Four short links: 18 November 2009

Web Time Travel, UK Map Data Liberation, Streetview Mashups, 3D Retail

1. Memento: Time Travel for the Web -- clever versioning hack that uses HTTP's content negotiation to negotiate about the date!
2. Ordnance Survey Maps to Go Online -- The prime minister said that by April he hoped a consultation would be completed on the free provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000, (not the scale of a typical Landranger map set at 1:25,000). The online maps would be free to all, including commercial users who, previously, had to acquire expensive and restrictive licences at £5,000 per usage, a fee many entrepreneurs felt was too high. No word yet on license. (more details here)
3. Mapsicle -- open source Javascript library to create mashups and application on Google Streetview, from NZ developers Project X. It has been released by Google as part of the Maps Utility library.
4. Freedom of Creation Shop -- online store for 3D-printed objects. (via Makezine).

Up Close with an Enigma

At last month's RSA conference in San Francisco, I stumbled upon a vintage 1944 model of the German crypothographic machine, popularly known as the Enigma. This particular machine was owned by the National Cryptologic Museum, and was part of a larger booth hosted by the National Security Agency. The staff at the exhibit were quite friendly and it didn't take much to convince someone from the NSA to talk on-camera about the Enigma. (I did decide to submit the video to the NSA public affairs office for final review.) Reading through the accompanying historical pamphlet and listening to NSA staffers, I developed a better appreciation for the contributions made by Polish authorities (and mathematicians) towards breaking what was then, the most important cryptographic machine in the world.

Also from RSA 2009:

Major milestone for ProgrammableWeb & "The Web as Platform"

Last week marked an important milestone for the "Web as Platform" as the 1,000 API was added to the ProgrammableWeb registry. John Musser (see: Web2.0 Report) started tracking the first few web service API's back in 2005.

How do these 1000 APIs break down by type? The following chart, derived from our database, shows the the top 15 sectors or markets with the greatest number of competing API providers. As you can see there are already 71 mapping-related APIs alone"

User Mediated Trans-Enterprise-Web Mashups?

There has been an on again off again discussion behind the scenes at Radar about the nature of the enterprise vs. the web and how they are defined not just by their technologies, but by their frames of reference. For my part, I think the enterprise view is defined implicitly by a planning mindset and a perceived scope of control that ends at the enterprise boundary. Whereas the web is too large for effective control so it tends to be an environment more conducive to serendipity and emergent behaviors. The web and the enterprise also differ in obvious cultural ways. Web culture tends toward speed and "good enough" while enterprise culture is informed by enterprise concerns like mission criticality, legal frameworks such as HIPPA and Sarbox, security, transaction volumes, and the like. These thoughts were still rattling around in my head last month when I arrived in Montreal for the weekend.

Just like every other year, as soon as I cleared customs I skipped the crappy exchange rates at the arrival area exchange vendors and headed upstairs to my favorite ATM machine in the departure hall. I needed to get cash for my cab ride to the center of town, only this time, the machine spit my card back out like day old sushi. I tried another ATM further down the hall with the same result.

After ten frustrating minutes of IVR traversal and the international roaming fees that went with it, I was talking to a Wachovia Bank customer service representative who politely suggested "you should have called us before you left the country, then we wouldn't have automatically blocked your card."

Apparently Wachovia (like many other banks) has decided the best way to reduce their risk of fraudulent transactions is to convert that risk to customer hassle with an algorithm that looks something like: IF Loc <> Home Country/County/City SET CardStatus to Blocked. My bank is now my mom and I have to call it and get permission before I am allowed to go out and play.

The funny thing about all this is that even though Wachovia suspected I hadn't accompanied my ATM card to Montreal, plenty of others knew that I had, including at least: AT+T (my cell phone provider), Verizon (my blackberry provider), Dopplr, USAA (I booked my flight with their credit card), Travelocity (where I booked the flight), US Airways, Plazes, Yahoo Fire Eagle (fed from Plazes and Dopplr), and naturally, the U.S. and Canadian Border Authorities.

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An ESB for the Web?

I spend a great deal of my time encouraging "enterprise people" to think more like "web people." Focus on adoption, use platforms to enable emergent capability, build the "generative enterprise," and that sort of thing.

So, imagine my surprise when I saw the web acting a bit like the enterprise with the launch of Gnip.

As the web moves toward a network of widespread transactional API's, each with it's own vocabulary, it is starting to look a lot like a legacy enterprise writ large or maybe like an industry eco-system. So we shouldn't be surprised to see web developers turning to solutions that their enterprise colleagues would find familiar.

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in the enterprise world talking about SOA in the last five years (or spent time building "trading platforms" for industry consortiums prior to that) has probably drawn a picture on a whiteboard that looks something like this (see, almost identical):

Whether you have integrated line of business applications inside the enterprise or connected trading partners within an industry, that N squared connection problem will resonate with your experience. Webs of poorly documented point-to-point integrations are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and impossibly brittle when the business changes.

And now the N squared problem seems like it might be beginning to resonate with web developers too now that they have to integrate to an ever growing population of API's. Plus, on the web, the additional limitations of a port 80 based infrastructure add to the nightmare by throwing the expense of constant API polling into the mix.

So, what to do?

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