Big Data* *small print

1

Tyler SingletaryDirector of Platform,

Klout@harmophone

My Perspective

• Klout uses GNIP,Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and about a dozen other APIs. Consume terabytes/day.

• Distribute own data to partners (Salesforce, CrimsonHexagon) & channels (Gnip, Datasift)

• Over 1,700 monthly active developers

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Finding a great APIis only the first step

• The data is what you want!

• You get to it easily, it’s well organized!

• This is awesome! I’m going to do X,Y and Z!

• Did you read the TOS?

3

Constraints breed Creativity

• Knowing what you can’t do opens doors

• Legalese is a programming language

• Bend rules, but build a rollback

• Respect the data of others as if it were your own

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Did you know?• Facebook forbids you from distributing

FBIDs

• Also from giving their data, or a derivative, to ad networks, etc.

• Twitter restricts you from separating location data from a tweet

• Nearly all require attribution, have cache and storage restrictions

A Rant About Scraping

• If a service has data you want, but doesn’t offer it in an API, do you have a right to it?

• Does this serve a long term business relationship?

• Whenever possible: have a relationship

• Robots.txt

Ubiquity• If APIs are going to be the defacto way businesses communicate, then:

• The rules are important.

• They need to apply to innovators as well as established business

• Terms must scale and be programmatically delivered and executed

• When you judge an API you discover, think beyond your own need:

• If I’m taking this data, and 50 other companies are, what benefit do I have? They have? The provider has?

• You serve at the provider’s pleasure.

• How can APIs be industry-wide if industry is afraid of abuse?

Distributing Your Data

• What do you want to encourage?

• What do you want discourage?

• Contingencies!

• Be upfront and clear: cucumber stories.

• legalese: thar be dragons! Test coverage.

• What do you give exceptions for?

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DRM

• No, not that DRM.

• Okay, you probably still think it’s that DRM.

• Data Rights Management

Robots.json• A standard way to describe

data rights

• Permissible use

• Data storage, caching

• Rate limits

• Copyrights, data stewardship

• License term, financial details

Alternatives

• Hypermedia?

• Requiring everyone to read and understand TOS and implement

• Trust? ignorance?

• Headers

Thank you!

12

Tyler SingletaryDirector of Platform,

Klout@harmophone

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