Fluidinfo

When we released the Fluidinfo API for Boing Boing two weeks ago, Simon Willison noted on his blog:

“Fluidinfo really is a fascinating piece of software.” …. “Writable APIs are much less common than read-only APIs – Fluidinfo instantly provides both.”

If you search online to try to discover what people mean by a “writable API”, it’s hard to find anything that merits the name. So what did Simon mean? What is a writable API?

Both Simon and the team at Fluidinfo think “writable API” should be a kind of shorthand for an API that provides access to underlying data that is writable. This is not meant in the trivial already-possible sense wherein you pass data to an API method that stores them into a database you can’t otherwise access. We mean it in a more fundamental sense: that the underlying data is writable. That anyone or any application can directly access the data storage layer and add new information to it – without the knowledge of the people who stored the original data. That sounds pretty radical. But if you have a model of control in which objects are not owned but their pieces are, it’s not scary at all. In fact it’s liberating.

And, you guessed it, Fluidinfo has exactly that model of control. Any information stored into Fluidinfo instantly has a writable API in the sense just described. Let’s see a concrete example from the recent Boing Boing data imported into Fluidinfo.

Below is an illustration of an object in Fluidinfo, showing a subset of the tags that are on every Fluidinfo object representing a Boing Boing article. (The image was generated using Nick Radcliffe‘s fun About Tag image generator for Fluidinfo objects. Click the image to see the all its tags.)

Simply by virtue of being stored in Fluidinfo, Boing Boing instantly got an API for all their articles. The API lets you find Boing Boing articles, as represented by objects in Fluidinfo, via querying on tags such as those shown on the object above. For example, you can use the API to find Boing Boing articles published in December 2008 that were written by Cory Doctorow. Or you can get a list of all the Boing Boing articles that contain a reference to the domain www.whitehouse.gov. (You can see details of these sorts of queries in our article on Mining the Boing Boing API.)

Those kinds of searches on Boing Boing data were not previously possible. We put the whole thing together in a single evening, which illustrates how simple it can be to make a Fluidinfo-fueled API for your own information. As cool as these examples are, though, they’re just reading & searching Boing Boing controlled data, as with a traditional API. What about writing?

Writing the Boing Boing data – without stopping to ask permission

The tags on the object above were put there by the Fluidinfo user named boingboing.net. That user controls those tags, and has given the rest of us read permission. But no-one owns the Fluidinfo object that the tags are on. As a result, anyone with a Fluidinfo account (sign up here) can add any information to the exact same object.

To give a very simple example, suppose someone wrote a simple browser extension (or extensions) that let Boing Boing readers mark stories as being funny or not suitable for work. Two users, Alice and Bob, might then put alice/funny and bob/nsfw tags onto the above object. Assuming I had read permission on those tags, I could then find Boing Boing articles by Cory Doctorow that Alice enjoyed and Bob found too risqué for work. Someone else could write a browser extension that popped up a warning about NSFW content based on Bob’s tag. In fact, take a proper look at the object above, you’ll see that I have added a terrycojones/nsfw tag to it (terrycojones is my username in Fluidinfo).

That’s customization and personalization – in our hands. It’s adding data to the exact same objects that Boing Boing created, combining their data and ours as we please, and all without stopping to ask permission or requiring that a database administrator or programmer anticipate our idiosyncratic needs. Boing Boing and any applications they create, may not be aware of, care about, or even be able to detect the new data (depending on permissions).

In other words, we can say that Boing Boing has a writable API, because other people and other applications are always free to add information to the same objects that the Boing Boing API is providing access to. The same applies to any application or API that uses Fluidinfo. A writable API opens the door onto a very different world, allowing unlimited possibilities for mash-ups, new applications, extensions, widgets, etc. It allows arbitrary customization and personalization. Fluidinfo acts like a universal metadata engine, providing guaranteed write access to anything, with a permissions system at the level of the tag, not the object.

We’ll give another example of a simple but fun writable API tomorrow. Next week we’ll release a much more substantial one at the LAUNCH conference in San Francisco. We’re really excited about it, and have a series of not-to-be-missed upcoming blog posts on what we’ve been up to.

Stay tuned!