Yeah. Bet that title got your attention.
I'll be gone for the next 10 days and didn't want you to forget me.
My soapbox about complex integration being ported from the enterprise to the cloud being a huge opportunity for the right solution had me thinking.
I wonder if a lot of the people developing "apps" using APIs even realize what governance is, and why it's critical. At a super high level, governance is the ability to articulate what to expect from an API, the formalization of that expectation into an SLA (service level agreement), and the careful monitoring of the actual API to make sure it continues to meet the SLA as defined.
Of course, one API may have many SLAs based on usage, and all that.
So, where does online dating come in as a benchmark?
I had this idea for turning Facebook into an online dating site to solve a huge problem with online dating. Let's think about the problem with the traditional online dating model.
A person goes online and tells some random website a whole bunch of personal details. Without any confirmation or reference at all, their profile is then published for other people to view. People seem surprised at all the exaggerations that are exhibited in personal profiles.
Like money, dating is something people don't seem to have such realistic views of when it comes to their situations. Makes sense too... if I met you for real, I wouldn't start the conversation by saying "Hi, I'm a compulsive neurotic who will make your life miserable." I'd more likely say something like "I'm great at my job because of my attention to detail" if I even let it come up at all in conversation.
While that's sorta funny... there are other more discrete ways to define people that aren't so "fuzzy". Like, "I'm not married" or "sure, this picture was just taken last month".
Married. Current photo. These are bits of meta data about the person that could be easily confirmed, though we're all concerned about big brother and (US) law doesn't make it easy for companies to be so intrusive in our life.
We're so embarrassed by online dating, that we keep it separate and only let other daters see dating profiles. So, we can exaggerate because our "regular" (non-datable) friends won't see what we're saying or hold us accountable.
From a technical perspective, the same analogy means that sometimes the technical infrastructure isn't there to constantly prove that what I'm saying about my API is true - even if it's a discrete measure. Like uptime. Or, expected performance.
And, that's where Facebook, or rather the community comes into play.
Imagine building a dating site layered on top of Facebook.
All of a sudden, when I say I'm 6'1" and my mother says "in heels" (that's funny because I'm a boy) someone looking at me as a prospective date will know my real height. If I say I'm not married, I'd have a hard time when I got home that day from work. And, if I thought I could create another profile, I'd need to figure out a way to get a reasonable # of friends so I look like a real person, with all the interactions on my facebook page that entails.
The community could hold people accountable.
Back to APIs.
However, if you'd like better governance of API providers, a way to let the community hold companies to a higher ethical standard of how they present their services, wouldn't it be better if the community had a place to share their experiences of the real level/quality of service provided by an API vendor so you could choose the right API for your situation? This community should be in the open, available for prospective customers, but validated by existing ones. Then, we'd have something that more reflects reality and everyone would prosper as a result.