Thursday, November 08, 2007 Toral: Tapping collective intelligence By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
IN the process of making a new design for my website, I realized that there are so many application programming interfaces (API) out there that can be integrated into an existing site. This allows website owners to pull in data from other websites to appear in theirs. In my case, I could have a club member’s profile page and allow them to integrate their user profile in other sites.
Depending on the information that gets presented and its use, it can also be referred to as collective intelligence.
Toby Segaran, author of the book Programming Collective Intelligence, said that “the ability to harness data created by people in a variety of ways on different sites is a principal element of creating collective intelligence.”
Take the case of Google which just launched OpenSocial (http://code.google.
com/apis/opensocial/). This is a set of APIs that enables third-party web application developers to build applications that can appear with little or no modification on any of the websites that have adopted the API.
As I mentioned last month, Facebook.
com’s application developers program (http://developers.facebook.com/) indeed has rocked the boat as it allows all users to build applications to interface with Facebook and be propagated to users. However, this requires familiarity of the website’s proprietary API.
In the case of Google OpenSocial, it embraces open standards, like Hypertext Markup Language, commonly known as HTML, and Javascript, among others.
As more sites join the bandwagon, Google OpenSocial will be a powerful platform and this development, along with Facebook, means a lot of opportunities for Internet users all over the world.
So for companies and entrepreneurs, we have to face the challenge of harnessing these applications to gather collective intelligence data about our target audience.
Website developers and programmers will now have to learn these new tools for competitive advantage. Information Technology professors can challenge their students to develop applications through these.
If you know Python or would want to learn it, Segaran’s book can be useful as it shows several API examples and codes. As a beginner in Python and the manipulation of APIs, seeing it in action and its results can be liberating.
