Tag: platforms (18)

Considerations in Designing a Developer Platform

social-networking-icons-1-formatted

The meteoric rise of developer platforms over the last seven years has been impressive to watch and a major boon to the social and mobile ecosystems. Twitter (API launched in 2006), Facebook (2007), and Apple iOS (2008) alone have spurred developers to build massive businesses on top of their platforms and simultaneously driven significant user growth for the platforms themselves.

Despite these successes, designing a successful platform today remains an elusive challenge for new entrants. Through my work of building Microsoft Visual Studio's extensibility platform as well as imeem's Media Platform, I know first hand how difficult it can be to get the equation just right. In addition, Connected is in many ways the ultimate mashup, leveraging over 30 different third-party APIs to give you a consolidated view of your contacts and conversations. In developing Connected, I saw some third-party APIs that had well functioning API ecosystems, while many certainly did not.

A Look at Open Source Inside Connected

Open Source

The cost of building software products has dramatically fallen compared to a decade ago. Products that used to take millions of dollars are now being built for hundreds of thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. Two of the most important drivers of falling costs have been open source software and cloud computing.

Yesterday I had the delightful task of rebuilding one of our production cloud images for Connected. What I realized during that process was the full extent to which we rely on open source software to build Connected. Connected wouldn't be what it is today and couldn't have been built nearly as quickly or cheaply without the incredible amount of open source used throughout the stack. I thought I'd take a moment to catalog all the open source software we use to give you a sense of just how much it has truly changed the cost of software development.

Understanding the Players in the Social Data Layer

Qwerly

Social is clearly one of the biggest trends on the web right now, with the majority of new apps and services taking advantage of your friends to provide a more participatory experience. This extends across desktop and mobile applications as well as across most verticals, including media, e-commerce, travel, and more.

But what’s most exciting to me is what is happening a layer below these applications - the rise of the social data layer. The social data layer provides a set of compelling APIs that any application can take advantage of to quickly immerse it’s experience in social. Just as cloud computing significantly reduced the cost of building web applications, these social data platforms are significantly reducing the friction in creating compelling social experiences.

Evernote, The 100 Year Company

Evernote Trunk Conference

Today I had the pleasure of attending the Evernote Trunk Conference, Evernote’s first ever developer-focused event. I was excited to attend not only because Connected is an app in the Evernote Trunk, but also because Evernote has been a break-out success story in the productivity space. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts from the day.

The Resurgence of LinkedIn

In the wake of LinkedIn’s announcement of reaching 100 million members, I’ve been impressed with the resurgence they have had in the past year. I thought I would showcase some of the recent product innovation from LinkedIn as well as cultural shifts we’ve seen from within the company that have contributed to this growth.

The imeem Mafia



Last night I read Sarah Lacy's excellent post entitled Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia. If you haven't read it yet, you should. It not only catalogues many of the excellent startups that have come out of Facebook, but the emerging patterns amongst the bunch.

It got me thinking about my own experience at my previous startup, imeem. When I think back on imeem, I always felt that we had an incredible group of fascinating, talented, and ambitious people. While we never achieved our ultimate goals at imeem, I was sure many of these same folks would move on to something great afterwards. I told myself to keep a lookout as I was sure many would likely start their own ventures.

And sure enough, about a year since imeem's acquisition by MySpace, more than ten new exciting startups have been founded by the original imeem crew. I thought I'd take a moment to showcase some of them.

Why I Abandoned the Rackspace Cloud

Rackspace Cloud

As many of you know, I'm a huge proponent of on-demand computing as I believe it's the best starting point for most early stage web startups. Cloud computing allows a venture to substitute high initial capital expenditures for operating expenses that grow proportional to your traction. Equally important is its ability to flexibility scale and retract with the ebb and flow of your business. While it may make sense at a later stage to move to your own data center as you look to optimize costs, it rarely should be a priority in the tumultuous early days when you are still searching for product/market fit.

At my previous startup Anywhere.FM, we were an early adopter of Amazon Web Services in 2007. I've continued to be an early adopter of next generation cloud platforms as I'm always interested in understanding the bleeding edge innovations. Last year I initially saw a lot of promise in Google App Engine, but ultimately chose to abandon it due to its shortcomings. Just recently I tried the Rackspace Cloud, which is shaping up to be the fiercest competitor against AWS. I thought I'd share my experience with you.

5 Social Platform Predictions for 2010

Leading Social Platforms

As many of you know, I'm a big proponent of open platforms and have spent much of my career designing, building, or leveraging open platforms and APIs. While we have seen explosive growth in social platforms over the past several years, I believe they are still very early in their history.

I wanted to put out my 5 social platform predictions for 2010, as I think we are poised to see another exciting year of innovation.

The PayPal Wars and its Lessons for Today's Entrepreneurs

PayPal Mafia

I was perusing Andrew Chen's bookshelf and came across The PayPal Wars by Eric M. Jackson. It turned out to be a riveting tail of the entire journey of PayPal, from its early conception to its monstrous success, retold by one of its earliest hires in marketing. It's a story I thought I knew, but there was so much more to it than the simple success story we all hear about.

I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on the five most important lessons I learned from their journey and my thoughts on their application to today's entrepreneurs.

Google App Engine Task Queues, Push vs. Pull Paradigm, and Web Hooks

Despite my post last week on the Shortcomings of Google App Engine and my decision to move away from it as a viable platform for upcoming projects, I have been impressed with the overall architecture and design of their experimental Task Queue API.

Google throughout its years has been a leader in interface design and that has been reflected not only in the UI of the products they have built, but the countless API interfaces they have published. Google has made available some of the most easy to use yet powerful API interfaces. A clear focus on leveraging open standards where possible has helped them along the way. Google App Engine is probably the strongest testament to this, allowing developers to quickly build web applications that scale to millions of users on an easy to use Python or Java runtime environment. Their latest experimental design for the Task Queue API in Google App Engine is no exception.

Shortcomings of Google App Engine

As many of you know, I have been a huge fan of Google App Engine. I love the vision and truly believe its the first real platform-as-a-service as opposed to the other dominant cloud platform Amazon AWS. While AWS has significantly moved the industry forward with on-demand virtualized instances and cloud storage, it has not developed a fully scalable runtime environment comparable to Google App Engine. Sure Google App Engine only supports a very restricted use case and set of technologies, but constraints can be liberating. If the scenario fits for your web app, the freedom to focus on your app and not on infrastructure and scaling is very compelling.

Thus far I've created a variety of small production apps on app engine, including this blog, TuneChimp, and MonkeySort. I am now in the process of embarking on a large project and have been planning on using Google App Engine for it. However, I have run into a variety of shortcomings in GAE that currently and for the foreseeable future seem insurmountable. It has led me to have to reconsider my platform choice for this project and at this point relying on Amazon AWS (or an alternative cloud platform) seems like the ideal option.

For those also considering building applications on top of Google App Engine, I wanted to discuss these shortcomings so that you can make an informed decision when making your own platform choice.

Clara Shih, The Facebook Era, and Business Opportunities on Facebook


Several months ago I had the opportunity to sit in on a guest lecture Clara Shih gave at the Stanford Seminar on People, Computers, and Design. Clara has spent the last several years at Salesforce leading their social networking product strategy as well as developed Faceconnector, the first business app on Facebook that made it easy to integrate Facebook profile data into Salesforce CRM tools. With this insight, Clara recently authored The Facebook Era, a look at how social networks have changed people's behaviors, expectations, and relationships, and the resulting business opportunities it has created.

After attending the seminar, I decided to read the book and wanted to share some of the key trends discussed and the business opportunities that arise from them.

Lessons Learned from imeem

Before moving on to a new phase in my career, I always like to reflect on the previous experience and put together key takeaways that I can leverage in the next opportunity.

It's that time again as this past Wednesday was my last day at imeem. As some of you know, imeem acquired Anywhere.FM at the end of 2007. Since then I've helped to migrate Anywhere.FM, develop the imeem Media Platform, and contribute to a variety of monetization projects. But now I'm eager to move on to the next adventure :)

Since I have a blog this time around, I thought I would share my lessons learned from imeem with all of you.

Does Facebook Connect Deliver on its Promise?

The announcement of Facebook Connect in May 2008 brought the next major chapter in the Facebook platform story. After building the first and most successful social networking platform, Facebook decided to expand beyond its own destination to bring the power of the social graph to any third party site.

Facebook Connect - Button

Facebook Connect promised to deliver on the five following tenants: trusted authentication, real identity, friend linking, dynamic privacy, and social distribution. In the half a year since the announcement, how has Facebook Connect done?

Let's take a closer look at how Facebook Connect has fared on each of these tenants.

The Rise of Media APIs

Last year at the SocialMedia Business School I gave a presentation on Media APIs and how they could be leveraged to enhance existing experiences or build entirely new services around freely available media content. Since I have received many follow up questions, I thought I would take the opportunity to expand on the topic.

Palm Gets it Right With Mojo Developer Platform

The most exciting news out of CES 2009 was the Palm announcement of the Palm Pre, webOS, and Palm Mojo Application Framework.

Top Underhyped Open Platforms

2008 was definitely a year of open platforms with the continued growth of the Facebook and OpenSocial communities, the unveiling of the iPhone and Android app stores, and the countless Twitter clients and mashups.

Yet I believe there is still considerable untapped opportunity in several promising platforms that have yet to see significant traction in terms of hype, developers, and ultimately end users.

So here is my list of the top underhyped platforms that I hope to see many entrepreneurs build on in 2009.

Is Google App Engine Ready for Prime Time?

I recently took the time to build a web application on Google App Engine and wanted to share my thoughts on the experience and the pros and cons of Google App Engine as a web development platform.