Hey AP, come on, get me!

Associated Press (AP) hates linking. As a blogger, I love it. Why? It drives traffic, keeps my context live and my post relevant. And, I don’t even write for profit. I just want my opinion to be published and read and reacted upon. AP does it for a living. It needs numbers and if readers like what comes along from AP, they might be its future subscribers and patrons. So it has all the more reason why it should love or at least, not object to linking. But last week it did the unthinkable – it went ahead and complained against Drudge Retort with a take-down request under DMCA.

Nobody gets away messing with blogosphere. AP learnt it the hard way getting thumped down. There were rebuffs, retorts and more fulminations. After getting righteously ripped across the blogosphere for demanding that the satire site Drudge Retort remove seven brief excerpts of AP stories, the organization decided that its letter was ham-fisted and that it would rethink its policy on bloggers and links.

As I see it, the fair-use exceptions have been established by law and judicial interpretation; individual copyright holders don't get to create a custom version. AP is welcome to go through the exercise, but in the end, it would have to convince a judge that headline-and-blurb links back to its content and its clients causes it financial damage, an argument that is both dubious and counterintuitive. Let's say it again, though we shouldn't have to. Reposting full text of copyright material is a Bad Thing. Posting a link to copyright material and enough of an excerpt to encourage a click-through is a Good Thing. It drives traffic, raises visibility and weaves the source material into an ongoing conversation. Getting linked is what you want to happen to your content.

The best take for me was that of Michael Arrington - "Here's our new policy on A.P. stories: they don't exist. We don't see them, we don't quote them [and] we don't link to them. They're banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet." This, of course, will have about the same impact as those periodic calls for a gas boycott, but still, it's a message AP really needs to get its head around as it works on the next write-through.

If AP finds runways slippery, it should abort landing or takeoff to avoid runway overshoots. Not all excursions could be easy. [Yikes! I linked to AP through Yahoo again!... now come on, get me:)]

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Shedding P in API

I like the way SaaS is morphing into PaaS (Platform as a Service), and the trend of API releases that help third-parties create value around the core. We have now API of Facebook or that of Salesforce.com CRM application. This is just smart as it further extends their reach and gives the ability for customers and partners to create more value. It may have its perils, but I still like it.

But what I don’t like about it is that, to use or exploit it, you need to be a programmer, the one that can write codes. Those bewildering jumble of letters, punctuations and ampersands give a more prosaic Joe nothing short of hell. For an entrepreneur that has some application in mind that could be useful to his business, has to depend on a developer that may or may not understand all that he needs or will end up building features he never would get to use. Or for that matter, the entrepreneur may not be eloquent enough to explain all his needs though he has figured it out mentally.

I feel progressively, API should lose the P and become just AI. Yes, why can't it just be Application Interface? Do we need the `Program' in the middle? Erase it. That's when you can call yourself user-friendly. Developers should enable non-programmer users, that form the bulk of customer base, to develop applications on their own. I recently found Rollbase.com (beta) is almost there. I say `almost’ because its demo still voices words such as `bugs’, `tabs’, `objects’ etc., which have different literal meanings outside the developer community. Use words that mean exactly the same as man in the street understands or even demands.

Here’s where I found Rollbase hitting it on the head. Rollbase helps create a next-generation Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform and user-driven application ecosystem that enables business users to find, create, customize and share onDemand applications without programming. Rollbase has been designed from the ground up as a purely metadata-driven, multitenant, onDemand application development and delivery platform with a rich AJAX-based user experience and a unique underlying application execution, serialization and publishing model. But it needs to use simpler syntax in its demo, because it is addressed to a non-programmer audience - calling users to "roll your own business apps".....

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