Thoughts on APIs
One of the best parts about G+ has been the API that allows services like FriendsPlusMe to exist. I asked them whether they were going to support MeWe, Mastodon, or Diaspora. Their response:
”Almost no reasonable G+ alternative offer an API, MeWe and Diaspora are no exception. We’ll have to wait for these two but we should be able to come up with Mastodon support in upcoming months. Stay tuned!”
Given the current existence of a decent iOS Mastodon app (Tootdon), that platform
Is looking better and better.
One of the best parts about G+ has been the API that allows services like FriendsPlusMe to exist. I asked them whether they were going to support MeWe, Mastodon, or Diaspora. Their response:
”Almost no reasonable G+ alternative offer an API, MeWe and Diaspora are no exception. We’ll have to wait for these two but we should be able to come up with Mastodon support in upcoming months. Stay tuned!”
Given the current existence of a decent iOS Mastodon app (Tootdon), that platform
Is looking better and better.
With the lack of text-formatting support on most instances, and not having Collections, and most instances having a length limit of 500 chars, it's focus is quite a bit different though.
ReplyDeleteThe API for Diaspora is being worked on, and sounds like the guy is making good progress.
ReplyDeleteAPIs are dicey though. How many functions do you enable for the ease of use without allowing stuff like bots...
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter Ah. I hadn’t used it enough to run into the 500-char limit, but just did. That sucks. Why would someone do that??
ReplyDeleteBrian Holt Hawthorne because it's supposed to be a microblogging platform, probably. :) They are using the Note type of ActivityPub, rather than for example the Article type.
ReplyDeleteschub.io - ActivityPub - one protocol to rule them all? - Dennis Schubert
"Article - Represents any kind of multi-paragraph written work."
"Note - Represents a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length."
APIs are of typically of tremendous interest to a very small portion of the user base for offerings such as Google+ but of virtually no interest to the overwhelming majority of users. I suspect that well under 10% -- and probably well under 5% -- of Google+ users ever used either the APIs directly or third-party products that used the APIs.
ReplyDeleteJohn Skeats The users, or tool-designers, who are interested may be highly consequential.
ReplyDeleteHeart surgery and wastewater management are topics of minority interest. This does not make them inconsequential.
Fewer than 10% of G+ users ever posted to the platform. Those making 100+ monthly posts (3.3/day) are about 50,000. That's about 1 in 6 million users. They dominate platform activity and experience.
and offering write access APIs would make cross-platform posting a lot easier too and could increase engagement and new activity model. It would also make writing new clients easier.
ReplyDeleteIt is in part why Twitter was so popular in the beginning, as especially devs loved writing tools and their own clients for the platform. I know that I've myself written several bots/integration scripts using frameworks written by other devs, to provide link some of my own projects to Twitter.
Third-party clients were often a lot better than the official clients as well, as they were written by the users of the platform, rather than by its designers. People liked Tweetdeck so much better even than Twitter's own client, they basically had to buy it when Twitter later on cracked down on third-party client by introducing far more strict API rate-limiting for third-party clients.
(of course write-access to your API also simplifies spam for your platform, but spammers will find a way regardless, and banning API keys is easier and doesn't have the risk of false positives that dynamic IP banning has)
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter Sorting out a cost basis for API keys might also be useful. Needn't be very high. Metafiter charges $5 (not for API, but effectively similar mechanism).
ReplyDelete