Twitter on Bruno Pedro

Bridging the Gap Between APIs and Customers

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 11:15:59 +0000

I recently gave a talk at the APIdays Mediterranea in Madrid where I started with a question: “Who are your customers?”.

The single, most important thing you want to understand about your API is how you can generate revenue from it. It all depends on who your customers are and how they can obtain value through your API.

What customers need is represented in one of the slides as the “API Hierarchy of Needs”, an adaptation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to the context of APIs from a customer point of view.

Drinking from the firehose

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:22:27 +0000

Some firehoses to ~~drink~~ read from, other than twitter’s:

Google Buzz, through their activity firehose API methods;
FriendFeed, using their real-time updates methods.

While the first works via pubsubhubhub, the second uses a combination of long polling and a cursor that helps you make subsequent calls.

Re: Twitter URLs: Are Microformats The Answer To A Real Problem?

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:40:24 +0000

Stowe Boyd writes about a possible approach to address different user profiles on different clients. After exposing a possible microformats based approach he talks about a microsyntax solution to the problem:

A microsyntax approach would be something visible in the stream, like including a prefix in front of an @mention or retweet to denote original or desired client:

dabr@pigsonthewing Nice profile!

Here, the implication is that I am referring to Andy’s profile on the Dabr client.

Re: Where is RSS? on Scripting News

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:14:32 +0000

This is a post to test a communication flow using a feed reader and a blog post as a “distributed twitter”.

Read the original story: Where is RSS? on Scripting News.

Should twitter have its own data storage?

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:34:56 +0000

Now that twitter OAuth feature is in public beta, some people argue that twitter should also provide a data storage facility through their API. This would allow developers to add payloads to different twitter objects but would create another information silo, instead of leveraging existing data storage providers.

I agree with Kevin Marks when he asks “Why should the storage and the event stream come from the same provider?”.

Quoting Dave Winer’s article “Twitter and OAuth, interesting brew”:

Do you agree with twitter following limits?

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:00:21 +0000

Quoting the twitter status blog post “Twitter Status – A note about per day following limits.”:

While there are technical reasons behind having some limit on following activites, this per-day limit exists to discourage spamminess. Also, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes the mass following activity disingenuous.

What do you think?

How to share a secret

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:15:38 +0000

“How to Share a Secret” is the title of paper written in 1979 by Adi Shamir (best known for his work on the RSA algorithm). The paper describes a method for dividing information in smaller pieces so that the knowledge of all but one of the pieces gives absolutely no information about the original information. Quoting the author:

This technique enables the construction of robust key management schemes for cryptographic systems that can function securely and reliably even when misfortunes destroy half the pieces and security breaches expose all but one of the remaining pieces.