Re: User stories for Social API

> On 4 Feb 2015, at 21:41, Erik Wilde <dret@berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 
> hello.
> 
> On 2015-02-04 11:52 , Lloyd Fassett wrote:
>> I think Henry makes an illuminating and important point.  A Social API
>> derived exclusively from analyzing the existing API's of big social
>> players is not the Social Web.
> 
> https://www.mnot.net/blog/2012/06/25/http_api_complexity_model might be an interesting read in the context of this thread. back at the TPAC F2F, we decided that the "Social API" in the charter should be interpreted to be a "RESTful HTTP API". my assumption was that then it clearly should be one matching mark's "Many Clients, Many Servers" category. are we now backtracking to say that the API actually is something different?

Mark's categorisation suites me well. My proposal is indeed that the API we need to develop 
here, since we are at the W3C, is one of "many  clients, many servers". ( Anything else does  
not require a W3C WG, but could easily be done by individual players ). 

Mark writes that doing that is hard. I disagree that this is still the case: it is hard 
if you don't have a  Linked Data Platform.  But once you work within that, it turns 
out that it is  easier to write a distributed protocol than it is to write a siloed one. 

Now since for the moment there is a lack of consensus among the group
members about where the lines are to be drawn and if they have to be drawn at all
between local and federated apis, I suggest that we don't tie the prejudices of what
a Social API is into the use cases.  We need User Stories that help create a Social Web,
whether they be distributed or centralised. Where the line between the protocols is to 
be drawn should not be part of the user stories - that is a technical detail. 
I agree with Harry Halpin's point in this weeks teleconference where he said

[[
hhalpin: we did rat-hole really badly last week, we had users bringing up implementation level 
details about how they wanted the plumbing to work
... we dont' want to do that in the user stories
... they have to be implementation independent at this point
... let's try to stay on focus on the mailing list, and if people want to have more technical discussions about plumbing, that's off topic for the WG and you can do that in the IG
]]

So we should have user stories for the social web. Later we can decide wether we need one
or two or three of 50 apis. 

Can we construct a consensus on this?

Henry


> 
> cheers,
> 
> dret.
> 
> -- 
> erik wilde | mailto:dret@berkeley.edu  -  tel:+1-510-2061079 |
>           | UC Berkeley  -  School of Information (ISchool) |
>           | http://dret.net/netdret http://twitter.com/dret |
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Thursday, 5 February 2015 12:51:50 UTC