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August 14, 2002
Unintended Consequences
One of my favorite sayings is that I love when good things happen and I don't have to be involved. I don't think its original with me, its an expression that anyone who manages anything has thought at one time or another.
Web services are like that. In this article on Loosely Coupled, Phil Wainewright talks about the Bookwatch Plus service and what makes it all possible: namely services offered by five different companies, people or groups who didn't know beforehand that their service would be used to create this book watch service.
Tim Oreilly writes: "Innovation will come from APIs that support 'unintended consequences'." Bookwatch Plus is perfect example of Tim's point and what we're trying to promote with principles like those in my Enabling Web Services article.
I used to teach programming language design and theory. One of the great lessons of programming languages is that if you put a feature in, some clever programmer will figure out something cool to do with it. The same is true of creating good services, making data available in ways that enable future use, and documenting the resulting APIs so that others can use them. Cool things will happen.
09:05 PM | Recommend This | Print This
People are the Key in Technology
In an article in the Atlantic Monthly called Homeland Insecurity, Charles Mann quotes Bruce Schneier thusly:
"The trick is to remember that technology can't save you," Schneier says. "We know this in our own lives. We realize that there's no magic anti-burglary dust we can sprinkle on our cars to prevent them from being stolen. We know that car alarms don't offer much protection. The Club at best makes burglars steal the car next to you. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around people."
The article is a great read and offers numerous insights into the problem with most homeland security proposals, but I was struck by the strong and pervasive belief, expressed in the article, that technology won't solve these problems.
That's a general theme and is applicable to things besides security. For example, Information Technology Services has initiated a tiered support model for network and server operations that has at its heart the same principle: when it comes to delivering highly available service, people and processes are much more important than the technology. At best the technology makes the job easier. At worst, it makes it more difficult.
03:28 PM | Recommend This | Print This
IM Bots
Rick Gee turned me on to this. There was a story today on NPR about bots that interact with people over IM. If you go to Active Buddy, you can interact with some of their bots. They are essentially Eliza programs with a better database, or at least that's what it seems. eBay apparently uses one for FAQs. All in all, a pretty clever use of IM, in my book.
A few questions:
- Does anyone know if there's a IM interface to Ask Jeeves? I couldn't find one on their site. Seem like a natural.
- I don't see (with a quick look) any similar development efforts for Jabber. Does anyone have pointers to something like this for Jabber?
This seems like it would be pretty easy to put together for utah.gov as a FAQs, for kids to ask questions on homework, etc.