I’ve been thinking a lot about APIs lately. Xobni works with MS Outlook; we use its APIs to get to mail data. Xobni’s current value comes from organizing this data in novel ways for our users.
There’s still a ton of great things Xobni can do to (a) tap into other sources of data, including but by no means limited to mail data, and (b) make all of this useful data more accessible to other developers.
Xobni isn’t the only group of developers thinking about this problem. It’s clear to everyone that rich personal and inter-personal information is locked away in data silos.
Social Graph
People are trying to free social graph data, e.g. OpenSocial and the Social Graph Foo camp this coming weekend.
At the end of the day I think it’ll get done. The data is spread through email, social network, IM, and phone platforms, but that won’t stop progress if there is real value to be unlocked. That second piece is what I’m worried about; we are at a lack for compelling use cases of the social graph data. Here are the ones I know of: dopplr, evite invitations, setting permissions based on friendship, and search. What am I missing?
Other Personal Data
People are important but there’s more to life. Facebook, for example, has all kinds of data entities, and all of them are interconnected. It’s a powerful approach. Here’s my illustration.
