You may have read of the BBC's plans to release some of their immense digital library onto the web Yet another BBC initiative, BBC Backstage, received less coverage but could have a greater long term impact.
Launched in May, BBC Backstage is where the BBC will open up its computer programmes to web developers. As it says on the BBC Backstage web site “we're passionate about giving designers and developers the content and services they need to create cool new things“.
The BBC follows a trend already set by companies such as Google and Amazon to provide web programmers with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to their core applications and data. For instance with Google a developer can write a programme to do a Google search and get back a page of machine readable results which their own programme can then use in new and interesting ways. Same with Amazon, developers can build their own bespoke shopping sites selling anything and everything on Amazon – the user only knows its Amazon when they finally come to the shopping cart.
What makes all this possible are simple APIs called web services. These specify how one web computer can make a call to another web computer to get some information, or to get do a particular task. APIs used to be relatively complex, but once the blogging community got their hands on them they suddenly became very simple and usable. The RSS news interface was an early, simplistic, example of a web API, and SOAP is the current web-services standard. What both have in common is the ability for a programmer to be up and using them in hours, not days.
So what can programmers do with such APIs? With Google developers can create far richer visual interfaces, for instance displaying results as imaginary maps of information. Some have taken news stories and combined them with Google images to create news mosaics – the more common the headline the bigger or more frequent the image. With Amazon the value is in the so-called “long tail”. There is a huge market out there for niche and specialist retailers. Using Amazon's web-services interface a web site owner can pull out the Amazon books and other products of interest to their audience, build niche content around it, and have an attractive and profitable e-commerce web site without ever having to handle stock or a credit card transaction.
And what of BBC Backstage? The initial APIs have been for their newsfeeds, although feeds of programme information are promised. Applications, developed in just the last month, have included news maps (taking BBC news items and dropping them onto Google Maps of the UK), traffic maps (complete with jam cam feeds) and even a variant of Have I Got News For You's missing words round!
Why are companies like the BBC and Google doing this? Possibly because it's a way of outsourcing, and legitimising, innovation. Why invest in lots of internal R&D staff when you can let every developer on the web act as part of your R&D team? For the developers it can mean useful exposure - and kudos amongst their peers. Many, though, will be hoping to see their applications bought up to become part of the sponsors official offering.
There is no doubt in my mind that if you want to see innovation on the web, then these initiatives are the places to find it. The lesson? If you want to innovate, or outsource your R&D, just make a few web services available for your core systems!
Leave a comment