application that needed an XMPP interface more.

The most fundamental missing functionality is a convenient, light weight way of getting notified that your turn has rolled around again. WeeWar will send you email, but now your inboxes is even more cluttered, and you’re having to check your inbox constantly. (something I try to keep to 1-2 times an hour)

Push

A Jabber interface you could trust to push to you the state changes news, and thereby remove the nagging, “Is it my turn?” and the variable positive reinforcement relationship it sets up with your inbox.

Additionally its a classic app where, if you’re polling, you want to keep the polling time very low, but the actual incident of change is fairly spare, which means WeeWar is going to at some point start resenting their polling based APIs.

Payload

Ideally messages would also include an XML payload describing either the changes since your last turn, or the current state of the map, allowing for rich consuming clients to build alternate interfaces to the world.

New Games

Orthogonally, a new games, and new games from your “preferred players” would also be excellent to get pushed out over Jabber.

http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/05/01/videos-in-the-flickr-api/

http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/twitter_web_clients_for_the_iphone

http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/

Other folks are talking about and writing about the long germinating, launched in beta, location broker from Yahoo’s Brickhouse, Fire Eagle.

I wanted to call out just a couple of the cool, and non-intuitve decisions they made.

Is NOT a consumer brand

Fire Eagle is a service for building and sharing location data. Its the application built on top of it that you’ll interact with, unless you’re building stuff.

Fire Eagle does NOT manage the social graph

Its a service for sharing your data with friends (or services, or your toaster), but it doesn’t know who your friends are. The social graph has been outsource. Best example of a small piece loosely joined I’ve seen in a long time.

Cares about privacy and ease of use

Ninja privacy is built in. But you don’t have to care. The TOS requires developers to discuss how the data is used. And privacy levels are front and center. And from day one data is delete-able, and in fact data is flushed on a regular basis.

Built on OAuth

Yay!

http://developer.myspace.com/community/RestfulAPIs/authentication.aspx

http://code.google.com/p/gmail-greasemonkey/wiki/GmailGreasemonkey10API

http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/spec/trunk/oauth-1.0-draft.html

But if you read it closer you’ll notice the operations map to what can de done in memcache (down to transactions are handled via atomic auto-increments) with a bit of cleverness, and some persistence. (pun intended) Still a nice step towards making developing f.bk apps a bit less eye-pokey-outty

Everyone is building the giant hash table in the clouds.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/07/31/Design-for-the-Web

http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/