The Biological Brit

Although he strays into Semantic Web territory Tom Morris, perhaps unwittingly, made a terrific connection between my recent post on uniFeeds and an older one entitled - "I'm an Application". Tom says -

"Applications and web services would have to ask you to access your data and you'd have a situation that is 180 degrees from where we are now. Instead of having a webapp with an API, you'd have individuals with APIs that the applications would tap in to."

Woah, think about that for a moment. At first glance it might seem analogous to the Mechanical Turk but it's actually the Mechanical Turk turned inside out, it's inverse. While the famous chess playing contraption was a human controlled system designed to fool another human into thinking it was a machine, what Tom describes above is more like a machine controlled system designed to fool another machine into thinking it's a human!

In honour of Tom's London background I'm calling this concept the Biological Brit ;-)

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Comments

[walter]

>> nstead of having a webapp with an API, you'd have individuals with APIs that the applications would tap in to."

Isn't this kind of how OpenID operates ?

[Tom Morris]

OpenID does it for identity. But imagine if all your data were like that - RSS feeds, bookmarks, attention metadata, photos, video, blogging etc. *That's* what I'm getting at. When I bookmark a site, it shouldn't go in the del.icio.us database which I can then run API calls against. It should go in to the TomDB, which del.icio.us can run API calls against.

Biological Brit? I have to pass on that honour to Professor Richard Dawkins, I'm afraid. ;)