Laughing Meme

I remember it as a dark and stormy night, that seems unlikely, but I’m sure it was late and chilly and damp.

I remember being tired from a long day in the salt mines; that was during a period when I was always tired after work.

I remember there being whiskey, and knowing @maureen, that seems likely.

I’d just won some internal battles regarding delegated auth, and implemented Google AuthSub for the new Blogger Beta, as well as Amazon auth for a side project. So when I wanted to share photos from Flickr to Twitter, I knew it wasn’t going to be over HTTP Basic Auth.

A few weeks earlier @blaine and @factoryjoe had pulled me a into a project called OpenAuth that they’d been talking about for a couple of months — an alternative to yet another auth standard, and a solution for authenticating sites using OpenID.

So one late, damp night along Laguna St. with whiskey, we did a pattern extraction, identifying the minimal possible set of features to offer compatibility against existing best practice API authorization protocols. And wrote down the half pager that became the very first draft of the OAuth spec.

That spec wasn’t the final draft. That came later, after an open community standardization process allowing experts from the security, web, and usability community to weigh in and iterate on the design. But many of those decisions (and some of the mistakes) from that night made it into the final version.

Yesterday, a little over two years later, we finally shipped Flickr2Twitter.

So it was nice yesterday when people commented on the integration:

“Uses OAuth!” “Doesn’t ask for your Twitter password” “Great use of OAuth”.

And I thought to myself, “It better be, this is what OAuth was invented for — literally”.

Uploaded by straup on 12 Mar 09, 1.49PM EDT.

by Kent Brewster

I tried explaining the title of this blog post to Jasmine this morning. Suffice to say my explanation needed a bit of practice. And more than 140 characters. Or it might just be I’m a bit stir crazy from Winter returning with a vengeance in these here parts. But I wanted to call out a couple of points that might have gotten overshadowed in the good Reverend’s recent post on the Flickr Panda APIs.

NewsWire API

The NY Times at their great Times Open event announced their Newswire API, which is a real time stream of their content. Stories, and blog posts, and what not. More interestingly was their discussion about how they’ve built a backend “pinging service” that makes it easy for them to add new types of data to their stream. I’m a dork enough that a Grey Lady firehose sounds pretty awesome.

But they got some flack for it being a snowflake API. From where I sit snowflake APIs look like opening up your data as fast as possible, along any means necessary, and trying not to pre-judge how people will use it, but I’m thankful for the metaphor, as it allowed me to spend the morning envisioning fire hoses of snowflakes.

Still I spent 2007, and 2008 talking about how XMPP was going to be a key piece of building firehoses standardizing and enabling the real time Web, so its a criticism I’m sensitive to. (and I’ve already been skipping conferences in 2009 in the hopes of actually having some time to build it, though thankfully minor details like time haven’t stopped my colleagues at Fire Eagle from launching theirs)

Pandas

Which is all apropos of saying, we launched our own “snowflake” realtime API yesterday. (though actually its just a slight modification of our standard photo response format). And its Panda-shaped. And it is awesome.

Near Real-Time, Every Minute, up to 120 Events

But because the documentation is quirky, I think people missed the significance. These are Flickr real time data APIs.

We’re building streams of photos in real time. Examining the huge stream of data events that happen on Flickr, the social activity, the searching, the meta-data creation, and fishing from that stream to build 3 real time streams. We’re then exposing those streams via a near real time polling based API.

The API pattern is specifically structured around making it easy to call from client side scripting, and the data streams are structured around discovery rather then guided search, but we’re pushing up to 120 discovered photos down these streams each minutes, every minute. Two streams of real-time interestingness, and 1 of lightly interestingnessed geotagged photos.

And they’re named after famous pandas. Really what more do you want?

Whither XMPP

So what’s up with the blossoming real time data APIs? And where is our promised standardization? They’re coming. There has always been a tricky chicken and egg problem. There is so little data out there that is appropriate to expose in a real time fashion, that there is little demand to consume it, so the tools fail to evolve. But I’m seeing tons of work, great toolkits from like Fire Hydrant from FireEagle and Babylon from notifixio.us, and Google’s decision to make XMPP a standard part of their AppEngine toolkit are just I’ve been most excited about recently.

Based on Derek’s NYT Trender and some APIs we haven’t gotten around to releasing, I spent 20 minutes whipping up Flickr Trends yesterday morning.

App Engine is awesome for this kind of stuff.

Favorite’s I’ve found so far:

• snow vs flowers
• party vs wedding
• jumping vs hdr (oooh, 365 vs hdr is more fun.)

asc: it seems to me that we need to set up a magic email address for “things on fire”

From an amazing set by Ai de ke.

Photos from waterbubblz, dgrubz, murdlebanks, so_phie, elton and picturesofthings

I tried to fit this all into 140 characters. I really did. I couldn’t do it, not even with disemvoweling.

#motrinmom

Chatting with a friend who does information architecture for pharmaceutical advertising she was shocked I hadn’t heard about the “Motrin Mom” twitter-in-a-teapot. I had no idea what she was talking about.

Apparently “Twittering Critics Brought Down [the] Motrin Mom Campaign”. And the entire advertising industry, at least here in New York, is having a fear-of-a-twitter planet moment. Complete with righteous anger about the “irrationality of Twitter”. (um, hello folks, but didn’t you build one of the largest global business by cynically manipulating people’s “irrationality”?)

But the part that really caught me off is this didn’t blip my radar at all. Maybe I was just offline for it, but as far as I can tell the twittering classes I follow didn’t peep about this. I thought Twitter was all about us? (Also, Summize you are already awesome and everything, but if you add “search within people you’re following” and “search within people who follow you” I promise to love you forever)

@flickr

Only tangentially related, I’m sure Tyler Hawkins aka @flickr has a very busy @replies tab.

What I can’t figure out is if all these folks responding to @flickr are really confused about whether Hawkins is a Flickr representative (he isn’t and doesn’t in anyway suggest he might be) or just believe so strongly that “@flickr” address twits will arrive in Flickr’s inbox that reality is irrelevant.

I’m torn on whether the assumption that when you speak you will be heard is the ultimate arrogance (and one particularly prevalent on Twitter), or if rather this proves that we’ve historically worried too much about URIs and that culture has no problem evolving them ad-hoc.

Now if only I had a thesis, rather then a rambling collection of half thoughts. Which is why I wanted to fit this all into 140 characters. Alas.

Historical landmark New York Central Railroad 69th Street Transfer Bridge, with Trump Towers looming in the background.