Plumbing
On Monday, I linked to Tom’s latest video. It uses a clever trick whereby the title of the video is updated to match the number of views the video has had. But there’s a lot more to the video than that. Stick around and you’ll be treated to a meditation on the changing nature of APIs, from a shared open lake to a closed commercial drybed.
It reminds me of (other) Tom’s post from a couple of year’s ago called Pouring one out for the Boxmakers, wherein he talks about Twitter’s crackdown on fun bots:
Web 2.0 really, truly, is over. The public APIs, feeds to be consumed in a platform of your choice, services that had value beyond their own walls, mashups that merged content and services into new things… have all been replaced with heavyweight websites to ensure a consistent, single experience, no out-of-context content, and maximising the views of advertising. That’s it: back to single-serving websites for single-serving use cases.
A shame. A thing I had always loved about the internet was its juxtapositions, the way it supported so many use-cases all at once. At its heart, a fundamental one: it was a medium which you could both read and write to. From that flow others: it’s not only work and play that coexisted on it, but the real and the fictional; the useful and the useless; the human and the machine.
Both Toms echo the sentiment in Anil’s The Web We Lost, written back in 2012:
Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself.
I know, I know. We’re a bunch of old men shouting at The Cloud. But really, Anil is right:
This isn’t our web today. We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich.
But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.
In his video, Tom mentions Yahoo Pipes as an example of a service that has been shut down for commercial and idealogical reasons. In many ways, it was the epitome of what Anil was talking about—a sort of meta-API that allowed you to connect different services together. Kinda like IFTTT but with a visual interface that made it as empowering as something like the Scratch programming language.
There are services today that provide some of that functionality, but they’re more developer-focused. Trys pointed me to Pipedream, which looks good but you need to know how to write Node.js code and import npm packages. I’m sure it’s great if you’re into serverless Jamstack lambda thingamybobs but I don’t think it’s going to unlock the potential for non-coders to create cool stuff.
On the more visual pipes-esque Scratchy side, Cassie pointed me to Cables:
Cables is a tool for creating beautiful interactive content.
It isn’t about making mashups, but it does look something that non-coders could potentially use to make something that looks cool. It reminds me a bit of Bret Victor and his classic talk on Inventing On Principle—always worth revisting!