medieval art, collective intelligence, & language abuse - a story of apis

Medieval Art,Collective Intelligence,

& Language Abuse

tyler hannan

http://tylerhannan.com

platform evangelist, ip commercethursday, 28 october 2010

today we will discuss

- briefly -

medieval art,

collective intelligence,

language abuse,

network effects,

the definition of aplatform,

and

enabling innovationthrough

open APIs.

actually,

this is,in fact,

a medieval art

free

presentation.

you may thank me later.

(although i’m happy to discuss Brunelleschi’s

approach to perspective,at length,

whenever you desire.)

let’s begin

at the beginning.

(often a good idea)

provides a

managed commerce servicesplatform

& APIs

to enable

innovationin

payments

by obscuring the

“messy plumbing”

associated withtraditional payment

services.

developers can

integrate with

one set of open APIs

for all services they require.

paymentservices

dataservices

value-addedservices

&federated identity

services…

while,

importantly,

making money.

some examples:

unattended parking&

ticketing

movie theaterreservations

PoSconcessions

mobile payments

as the

platform evangelist

for a companydelivering

open APIsfor

payments

i have learned

someimportantlessons.

- language abuse -

the yearwas

1873.

a young college student

was appointedas

the assistant librarianat

Amherst College.

this man

Melville Louis

Kossuth Dewey

became frustrated with

categorizationinside the library.

in an attempt to

increasethe

utility

of the library,

withoutincreasing expenditure,

he created

a method ofclassification.

theDewey Decimal System.

the systemwas

devised

solely for

cataloguing

andindexing

purposes.

but,he found it

to be equally valuable

forarranging books on

shelves.

interestingly,

or perhapsfrighteningly,

he also becameenamoured

with the concept of

“Simplr Spellin”,

or

english language spelling reform.

which is responsiblefor

the spelling of

catalog

instead of

catalogue.

this also prompted

a desire to change his name

to

melvil dui.

and,most disturbingly,

responsiblefor

menus,

in the local area, reading:

hadok,poted beef with noodls

parslior

masht potato,

butr,steamed rys,

letis,

andys cream.

NOTE:powerpoint hates those spelling errors. red lines

under all the text.

ahierarchical system

of categorizationthat

led to a

measure of insanity

andlanguage abuse.

at an event,

in NYC

2 weeks ago,

billed as

“Financial Innovation”

for banks,

the term

“platform”

was used

47 times

in the first

8 hours

of presentations.

most of these

were not,

in fact,

platforms.

*nerd rage*

why is this?

why platforms?

what drives the

“me too”

effect?

1906London

Francis Galton

visiteda

livestock fair

wherea

contest

would demonstrate

collective intelligence.

an ox was on display

andvillagers,

farmers,

ranchers,

doctors,

women,

children,

professionals,

labourers,

basically...all townspeople...

were invited to guessthe

weight

after slaughter.

787 guesses.

none right.

however,the mean of the guesses,

was

1,197 pounds.

actual weight...

weight for it...(boo. hiss.)

1,198 pounds.

“The results seems more creditable to the

trustworthiness of a democratic judgement...”

with that said,

this came froma

man

earlier steeped in the study

of

anthropometry.

“The systematic quantitative

representation of the human body for use in

classification and comparison.”

in which the sum of hisresearch

indicated that

peopleare

idiots

andonly the

“select, well bred few”should control society.

collective intelligence.

thenetworkeffect.

platforms&

open APIs

matter

because ofthe workthat

you

are doing…

are thinking about…

are planning…

will do in the future.

platforms

succeed

because of the

enabled innovation

represented by

your work.

in this enablement,

there is

an

inherent

tension.

for example,

commerce web services,

the ip commerceweb service

API,

we faced the choice

yes,

“THE CHOICE”

REST

vs.

SOAP

and,

while we can debate

theoretical implementation,

the answer

(for us)

was

both are necessary.

but we

madethe

decision

to begin with

SOAP.

why?

when buildingan

abstracted message interface

that obscures the

fixed bit length,

ISO 8583,

name::value pair,

painfully legacy,

payment interfaces

things change.

and if

“things change”

in a newREST interface

things fail.

remember,

it’s not the verbing that weirds the language,

it’s the

renounification.

by delaying theREST

implementation

we had a

“known good”

underlyingdata

structure

and ourREST

developers are

thrilled.

a,

seemingly,

strange

technical decision

made based ondeveloper needs.

a tension.

a healthy tension.

or,

consider a

relatively major problem

in traditional payments…

“transactionoriginator

authentication”.

the majority ofpayment services,

in market today,

do not implement

any

form of originator authentication when

processing transactions.

instead,

they simply pass

identity data

unprotected

in the transaction body.

strong authentication,

of the originator,

is a requirement.

and there may be

“easy” fixes…

ip commerce

built a

holistic

federated identity implementation.

SAML 2.0 compliant

supports all authentication methodologies

issues identity tokens(long-lived)

coupled withsession tokens(short-lived)

to enable

SSO,claims-based

authentication,policy management,

etc.

overkillwhen only

authenticating atransaction originator.

but,wildly necessary,

when enabling

developers tobuild

add-ins,workflow,

stand-alone solutions…

commercemodules

formerchants...

that other developers

can simply

“plug-in”.

the tension

between

today’s needs

and

future requirements

is what makes

a platform

grow.

why do platforms matter?

because of

your work.

how does API quality

improve?

through

your work.

inany

platform

the most important partner

is the one with pain…

the one being enabled…

the one who can innovate…

It

Is

Us.

when building a platform

when offering APIs

recognize the nature

of this

tension.

embrace the discomfort

and let the

developer community

drive the innovation

others cannot.

recognize your contribution.

own your value.

slide #279

With thanks, and apologies,to:Lawrence Lessig

Rolf Skyberg

Written while listening to:Bombazine Black, Here Their Dreams

.::more resources::.

http://commercelab.ipcommerce.com

http://www.paymentsapi.com

http://www.tylerhannan.com