I’ve been keeping an eyeball on open data initiatives in local government for a while now, and as I’ve mentioned here we advised our consulting client BART on their open data initiative last year.
I just noticed that the upcoming San Francisco Open311 initiative is planning to coordinate its efforts with a similar initiative underway in [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Platforms'
Cities Starting to Collaborate on Open Data Initiatives
February 23rd, 2010 · No Comments · Platforms, Web/Tech
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Yahoo Pulls Plug on Shopping API
January 12th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Platforms, Web/Tech, Work, Yahoo
I’ve been getting a few pings from folks regarding Yahoo’s plans to transition its Shopping property to a third party. My team at Yahoo launched the Shopping API in August 2005 (although I don’t work for Yahoo anymore so I can’t provide insider answers on what’s going on here).
Since the new partner service (PriceGrabber) apparently [...]
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How Not To Describe Your Platform
December 14th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Platforms, Web/Tech, Work
Link: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps
We haven’t actually released new APIs; what we have done is that we announced a set of APIs on November 3rd, which was our adaptive suite. Adaptive suite APIs include adaptive payments and adaptive accounts. Then we also announced our authentications and permissions API. What [...]
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Technology Platform Content Strategies
November 30th, 2009 · No Comments · Platforms, Web/Tech, Work
A frequently-overlooked aspect of managing a platform technology product is creating a sensible content plan and executing on it effectively. This is not what you’d call a sexy topic: In a lot of ways, technical content is to a platform as horse manure is to a farm. Very few people get excited about working with [...]
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Facebook To Let Others Play In Its Stream
April 27th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Platforms, Programming
Link: Facebook To Let Others Play In Its Stream
If true, this could be huge. It looks like the premise is that third-party developers will be able to get access to Facebook data (including photos) through new APIs.
This could make Facebook much less of a walled garden and give them a more compelling competitive response to [...]
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The iPhone is Not a Platform
September 16th, 2008 · 20 Comments · Apple, Platforms
A post on the NY Times’ “Bits” blog describes the trevails of a developer who went to the trouble to build an iPhone podcasting application only to have the application rejected because it duplicates functionality found in iTunes (which is to say, the developer’s product is competitive with Apple’s own software).
This violates our first rule [...]
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Product Managers, Lawyers, and Google Chrome
September 4th, 2008 · No Comments · Google, Open Source, Platforms
Product managers have an interesting relationship with corporate attorneys. In my various product management jobs I had to deal with attorneys quite a bit, but this kind of interaction clearly doesn’t happen often enough, for reasons I can sort of understand (lawyers can be intimidating, they frequently say “no” in a overly authoritative way that [...]
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Death to Developer Contests
March 18th, 2008 · 1 Comment · .NET, Microsoft, Platforms
Over on his blog Microsoft’s Dan Fernandez courageously decries the frequent use of developer contests to engage developers and increase momentum for platform adoption. He counted up the number of contests Microsoft is running at the moment: it’s 18. Eighteen different ways to win cash and prizes for doing stuff with various Microsoft products.
Dan thinks [...]
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Mono’s “Usability Disaster” and Platform Discovery Optimization
January 25th, 2008 · No Comments · Platforms, Web/Tech
Seeing this post from Miguel about a major cock-up pertaining to the developer download experience in Mono made me think about the platform companies we’ve been advising.
Companies often trick themselves into thinking that every developer who discovers their stuff will automatically do whatever it takes to use their stuff. But developers actually make very calculated [...]
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Understand the Difference Between Demos and Code Examples
January 1st, 2008 · No Comments · Platforms
Lots of technology products and platforms aimed at developers — possibly the majority of them — confuse the distinction between a good demo and a good code example. A good demo looks great and dazzles your CEO and customers. On the other hand, good code examples seem to take forever to write, they never look [...]
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