Posts from Application programming interface

Today we are going to talk about a new feature right here on AVC. It's been running for a day or so, so some of you may have already noticed it. Right next to the comments link, there is a new link that says "disqus commenter breakdown". It looks like this:

If you click on that you will get an alternative view of the comment thread – broken down by the most active commenters. You can scroll down, find the commenters you enjoy most, click on them, and read what they have to say.

Like many of the hacks featured on this blog, this was built by Kevin Marshall. He built it on top of the Disqus API.

I like applications that offer an API to developers to build alternative views for end users. And I think Disqus does this better than anyone else in the comment space.

Given how long and busy some of the comment threads are here on AVC, I can imagine a number of alternative views that one could construct that would be useful. If anyone else wants to hack on the Disqus API and create something useful, I am happy to give them similar real estate.

One of the most aggravating things about commerce online and on mobile is the inconsistent checkout experience site to site and app to app. It's one of the many things that keeps me shopping at Amazon and clicking on the PayPal button when its available. That and stored payment credentials.

Last week I saw something that makes me think we may be heading in the right direction. Stripe, the fast growing payments company, introduced Stripe Checkout. Now, if you choose to use it, Stripe will give you a standard checkout form for both web and mobile. It's a few lines of code in your app and Stripe takes care of the rest. It is optimized for the user experience and for the device. And they plan to keep optimizing it so that developers who use it will see better and better conversion rates.

But this is also great for the buyer. Now when I see this button below, I know I am going to pay with Stripe and I know what I am in for in terms of user experience.

It's like the good housekeeping seal of approval. I know I am going to get a simple and easy checkout flow.

The next thing I'd like to see from Stripe is stored payment credentials. Then they would enter the land of Amazon and PayPal for me for sure.

I learned about this cool Twilio SoundCloud hack and thought it would make a fun feature friday post.

The band Young Guns encourages fans to call them, leave a voicemail (powered by our portfolio company Twilio).

The voicemail gets transcribed and uploaded to our portfolio company SoundCloud, embedded to their site in custom SC player and band calls the person with the best voicemail.

http://voicemail.weareyoungguns.com/

I just called and called and left them a message. I hope I get the call back.

We had a good chat hanging around Zander's desk yesterday about this line from Matthew Ingram's post on his love/hate relationship with Twitter:

Lastly, I hate that Twitter’s metamorphosis seems to reinforce the idea that being an open network — one that allows the easy distribution of content across different platforms, the way that blogging and email networks do –isn’t possible, or at least can’t become a worthwhile business.

I asked Zander what he thought about that line and he told me he hadn't thought long and hard enough about it to have a fully formed opinion but it was certainly important to our investment thesis and we ought to have an opinion on it.

I do have an opinion on it.

I do not think open conflicts with making money and further I think there are ways to make more money by being open rather than closed, but it takes imagination and a well designed relationship between your product/service and the rest of the Internet.

I also think it is better to open up slowly, cautiously, and carefully rather than start out wide open and then close up every time an existential threat appears on the horizon.

I recall when Etsy first put out an API. It was a read only API. Then they made it read/write. Over time they have added a lot of features that have made it possible for third parties to add value to Etsy and Etsy's sellers and buyers. But they have always protected the essential things that make Etsy's business and marketplace work and hang together as a sustainable entity.

Contrast that with Twitter which started out completely open which allowed anyone to build a third party client, grab a huge percentage of Twitter users, and then threaten to take them away from Twitter. That's not a sustainable relationship between your product/service and the rest of the Internet.

So I do believe that there are many ways to be open, to become more open, and to do so in ways that enrich the overall Internet and your company too. I am quite fond of O'Reilly Doctrine:

Create more value than you capture

And I think doing so means being open, becoming more open over time, but always in ways that allow you and your company to remain a sustainable business that can cover its costs and then some and remain viable and value enhancing for the long haul.

My partner Albert wrote a great post yesterday that I'd like to highlight. His going in assertion is:

It would a huge benefit to society if we can get with social networking to where we are with email today: it is fundamentally decentralized with nobody controlling who can email whom about what, anyone can use email essentially for free, there are opensource and commercial implementations available and third parties are offering value added services.  All of that is made possible by the existence of standards such as SMTP and IMAP.

Albert goes on to suggest what some of the key open protocols might be; webfinger, pubsubhubbub, and salmon, and then asks for comments and suggestions, which he got on his own blog and also on Hacker News.

A comment on Hacker News says that App.net (which I backed along with many others) is using the Activitystream.es, Webfinger, RSS, pubSubHubbub protocols. So that's a good thing. Dave Winer, the father of RSS, also has been posting up a storm on this stuff.

I believe in open protocols and open APIs. That is what the web was built on and that is how we can best take it forward in the spirit it was given to us. All of this is geeky and only interesting to a tiny minority of web users. It is not a threat to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the other social platforms who serve a mass audience any time soon. But it is important stuff nonetheless and I am happy that folks are talking about it and building stuff.

I've been involved with NYC BigApps since its creation three years ago. It's a great program. NYC opens up some of its data sources to developers who use the data to build new mobile and web apps. The judges vote on them (I'm one of the judges) and there are prizes awareded which total $50,000. A number of startups have come out of this program and I've met quite a few great developers through this effort.

The submissions for year three are in and they are solicting public opinion on them here. There are 96 apps this year to be considered so that's a lot of product to review. You don't have to review all of them (I do) so just go take a look and let the organizers know which ones you think are the best. There are nine days left in the voting phase. There are two popular choice awards that will be given based on the public voting.

All the winners will be announced at the annual BigApps event in late March.

A few days ago, I stared getting emails asking about avc.fm. Was this done with my approval? Did I know who was behind it? The answer was no and no so I tweeted this out and gave my approval.

AVC.fm, the unofficial blogcast of @AVC created by @VoiceBunny avc.fm via @voicebunny.

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) February 21, 2012

As I suspected they would, the team behind avc.fm reached out soon after that tweet and we've been trading emails since. That team is called Voice Bunny and their business is "voice talent via an API". If you want to see a reasonably technical and critical discussion of Voice Bunny, here's a Hacker News thread on the service.

The main knock on Voice Bunny in that HN thread is the cost. So I asked the Voice Bunny team about that. They said:

Our prices are coming down fast: Most professional talents are used to doing a few recordings per day and waste a lot of time auditioning. We are teaching them that VoiceBunny allows them to be more productive and, thus, charge less per recording. In just three weeks the median prices have dropped 40%. We expect the prices to continue to come down as more projects flow through VoiceBunny.

Royalties: We are extending our API so that our clients can build apps like avc.fm by sharing royalties with our talents. That way our clients won't have to pay anything up front. Most professional talents are used to be paid with royalties and they are welcoming the idea.

This past Sunday afternoon I had the pleasure of being on the judges panel at the NYC Cleanweb Hackathon at NYU ITP. There were thirteen hacks presented to the judges. Of them, probably half had incorporated the "green button" for getting your utility data into their app.

The Green Button is an initiative promoted by Aneesh Chopra, the CTO of the United States. In a speech last fall, he challenged the utility industry to come up with a simple way to allow consumers to access their utility data. Last week, three big California utilities announced they had made the Green Button available on their websites.

And by sunday, the green button was in a half a dozen web and mobile apps that had been created over the weekend. This is the kind of innovation that gets me excited. The Green Button is like OAuth for energy data. It is a simple standard that the utlities can implement on one side and web/mobile deveopers can implement on the other side. And the result is a ton of information sharing about energy consumption and in all liklihood energy savings that result from more informed consumers.

The Green Button follows on the success of the Blue Button, a similar initiative that allows veterans to get at their medical data.

I'm a big fan of simplicity and open standards to unleash a lot of innovation. APIs and open data aren't always simple concepts for end users. Green Buttons and Blue Buttons are pretty simple concepts that most consumers will understand. I'm hoping we soon see Yellow Buttons, Red Buttons, Purple Buttons, and Orange Buttons too.

Let's get behind these open data initiatives. Let's build them into our apps. And let's pressure our hospitals, utilities, and other institutions to support them. I'm going to reach out to ConEd, the utility in NYC, and find out when they are going to add Green Button support to their consumers data. I hope it is soon.

While everyone was on the holiday break at the end of last year, Twilio wrote a blog post that very few people noticed. They announced that our firm, Union Square Ventures, had become an investor in Twilio.

Twilio is not a services for the masses. Yet. 

It's a service that web developers can use to build telephony apps or build telephony into their app. This image on Twilio's home page says it all.

In the "Areas of Interest" post that I wrote at the start of the year, I wrote:

Developers are the new power users. If you cater to them, you can build a large user base with significant network effects.

We believe that one way to build a large network of web users is to build something that makes developers' lives easier. And Twilio does exactly that. It masks all the complexity of telephony into a finite number of API calls that web developers can use to build apps quickly and easily.

When we first met Twilio, the founder Jeff Lawson blew me away when he told me that the entire service was built on five API calls; <say>, <play>, <gather>, <record>, and <dial>. Clearly they've added a few more, like <conference> highlighted above.

Today, Twilio is announcing they've added SMS to the service, with <sms>. Now you can easily allow users to access your web app via SMS without having to set up shortcodes, dealing with aggregators, doing the configurations, etc. TechCrunch has the details.

My partner Albert led this investment for us. He's a web developer himself and has already saved himself countless hours with Twilio. Albert wrote a post about Twilio on the USV blog today. If you are a developer of web apps and are interested in adding telephony, you should check out Twilio.