Okay, so what *is* an API?

This is an excellent question, and one I get asked a fair amount. The not-very-useful answer is "it's an Application Programming Interface," which tells you what it's an acronym for but not what that means. If you're not familiar with the term, the words are just a different kind of meaningless noise. 

If you want to read the Wikipedia entry on APIs, knock yourself out. You might also find the entry on Web Services interesting. I'll wait here. 

Done? Okay, welcome back. There's a lot of really dense information over there, and I find it useful to fasten on two key concepts: One, an API is a way for computers to talk to one another, and two, a web service is (kind of) a web site with the skin taken off. 

Remix, for example (hey, what other example am I going to use?), replicates pretty much what you can get from BestBuy.com on the "product detail page" for a given item. Here's an Insignia TV at BestBuy.com:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8632875&type=product&id=1194052042360

And here's the same TV in the Remix API:

http://api.remix.bestbuy.com/v1/products/8632875.xml?apiKey=fqbvt96fpczdv4wesx4s62sd

Notice that pretty much all of the information that is in the pretty BestBuy.com version is also in the texty Remix version? That's because Remix is more or less just BestBuy.com with the skin off. 

So why do you care? What's the point of taking the skin off a web site? Well, when you do that, it becomes possible to put a different skin on. For example, in the sidebar of this blog is a list of games, showing names, images and prices. All of that information is coming from Remix; I just put the list of SKU IDs into a control panel and it created a chunk of javascript that does the work. 

So what you're seeing is information from BestBuy.com, but not at BestBuy.com. When prices change on BestBuy.com, they'll change in that sidebar gadget. 

What do we hope to get out of this? Something cool that we can't imagine. Yellow Tag Productions, our internal video production team, did a great video that summarizes the thinking behind this and the potential we see, called "Open for Business." It's worth 4:50 of your day, I think. Of course, I would, since I'm in it. Give it a try. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whzN-7uCiZw

Affiliating myself

Had an excellent meeting at work early this week and discovered Things From Another World (www.tfaw.com), which looks like a most excellent place to buy some of things I find fascinating. Yeah, I'm talking about comic books. 

Turns out they have an affiliate program, which is nice. I am not sure if they are targeting the long tail, which is where this tiny little self-indulgence belongs. Their process seems to assume that I own the domain where my site is located. Since I'm on Blogger, that is very much not the case. 

They do offer me an alternative method of demonstrating my ownership of this blog, though. I cam put this into a post:

Confirmation Code: GNDFMCN16321763

There you go, guys. Sign me up!

Bridges to the Future

Hey, my article is live, and I didn't blog about it. Never has the subtitle of my blog been so eerily accurate. 

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/dec2008/db20081228_586132.htm

It's aimed at non-technical people working in businesses that use technology, in particular those that are dependent on technology for their success. If you're working for a company that needs to do technology projects, it's worth reading. And then printing out and showing to your senior management. :)

Serendipity

Sometimes you just get lucky, I guess. Case in point: I've been invited to write an article for Business Week. This is utterly relevant to what I am doing right now, and yet is completely random. One of my friends at work (Erik Olson, @EAEO) twittered that he recommended following @johnabyrne, Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek. I did so. Turns out I was John's 2,500th Twitter follower, and as a result, he offered to let me write the article as a reward.

It's such an amazing coincidence. My project (Best Buy Remix, http://remix.bestbuy.com) is gathering momentum inside Best Buy and we are working on getting out the word externally. We just brought on a community manager to help us reach out to external development communities and take care of the folks using our portal. We've been talking to PR and Marketing about how to reach out. And then this opportunity drops into my lap.

Sometimes you just get lucky, indeed.

- Kevin

Getting Outlook calendar onto your iPhone without violating corporate policies

At work (Best Buy), we don't allow non-company-owned devices on the network. This means that I can't sync my (personal) iPhone with my work calendar. Since my work-provided phone is dead as a doornail right now, this is kind of a problem. But I'm a resourceful guy, and I'm pretty good with the Google. 

So I found a way to do it, mostly courtesy of this post from Ian Fernando. Basically, you need to do 4 things:

1. Use Google Calendar Sync to get your Outlook calendar into Google Calendar
2. Sign up for a (free) account with www.nuevasync.com (beta service, will probably go pay or go away some day, but for now it works and is free)
3. Give Nuevasync access to your Google calendar (not your account, and not your password, just access to the calendar)
4. Add a calendar sync on the iPhone to the MS Exchange server that Nuevasync provides (detailed directions at Nuevasync site)
   

It's a pretty simple process, and the results are hard to argue with: I have my calendar on my phone. 

In which I take the Wall Street Journal to task for their "analysis" of the impact of the Beatles appearing in Rock Band

So the Beatles at long last are going to have some kind of digital distribution, and it will be in the Rock Band series. The WSJ's article on it is fairly good, written as it is for a general audience, but it contains two paragraphs that made me wince.

The first is an observation about the relative sales performance of the two games. It follows earlier portions that have made it clear that the two games are competing, and that the Beatles deal represents a big win for Rock Band. This is apparently offset by:

DFC estimates that Guitar Hero and its sequels have generated more than $1.5 billion in cumulative revenue so far, three times as much as Rock Band. However, the two games are competing neck-and-neck so far this year, with MTV's launch of Rock Band 2 and Activision's latest, Guitar Hero World Tour, this past Sunday. Guitar Hero has issued seven titles to date, while Rock Band -- distributed by Electronic Arts Inc. -- has put out just two titles.

The implication is that Rock Band is the upstart, coming from behind; that GH is more successful than Rock Band. But, since there are no sales figures for the period since Rock Band's release, or across the last two releases or really anything that gives you an apples-to-apples comparison, it's what we call a "factoid." That is, "fact-" meaning "fact," and "oid" meaning "something like." It's an ornament, but not particularly useful in helping you figure out which game is winning.

Look, if you want to compare the two games, compare them in a meaningful way. When one game has a two-year head start, lifetime sales figures aren't a very good yardstick. And since the creative team (Harmonix) that is making Rock Band was responsible for developing the first 3 Guitar Hero releases (GH, GH II and GH:Rocks the 80s), perhaps those should be counted on the Rock Band side.

The second maddening paragraph is the very next one in the article:

Beatles songs available on a Rock Band game are likely to be popular, but analysts point out that the challenge will be in reaching out to Beatles fans, many of whom are in their 50s and 60s, and marketing the game in a way that will persuade them to buy a videogame console and try the game.

The "analysts" mentioned are no doubt glad they are anonymous, because this is a dipshit statement, on multiple levels. First, it assumes that Beatles fans are mostly over 50. Hello? They're the BEST ROCK AND ROLL BAND EVER. Their appeal transcends age. Yes, lots of people over 50 like the Beatles. So do lots of people who are under 50.

Second, it assumes that you have to be a Beatles fan to be interested in their music. I'm not a Jimmy Buffet fan, but I bought the 3-song Buffet set for Rock Band. Iconic, distinctive music has general appeal. The music of the Beatles will appeal even to non-Beatles fans.

Third and most annoying, it assumes that Harmonix and MTV are interested in trying to drive console sales. They don't make consoles. They make software and peripherals, and trying to drive sales of those things is their primary concern. Adding the Beatles to their product line (especially if they do a standalone Beatles game) drives software sales to people who already own consoles.

It's one of those superficially smart-sounding observations that falls apart under scrutiny. It shouldn't have made it past the editors at the WSJ.

Pondering on the VP debate

I still haven't watched it, but I have been following the blogospheric coverage, especially through www.fivethirtyeight.com. One thing that was being theorized coming into the debate was that the format, especially the lack of direct interaction, was going to favor Palin. Another was that Biden needed to be careful and not attack too much, not come across as being mean to her.

Is it possible that the format, by depriving Biden of the opportunity to interact directly, wound up helping him more than her? Not sure if it's possible to tell after the fact, but the coverage I am reading is indicating that he came off as more sympathetic and human than she did, in addition to being more qualified.

Then again, I'm not reading everything (unlike Governor Palin, who apparently reads "all of" the newspapers and magazines), so this may just be an artifact of small sample size.

AP, IP and baffling business decisions

Okay, I'm kind of cheating here. I originally wrote this for my internal blog at Best Buy, but I really like it, so I'm reposting it out here in the wild.

=============================
Original date: 6/20/2008

I've read a number of blog posts recently about AP's decision to try to impose very strict rules on use of their content. In essence, they're claiming that quoting more than 5 words from an AP article (in a public context such as a blog) constitutes infringing use of their intellectual property and they should be paid for it.

That strikes me (and many others) as an untenable legal position -- fair use seems to me (a non-lawyer) as granting greater ability to re-use than a 5-word limit will allow. It seems to me that AP is following in the footsteps of SCO or the RIAA; unable to grow their business in the fashion they were, they're suing customers (or potential customers) to create a revenue stream or safeguard the existing one.

Whether downloading music without paying for it is legal or not (probably not), whether it hurts sales or not (also probably not, in my opinion), it's a logical and inevitable consequence of technological change. Trying to hold back the Internet by suing potential customers is not likely to succeed, and a waste of time and energy that could be put into finding ways to actually grow your business.

There's an excellent article on the AP decision over at Greg Costikyan's Play This Thing blog. He points out that AP (and Reuters) had the opportunity to own news online but have missed the boat. To illustrate the futility of their approach, he wanted to find a story to quote (more than 5 words) from, but couldn't find one:

"... I searched on "videogame," and brought up...

Nothing.

Not a single story.

Now, the search was constrained to the last seven days, and I suppose it's vaguely possible that AP has not run a single story in the last week that contained the word "videogame" or dealt with them in any fashion -- but I doubt that. What's more likely, I suspect, is that search is on keywords, not fulltext, and that "videogame" isn't a keyword they use."

The full post is worth reading, but does contain a couple of swear words. Fair warning. :)

http://playthisthing.com/i-wish-violate-aps-ip-aps-gormlessness-prevents-me

Netflix goes open, and I uncloak

So Netflix has opened up their data via an API. They're also using Mashery, which lead to me discovering something that probably should have been obvious: My Remix account works over at Netflix as well, since it's not really a Remix account but a Mashery account. 

In retrospect, duh. It tells you that on the login screen. I just hadn't connected the dots. 

In other news, I changed my Twitter handle to my real name. I figured that would be easier for people to keep straight. I'm keeping this blog, though, and I'm still Brainiac4 lots of places. I'm just being more open about who Brainiac4 is. 

Remix Best Buy

Ever say to yourself "Man, Best Buy's web site sucks. I could build a better one!"

I'm calling your bluff. Best Buy Remix is live. We've taken the BBY product catalog and turned it into an open API. Swing by remix.bestbuy.com, check out the documentation, sign up for an API key and do something with our data.

I dare you.

:)

You'll see me in the forums there under my real name: Kevin Matheny. Say hi.