Have you ever purchased a product based on a product description, or industry review, or friend’s recommendation… only to realize you’ve got a different situation than those others, and that the product you’ve bought is not right for you?
Have you ever purchased a complex product (chosen a neighborhood to live in, or picked a type of car) and found, a few years into the decision, that based on what you’ve learned since then, you would have made a different decision? Maybe the house you bought was great, but the neighborhood… or the criteria you used to evaluate the schools were not the best criteria for what ended up being your situation?
Ever wonder why second children are raised so much differently than firstborn? (No hard feelings, really.)
It’s because we learn as we grow. We don’t know the right questions to ask until we have the experience, at which point we have to live with some of the decisions we’ve made.
It’s like this a lot with application architecture.
People who define architectures (or select products) try to anticipate what they don’t know… like how the business will change, or what the economy or industry trends will do. That’s important, but only part of the decision. These same decision makers discount the fact that they don’t know what they don’t know.
“Social technology” (that’s the phrase I’m using, you can use your own) enables us to share more with more people. It’s changing the dynamic of decision making, in part because we can leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
Let me give you an example.
I don’t care if the guy next to me in the coffee is smart enough to be the next president, but if I have a conversation with him and ask the right questions… I may trust his opinion. If I asked him why he chose this cafe, over the brand-new one across the street, I’m either going to relate to the answer or not. If I asked 10 people over 10 days, I’d have a really good insight into the cafe… maybe understanding the best time to arrive, or the best barista to befriend. I would even gain a new perspective or two because some of those people would evaluate the cafe differently than I ever thought to. It might take me much longer to figure it out otherwise. Or, I might learn much more quickly if I really should be going across the street to the new cafe (with seemingly harsh sound & lighting).
This is what brands are (re)learning about marketing and how they communicate. It’s not about the smooth talker with the sharp suit. It’s not about the buzzwords. It’s about authenticity and the shared experience.
With that in mind, let me post a few questions:
- How can we use social technology (and crowd-sourcing methodologies) to improve the API experience?
- What if I didn’t have to learn the same mistakes you did, six months after you?
- What if I had access to more contextual-information (as compared to product information)?
- What if I could share (and use) tips or fixes the community has already created to best use an API, so that I didn’t have to recreate those tools (and the thought process behind them) from scratch?
I’ll leave you with an example. My post from a few weeks ago, when Salesforce bought DimDim and the impact it had on DimDim API users. There were probably an awful lot of people/companies using DimDim’s API having the same “oh crap” moment the day that announcement came out.
Wouldn’t it be great if they could have come up with a solution together?
Yeah it sure would.
Originally posted on OpusGrid.