Idle Thoughts

Any new technology will eventually have social elements arbitrarily grafted on, it’s the way of today’s web. To an extent, this makes sense; people are becoming more social, and want to share most of what they do online, but it’s important to consider the way in which social elements are implemented.

Social feed readers have been around for almost as long as RSS, usually allowing users of a particular feed reader to discuss a post amongst themselves. This isn’t a particularly user-friendly system of commenting because it isolates the commenters from the primary discussion - the one occuring on the blog. This brings me to my point:

Feed reader comments are implemented this way because it is almost impossible to integrate with blogs. Everyone uses a different commenting system, not all blogs provide a feed of comments or otherwise make their comments accessible, and none that I know of provide the ability to comment from a third party site.

Ideally, a feed reader would display all comments for a post, along with a comment form to allow the reader to join in without leaving the page. Unfortunately, for such a feed reader to ever become a reality, there would have to be no more than a few comment standards, preferably just one, used by the vast majority of sites.

This standardization of commenting systems is gradually becoming a reality with services like Disqus and IntenseDebate, but these offer no extended functionality; they would need to provide the ability to post comments from a third party site to enable such an idealized feed reader.

This may seem like a lot of trouble, and it is, but it would be very beneficial to all concerned. Users would be able to add their comments, and read others’, without having to visit every individual site, and blogs would gain more comments by feed subscribers, who are likely among their more devoted followers, adding value to their stories.

This isn’t likely to occur for some time yet, but it would only take one platform creating a standard to kick start the change. WordPress, I’m looking at you.

APIs, Blogs, Feed Readers, RSS

It is an unwritten rule of social media that all sites must provide free access to their API. The theory goes that a user should have full control over their content and how it is displayed, since they were the ones who generated it in the first place.

For users, this is fantastic - they can access their content in any way they want.

For third parties, this is fantastic - they don’t have to build their own communities, instead tapping into thriving ones.

The trouble is, it cripples the initial service. The two cornerstones of startup monetization are advertising and premium features. Advertising is outright impossible - no-one’s going to use an API which delivers ads interspersed with the content. Features, while possible to build, will have to compete with the myriad third parties accessing your API, and generally providing their services for free.

The odd thing about this situation is that the answer is so obvious, and yet ignored - it doesn’t make sense to provide free access to your API - it’s a service companies would willingly pay for. Much more so than users for premium services, or for advertisers for ads.

While charging for API access would put a significant dent in the number of third party applications built on top of your service, it would mainly kill the weaker services, the ones which offer no real benefit to the user. If a service is truly useful, it should be able to build a business model around its offering.

Companies got into this mess because they were too considerate of providing a great service, at the expense of a business model. In fairness, it can be very beneficial to a company to provide a free API - more applications mean more features, and a happier user base. At some point, however, customer satisfaction must take a back seat to profit or the company ceases to be a company at all, but rather a charity.

APIs