Seth Goldstein

API stands for Application Programming Interface.  In the context of Media Futures, an API routes the output from one’s own unique Attention-processing Algorithm  into an Alchemical reaction triggered by the convergence of other human-driven APIs.

I wrote my first post about APIs in the Spring of 05, at a moment when APIs such as those of Flickr and del.icio.us were just starting to become becoming popular targets of developers.  Since then, the subject of APIs has become commonplace in any discussion of the future of media.  In fact AOL- that stalwart of old new media- is now obsessed with open APIs.  Tina calls it the “the liberation of egosystems.”  Open data transport has suddenly become de riguer among the even the most traditional media companies.  In less than two weeks, legions of their corporate development executives will descend upon SF to walk down the red carpet of the O’Reilly ceremony, ready to sign the top Web 2.0 talent to long-term studio deals.

But while we all fall over ourselves to proclaim our “openness,” we introduce a far heavier burden of trust into the mix.  Is one company’s “open” the same as another’s?  While I may be able to avoid data lock-in in that silo, how do i know for sure the next “open data” silo will be equally amenable to the mobility of my data?  These questions beg a deeper investigation into the history of APIs and their evolution both physically and electronically.

History

In a memorandum dated July 15, 1949, Warren Weaver, who held the position of director of the division of natural sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1932 – 1955, wrote about the possibility of language translation by an electronic computer.  It was the first suggestion most had seen that such a thing might be possible, and as he draws the memorandum to a close, his words preview the emergence of the API:

Think, by analogy, of individuals living in a series of tall closed towers, all erected over a common foundation.  When they try to communicate with one another, they shout back and forth, each from his own closed tower.  It is difficult to make the sound penetrate even the nearest towers, and communication proceeds very poorly indeed.  But, when an individual goes down his tower, he finds himself in a great open basement, common to all the towers.  Here he establishes easy and useful communication with the persons who have also descended from their towers.

Thus may it be true that the way to translate from Chinese to Arabic, or from Russian to Portuguese, is not to attempt the direct route, shouting from tower to tower.  Perhaps the way is to descend, from each language, down to the common base of human communication – the real but as yet undiscovered universal language – and then re-emerge by whatever particular route is convenient.  Such a program involves a presumably tremendous amount of work in the logical structure of languages before one would be ready for any mechanization.

The key to examining the evolution of the role of the API in context of Media Futures lies, in fact, in the multiple resonances of its last term, Interface:  as a surface lying between two portions of matter or space, thus forming their common boundary; as a means or location of interaction between two systems or organizations; as an apparatus designed to connect two scientific instruments so that they can be operated jointly, the abstract concept of an interface contains in it the possibility of a very literal connection between two beings, two faces.  As a physical interface connects two pieces of hardware, a user interface connects a human and a computer and a software interface connects separate software components so that they may communicate with one another.  To interface is to come into interaction with a thing or being, to communicate, in manners both figurative and literal.

Mainframes

As a platform that allows a computer system, library or application to open itself to use by other computer programs, or to allow for the exchange of data between them, the APIs of yesterday were IBM mainframes and Microsoft SDKs, arcane languages of translation between hardware and software.

From the late 1950s through the 1970s, a number of American, German and British manufacturers (Burroughs, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA and UNIVAC; Siemens and Telefunken; and ICL, respectively), produced such mainframes, computers used in large part by companies and government institutions for the purposes of bulk data processing in the context of, for example, the census or financial transaction processing.  IBM secured itself a position of power in the industry with the development of its 700/7000 series, based on vacuum tubes and transistors, and with its 360 series mainframe.  Unveiled in 1964, the 360 series was to be an all-around computer system, a series of compatible models for purposes both scientific and commercial – a series which, moreover, brought together features which were once only available in scientific or commercial computers, such as floating point arithmetic in the former and decimal arithmetic and byte addressing in the latter.  The 360 series also included supervisor and application mode programs and instructions and built-in memory protection facilities, making it one of the first computers manufactured with provisions specific to the use of an operating system.

Console of an IBM 360/67 mainframe

PCs

As the demand for the older mainframe systems fell off, new installations were seen mainly in the realms of finance and the government.  Personal computer networks came to challenge the mainframe.  It was during the rise of personal computing networks, though, that the APIs with which we are most familiar came into being and, in the case of Windows, achieved dominance. 

In 1975, the Altair 8800 was introduced in Popular Electronics, a personal computer that was affordable, user-friendly, and, some argue, the spark that set Apple Computer and Microsoft ablaze in their development of personal computers. The Apple II, though less capable and versatile than some of the larger computers of the day, gave computer enthusiasts an environment in which to develop their own programming skills and to operate simple office and productivity applications. 

The IBM PC released in 1981 took the personal computer into the realm of business, giving individual users word processing programs, spreadsheet programs and database programs which would change the way businesses stored, sorted and used their data. Four years later in 1985, in order to compete with the graphical user interfaces made popular by Apple, Microsoft released an add-on to MS-DOS – an operating environment known as Windows.

Though that release of Windows was not an operating system in the full sense of the term, it had pushed beyond the characteristics of a typical desktop, adopting some functions of operating systems.  Windows achieved a leg up on competing systems due in large part to the fact that MS-DOS dominated the early landscape of personal computing.  But the dominance of Windows (up until Google that is) is the API.  The APIs which enabled professional programmers to develop desktop applications on top of platforms (perhaps most notably the Microsoft Windows API), have now given way to APIs which feed off of the platform of the Internet.  And while Microsoft and the desktop are controlled by physical bodies, the Internet, despite the fact that certain companies do, in fact, oversee enormous pools of user data and have the ability to direct traffic as they see fit, is not governed by a particular body or set of bodies.  If the power flow of yesterday’s APIs was a vertical one, headed at top by the executives of companies like Microsoft, which allowed programmers to work off of their platform to develop applications to be used by the users at the  bottom, we might see the power flow of today’s APIs as closer to a horizontal one.   

Next:  The Thrilling Poverty of Physical Gestures

1 Year of Attention

Exactly one year ago to the day, on October 4 2005, I wrote a joint post about the launch of ATX, the Attention Extension, which was the first open source clickstream recorder for the Firefox browser.  This was the culmination of a month of heavy lifting to produce the code and create the environment within which it would find an audience of the right people.  We were on our way to Web 2.0 conference, where we had a slot in the afternoon to host the first AttentionTrust board meeting, open to the public. 

Little has changed since then. 

And yet everything has changed.

365 Days: the People

I turned IAG, the Internet Arbitrage Group, into Root Markets and raised capital from a number of investors including Lewis Ranieri, The New York Times, Deutsche Bank and most recently, the Chicago Board of Trade.  I also began work on a clickstream Vault, which was set up as the first approved commercial service for ATX.  We released the Vault application to users last November, and since then have added a number of additional features such as the ability to exchange clickstream information with trusted people, evaluate your influence, and syndicate your clickstream through blogs.  The Vaults now have more than 50 million clicks under management on behalf of users.

Stan James, along with support from Mike Frumin, Tony Lieuallen and others, developed the code for ATX, followed his passion.  He moved to Boulder to turn his vision for Outfoxed into the business of Lijit Networks, with Brad Feld and I as his investors and board members and Todd Vernon as his operating CEO

Steve Gillmor claimed victory in the War for Attention and resigned from the board of AttentionTrust to focus his energies on collaborating with Robert Anderson on the architecture and implementation of GestureBank.

365 Days: the Companies

In addition to the narrative of the people involved with AttentionTrust over the past 12 months, there is an equally compelling story about the steps and missteps of companies impacted by the emerging Attention Economy.  Here is my brief history of key events over the past 12 months:

December 2005:  Del.icio.us sells its users’ tags to Yahoo! for $$$

March 2006:  O’Reilly ETech Attention Economy Conference

April 2006:  PC Forum Conference, Users in Control

July 2006:  Netscape pays Diggers for their gestures

August 2006:  Ray Ozzie say of Windows Live “we will monitor” our users

August 2006:  AOL Search Breach

September 2006:  HP Pretext Scandal

September 2006:  Facebook “Redesign” Fiasco

October 2006:    ?

AttentionGate, August 2006:  Defendant #1, AOL Search

In August, AOL Search broke the thin glass that separated Thelma Arnold’s personal search history from the rest of the world:  “Those Are My Searches”

From NY Times August 9:

Buried in a list of 20 million Web search queries collected by AOL and recently released on the Internet is user No. 4417749. The number was assigned by the company to protect the searcher’s anonymity, but it was not much of a shield.

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from ”numb fingers” to ”60 single men” to ”dog that urinates on everything.”

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for ”landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” several people with the last name Arnold and ”homes sold in shadow lake subdivision Gwinnett County Georgia.”

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. ”Those are my searches,” she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her

From NY Times August 22:

Nearly 20 million discrete search queries, representing the personal Internet hunting habits of more than 650,000 AOL customers gathered over a three-month period last spring, were posted by a company researcher, Abdur Chowdhury, on a publicly accessible Web site late last month.

No user names were attached to the query data, which was intended for use by search engine researchers in academia. But word of the data - which provided an intimate, sometimes disturbing look into what Americans search for on the Web - spread through the blog circuit and immediately began raising questions about the sort of privacy consumers were entitled to when they used search engines.

Within moments, amateur SQL hacks around the world had downloaded the 500mb .tar file and begun to extrapolate from the large pool of data thousands of unique individual streams of identity.  Insofar as it is unique and can express its lookingforness (ie search history) freely, an anonymous ID is imminently identifiable.  The expansion of social media across more and more online behavior means that it is increasingly likely that each one of your gestures will find a public outlet for expression.  The distinction between sanctioned and unsanctioned, public and private, open and closed will continue to erode because new forms of passive data expression increase every day.  This is the drama of anonymity, which is now a form of content in its own right.

This is precisely why we need to recognize and support the integration of Gesture Bank into AttentionTrust, which Steve Gillmor and Robert Anderson have gifted to our organization.  Thank you Steve.  Thank you Robert.  I am not sure anybody fully appreciates how important this will be to our future as free digital citizens. 

Attention the Media

Michael Goldhaber constantly reminds us that there is only so much Attention that we can pay.  And we have yet to promise all of our future Attention away.  Our future media commitments remain up for grabs, depending upon a variety of factors that have yet to be determined.  Because our choices as to what we pay Attention in the future remain contingent, there are great media territories still to be colonized.  This is why, with breathtaking speed, media and technology companies are competing in an arms race to conquer the Attention of their users.  The noble aims of Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and others are all based upon free market social media capitalism.  It assumes that people have free choice in the media technologies that they use.

In 2000, Josh Harris, the founder of Jupiter and Pseudo, pursued self surveillance as a form of media to its logical extreme.  His “weliveinpublic.org” was an open view into his  SoHo loft, with live cameras embedded in virtually every surface.  He and his girlfriend moved in, turned on the record button, and in a matter of months she had left him, and he was rumored to have purchased an abandoned apple orchard in upstate New York.  Right up to the end of his experiment; however, Josh kept pointing me to an animation that he created and was most proud of.  It featured an imaginary, 2nd Life -like landscape filled with dancing people who had TV’s instead of heads, and the TV’s were broadcasting their faces.  As these TV-headed people pranced around, they called out to the audience:  “let us show you how we show you how to live.”

Strange things happen when physical gestures turn into electronic signals.   Signals can be exchanged and valued, prompting intricate auction mechanisms that allow people to "trade" media.  The logic of trading is not governed by traditional media and advertising structures, but rather by the mercurial but ultimately efficient market dynamic.  But the broader “you” is missing in this transaction, outside of the fixed number of data fields that you fill out to indicate your interest in a commercial relationship. This is some strange math:  entirely focused on optimizing your response and yet structurally uninterested in anything you might have to say outside of narrowly defined response parameters.  Within these new markets enabled by Internet arbitrageurs and data brokers, there are billions of micro markets where a query or a unique user path comes into contact with one of more targeted advertisements. A tension emerges between the mission of the user who intends to find or do something and the sponsor of the link who, like a mercenary bounty hunter, is trying to lure the user into a proprietary commercial environment.

In 2000 I was at the TED conference in Monterey and had the opportunity to hear John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins talk about his experience working with entrepreneurs.  He said that there were two types, mercenaries and missionaries:

What distinguishes companies led by mercenaries from those led by missionaries? While the two might seem similar at first glance, they are in fact very different, Doerr points out. "Mercenaries are driven by paranoia; missionaries are driven by passion," he says. "Mercenaries think opportunistically; missionaries think strategically. Mercenaries go for the sprint; missionaries go for the marathon. Mercenaries focus on their competitors and financial statements; missionaries focus on their customers and value statements. Mercenaries are bosses of wolf packs; missionaries are mentors or coaches of teams. Mercenaries worry about entitlements; missionaries are obsessed with making a contribution. Mercenaries are motivated by the lust for making money; missionaries, while recognizing the importance of money, are fundamentally driven by the desire to make meaning."

This description has stayed with me over the years and has has become a core mental architecture.  Reflecting on this, I went back to my original post entitled Media Futures: from Theory to Practice from November of last year announcing the launch of ROOT as a lead exchange:

One final observation: the Internet business path is about to split.  One direction leads to an open approach to data, governed by the principles of transparency and publicity.  The other direction leads to a closed approach to data, focused on privacy and opacity: the black box.  Both directions have legitimate and consistent end-user benefits and economic rationales.  The danger is getting stuck in the middle:  (1) looking to increase your edge but not locking up the information it is based on; or (2) promoting your open-ness but not sharing data back to the system.

I believe this is even more the case now than when I wrote it last year.  There is no middle ground between the black box and the transparent bundle.  Most users are simply apathetic about the value of their attention data.  This apathy needs to stop.  Now.

There are too many parties out there who do not respect the four principles of AttentionTrust.  These folks, pardon my Algerian,  can go f–k their Attention-colonist selves.

Dear Mr. Search Engine, I regret to inform you that my search history is no longer your solution for a cleaner India…

Dear Mr. Behavioral Network, I regret to inform you that my clickstream is no longer your solution for civilizing the new world…

From now on, I will tell you and all of the companies behind you who are bidding for your inventory (aka my attention),  when and under what circumstances I am willing to expose myself.  My commitment to the principles of AttentionTrust threatens the practices and behaviors of any body who profits in-between me and those who desire my Attention. 

As users in control, we have a responsibility to lead the industry with vision, to grab the mercenaries by the scruffs of their necks and force them to recognize the missionary values we operate upon.

The more they take, the more we give
The more they steal, the more we share
The more they lie, the more we tell the truth
The more they spy, the more transparent we become

We have a couple of open spots to attend a small seminar that I am moderating this Wednesday in San Francisco featuring Michael Goldhaber.