WSFinder

Reply to open letter from Alex Barnett

Alex,

I appreciate your comments on this issue. Chris and I have spent a great deal of time thinking through the privacy issues that you discuss here. One of the primary reasons that we have launched as an “Alpha” and not even a “Beta” product is that we are looking specifically for this kind of feedback. Furthermore, the solutions to many of the issues you have brought up are part of our roadmap.

Let me address our overall strategy. In order for WSRelater to work, we need to know the aggregate viewing behavior of a set of people. We do NOT need to know specifically who they are. For example, we need to know

            Some person looked at item A, then item B, then item C

We do not need to know that the person above is “paul@wsfinder.com”.

In order for this to work across websites, WSRelater needs some way to know that the two people in the following example are the same person

            Some person looked at a group 1 on Tribe, group 2 on Tribe

            Some person looked at discussion 3 on eCademy

The solution is to use the FOAF practice of sending a one-way hash of the person’s email address. (As an FYI, if you submit an email address to the WSRelater with type PERSON it is automatically converted – we don’t store the address). By using this best practice attention can be aggregated across partners using WSRelater.

Let me address your specific issues and describe what our strategy is as we move from an Alpha to a Beta product.

(1) How do I know with whom you are sharing what data with?

The answer is simple: we are not sharing your user data with our partner sites. A partner site queries WSRelater for recommendations of items, not for information about a person. 

Right now we have an Alpha API feature that lets you query the database for information about a user. This is for debugging and testing purposes only (another reason that we are in Alpha). Its really hard to know if you implemented the API correctly if you can not directly query the system. Perhaps we should only enable this API function for the site that contributed the data or only for the development instance of the database. We are looking for your feedback.

(2) What is being done with all my data?

We are using it in aggregate to make recommendations of items that a person would be interested in. It is an item-to-item filter, so a partner asks for information about a item and gets back more items.

(3) How can I be certain that I am in control?

Since the system is based on the one-way hash of an email address we have a nice way to deal with this issue. The user who controls the email address with the behavior can remove any of the behavior data about him or herself or can opt out of being used for recommendations completely.

(This is not yet implemented, but this is how it will work)

After verifying a person is the owner of an email address, he or she can use a web interface to view all WSRelater behavior entries from that address. Any or all of these can be removed at any time. Since this is a real time system, item recommendations that relied on this data will be updated the next time they are requested. By opting out completely no data will be accept by WSRelater from this one-way hashed emailed address.

We would love to have this “console” interoperate with existing efforts like Attention Trust, or perhaps even BE Attention Trust. Why rebuild if it is already there?

As a follow up question: how do you feel about WSRelater keeping this opted-out data, but removing any reference to the user when it is removed? So when a user opts-out of WSRelater, instead of deleting all rows from the database, a unique random identifier (that can never be tied to you) will be applied to those rows, instead of the one-way hash of the users email.

As a final note: please remember this is a recommendation web service, not an ad network or a personalized search engine. We are not trying to deliver ads for wedding planners because you type “engaged” into a profile. Our goal is to provide high quality recommendations of items that you might be interested in based on what other people previously liked (or didn’t like). Being that this is an item-to-item system it can work for an anonymous user who simply clicked on a first book, image, or group and want to see more things like it. We think this is a compelling proposition for the end user and leverages the collective wisdom of crowds in doing so.

Aggregate Knowledge

The following is a posting of the mail I recently sent to our friends announcing our new company (the parent of WSFinder.com).

We wanted to let you know that we have started a new company: Aggregate Knowledge (www.aggregateknowledge.com). Our goal is to deliver the best content to people based on the aggregate behavior of everyone who has gone before them. We think that the wisdom of crowds can help people get at the best of all the information that’s out there.. Our website doesn’t have much information yet, but will soon.

We are still very early in our company’s life cycle. Currently, we are closing a small “friends and family” round of funding and thank those of you who are participating. Our goal is to do an institutional round in the spring.

As many of you know, we previously launched WSFinder, a wiki-based directory of web services and APIs that people are using to create mash-ups. This was the starting point of our analysis of the web services landscape and marked the beginning of our goal to understand what was happening in the Web 2.0 world. The insights gained are driving much of the thinking behind Aggregate Knowledge.

WSRelater is the first web service that we are offering. It is an Amazon style “people who liked this, also liked that” engine that anyone can add to their website with a few hours of work. Since the engine is implemented as a web service, all sites that use the service can contribute to the aggregate knowledge database. We are pursuing direct applications of this technology with companies that are selling goods online and want to incorporate this functionality to their browsing experience.

The WSRelater service is in “Alpha” mode. We will move from Alpha mode once we have good feedback from a few experimenters about the service and move to more production ready hardware. The API for this service and its documentation are online at www.wsrelater.com. Please send us any feedback.

There are two things that we are asking our friends for assistance with in the short term.

1.      If you know of a great sales / business development person that can help us knock on a few doors we’d love to meet them. Media and/or retail Biz Dev experience is really what we are looking for.

2.      If you have a site and would like to participate in the alpha of the recommendation service please let us know!

We are targeting a January unveiling of our first consumer facing service. This new service will leverage the WSRelater engine to create a compelling user retention solution for media portals. You will hear more about this at the beginning of the year.

We will keep you posted.

Paul Martino and Chris Law

Interview with Greg Isaacs (eBay - Director Developers Program)

Another repost from the 1000 Flowers Bloom blog that I thought was appropriate since it talks about APIs:

I met with Greg Isaacs last week to talk about the eBay Developers Program and I have to say that it was the first time that I have ever had an embargo put on something that I could blog about.

The big announcement is that eBay has made their APIs free. Obviously they're hoping to get more developers to use their web services. Techdirt and others are covering the story.

What's maybe not so obvious is that they were one of the best examples of someone who was actually making money from their APIs. It's almost a shame that could make more money by becoming free. I always viewed eBay as one of the shining examples of companies that made real dollars from their web services. Greg dashed my world view when I talked to him though.

One other really interesting thing to note is that eBay has been in the "Web 2.0" game of releasing their APIs for the last 5 years. The amount of listings volume and revenue is pretty staggering when you see the stats.

Question to ponder - Do you need to have an existing business model before you open up your APIs? The eBay example seems to point to yes.

Read on for highlights. Listen to the conversation here.

Why remove the fees?

Greg - "Historically eBay charged for their APIs, eBay is announcing is that it will be removing all API fees for call volume and annual fees. We are planning on building on current momentum. By making the APIs free allow developers to continue to build really wonderful innovative applications."

Greg - "We never charged for the APIs for direct revenue, it was always about efficiency. When we got started making our APIs broadly available 5 years ago it was not a foregone conclusion about what value our developers would drive and what it meant for our infrastructure."

Greg - "We want to do two things by making the APIs free – number one to all of our developers who have been with us for a number of years say thank you and the second is around new developers, our motto is innovation without barriers. We want to remove as many barriers as possible. Let’s get rid of them and let developers do what they do best."

It's interesting that the API calls were originally all about efficiency to make sure that people were not abusing the system.  I really thought that they might have a whole separate business around providing the webservices. Obviously the API revenue was smaller than the overall revenue that they could get by getting more listings onto their site.

How much in terms of revenue is coming through 3rd party developers?

Greg - "Today about 22% of eBay.coms listings come from 3^rd party developers and that is up from 20% in Q2”

Wow. That's a huge number. Think of how many listings there are on eBay and what 22% of those listings represents. One question I'll be curious about is how much that number grows once the APIs are free.

What does eBay do for developers?

Greg - "To make developers successful we have done a bunch of things. We give them a lot of marketing support - for example, a solutions directory solutions.ebay.com an online directory where eBay buyers and sellers can find tools, we also give them lots of technical support, online as well as live help. We also have a sandbox which is a replicated version of the eBay production environment which is available for eBay developers to test it before going live to site."

You can tell that eBay has a pretty mature program. They do a lot of useful things for their developers that others are moving to catch up and do.

What are some interesting things that others are doing with eBay's API and data?

Greg - "Terapeak takes eBay’s unstructured data and puts it in a structured format. If you want to sell iPod Nano’s, you can go to Terapeak’s system and get a wealth of information of historical transactions around average selling prices, conversion rates on iPod Nanos, look at what time of day to sell, what features like Bold to use."

Greg - "Mpire built a selling tool for eBay sellers, it allows you as a seller to manage your eBay inventory and get a snapshot of how you’re doing financially and allow you to manage your contacts."

I think that there is probably a tremendous amount of value locked inside of the transaction data that eBay has. Very cool stuff that Terapeak is doing. Mpire sounds like CRM/ERP meets eBay. It's amazing to me that there is this whole eBay economy that can use this.

Will there ever be a time when people don't go to eBay the website at all?

Greg - "A lot of our sellers today don’t even have to come to eBay to manage their business and we designed that intentionally. On the buy side today we have a whole host of applications that allow you to sell more efficiently whether you’re on the browser, telephone etc."

Greg - "Something I’m very excited to see is when you can search for an item and you can list an item on eBay without ever having to go to the website. My belief is that will increase the size of the marketplace and that’s a win win for everyone."

This is pretty amazing and even if they don't call it Web 2.0 at eBay they clearly get it. eBay could end up being an underlying commerce infrastructure layer for the whole web. What an amazingly powerful position to be in!

What is eBay's take on Web 2.0?

Greg - "For us it’s been less about buzz or hype and more about economic opportunity. We’ve always focused around how can we make developers successful and how can they actually make money. That doesn’t always go hand in hand with the latest fad or the latest buzz."

eBay does a terrific job of marrying a business model to the Web 2.0 concepts. In fact I think it's fair to say that they're a real pioneer at doing that.

Can I show both eBay and Amazon content on the same page?

Greg - "In our license agreement that is allowed and the one caveat is that with the listings from Amazon and eBay must be visually separate. The last thing you want is someone to click on an item thinking they’re going to eBay and go to some other site. Go to Fatlens and you will see concert tickets there not only on eBay but also on various other marketplaces that Fatlens does business with."

Again I'm amazed at the willingness that people are showing in putting their content and functionality up next to a competitors. I think that many companies have really gotten themselves out of the walled garden mentality now.

What should the others like Google and Yahoo do with their developers programs?

Greg - "I’m not going to give you all the information you like about what they should be doing because after all we’re going after the same developer mindshare."

This further reinforces to me that there is a real war on now for folks to get a hold of developers and get them creating things on platforms and getting them hooked there.

What’s coming up next for the eBay Developer’s Program?

Greg - "eBay developer challenge with two main components:

• An individual developer prize: $5000 + ability to present their application at the O’Reilly ETECH conference + flight and hotel.

• An open source prize: Xboxes for the winners + ability to present their application at the O’Reilly ETECH conference + flight and hotel."
  

Timeline
0:22 How did you make the jump from Investment Banking to eBay and the Developers Program
1:19 It seems like the Developers Program is a far stretch from Investment Banking.
2:21 What does it mean to be the Director of the Developers Program?
3:49 How do you measure the success of your program
5:08 eBay announces no more fees for APIs
6:10 What’s driving the reason to drop the API fees
7:42 Tell me about how eBay allows people to use anonymized data
8:57 What are your favorite three applications
11:11 What do you wish people would build?
12:48 Do you ever forsee a world where users don’t have to go to eBay directly to buy or sell at all?
14:25 What’s about developers who might be worried about eBay saying hey that’s a good idea I’m going to go do that?
15:57 So you think it will be less of a Google/Yahoo model where you buy up companies?
16:45 Why doesn’t eBay get more buzz around Web 2.0 since it was a pioneer?
18:01 Are you comfortable with eBay data mixing with Amazon data or functionality?
19:12 Fatlens example.
19:56 What do you think about Google or Yahoo showing eBay items in search results?
20:59 What are Google and Yahoo doing right or wrong with their developer programs?
21:45 What else is coming down the pipe for eBay’s developers program?

 

Web Services with Network Effect

This is a repost from my 1000flowersbloom blog that I thought was appropriate

I had been looking at the Web 2.0 world as a series of data silos, web services, and aggregators. I think that there is another way to look at is as well which is to examine which services stretch across all sites and gain network effect by doing so.

I think that a reputation system is a great example of a service that does this and that gets stronger the more sites it is deployed across. Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures has a post about why it won't work. Mary Hodder was at a Union Square Ventures session in NY where they talked about it:

Mary - "you can pull data for reputation from Ebay.... but the thing about the difference between what Tim was talking about, maps, and Ebay's reputation information is that the mapping data makes sense when you pull it out of the system, whereas the reputation data, because Ebay is so skewed, it's such a bizarre social environment, everybody is under tremendous pressure to make this sort of, you know, A+++ best sale I've ever had, which, I mean, would only exist if the guy who was selling you the thing drove me the item from Kansas or something, otherwise it's just probably B+. [So]... the reputation information is perfect or it's terrible, and when you pull it out of that system ... it doesn't match up. It doesn't translate with other walled garden reputations."

I have to say that I disagree with Mary Hodder on this one. I think that it would be tremendously valuable to know what someone's eBay rating was in other contexts.

Let's say I'm on Craigslist - right now I have no trust mechansim. I'd much rather at least have the eBay one even though it might be imperfect. I also think that people will understand that when a rating is presented as an eBay rating that they will be able to contextualize what that really translates into.

The more the reputation system is used the stronger it gets. A reputation system is going to be very important in further enabling person to person transactions.

Chris

Web Services sweeping the landscape

This is a repost from 1000 Flowers Bloom that I thought would be interesting to this audience:

There's an interesting discussion going on around Web Service components. Are they Internet Connected Compenents as Scoble is calling them? Maybe Raw Potatoes as Ethan Stock and I have mused about? You know - the things you make mashups out of.

No matter what you name them they are changing the way that functionality is shared and distributed around the web. Why do a mapping component when Google will do it for you? Why write a music engine when Yahoo will do it for you? Entrepreneurs should be building on top of these to create great apps.

Zvents is a great example of this. Take a core idea like - we need to have a good way to find all the events that are out there and then layer functionality like Google Maps on top of it to make it better.

I had an interesting conversation today with Greg Isaacs over at eBay and he's got some cool examples of the eBay APIs being used with things like Google Maps functionality. They put out a call at their last developers conference for more functionality like this and it looks like their developers have delivered. He showed me some truly cool stuff when I talked to him. I'll be posting the interview next week.

The real question in my mind is - what are the components? What should they be? I created a wiki over at wsfinder to help answer that question. One thing that's fascinating is to see which areas have lots of APIs from different providers and which don't... but that's fodder for another post.

Chris

More APIs

A few more APIs added to the wiki. Apologies for not posting these more often but things have been really busy with startup stuff. More on that later…

 

APIs

Shadows - A social bookmarking service for discovering, sharing and managing information on the web

ZeeMaps - International geocoding web service

Amphetarate - AmphetaRate aims to be used by all news aggregators in order for all users to collaborate on finding the best personalized RSS content

GUIDGenerator - GUID Generator for unique identification 

Examples
Internet Bargain Center - Powerful local eBay auction search tool

Chris