BBC Backstage and mightyv
I must admit that, at first glance, I was slightly underwhelmed by mightyv, which is the first winner of the BBC Backstage competition to build products based on the BBC Backstage APIs. At first glance, it just seems to be a more accessible version of the BBC’s existing TV listings service - kind of like the accessible version of the the Odeon’s website which a chap built (and which Odeon have subsequently ripped off, rather successfully, I think). The only thing I thought about it was that it showed how usable sites can be when they’re designed by one or two guys and not a committee of people with different agendas.
But playing with it a bit more, its true greatness came to light. It lets you tags programmes, and add them to your personal schedule, and even import them into iCal. It lets the community rate things. It has all the participatory goodness a site like this should have. It’s very, very good.
But what I’m really interested in, I suppose, is this: what happens next? Or, to ask the same question another way, how does the BBC benefit? On one level, mightyv has some lovely ideas which, I’m sure, the Beeb would like to copy - but the Beeb’s got an awful lot of very good ideas people of its own, and I’m sure they must have come up with something a lot like this by now. I’m kind of assuming (and this is cheeky, because I don’t know) that the only reason the Beeb wouldn’t produce something like mightyv is structural - they can’t make it happen for internal technical, architectural or even political reasons. Or, even more simply, it just isn’t a priority for them.
Of course, it may be that just having this innovation going on around it, fed by the Backstage feeds, is enough to make changes happen inside the Beeb to get these things delivered. But that seems a small reason to do something as profound as creating an API to your data. I guess what I’m asking (and the same question applies to Google and Yahoo and all the other bleeding-edge API-pushers) is: why are APIs such a good thing? What, in simple terms, is the point?
This is one of those “I know it’s good, I feel it’s good, I just don’t know why it’s good” things….
November 4th, 2005 at 11:03 am
The BBC is a unique case, in that it’s remit is to inform, and the public paid for the data in the first place, so it has something of an obligation to give the data out in every way possible. Providing an API provides a lot of utility, maximising the public good for the public money.
But that’s the BBC. For someone like, say, The Guardian, providing an API has two effects. The first is that The Guardian’s content becomes embedded into the weft and weave of the rest of the net - in the same way that Google, or Amazon, or eBay is. Properly designed, a news content api could provide, for example, canonical URIs for events and people in the public eye - things that would be immensely useful, and which would drive traffic. So, reason one is that if you build it, more people come.
Connected with it, reason two, is that it unleashes a sort of Long Tail of product development. GU’s budget doesn’t stretch to providing the hundreds of specialist content alerts, mashups and so on that people might like. Now, Steve Bell cartoons crossed with Google Maps might sound a pointless exercise, but someone will find it useful. Not enough for GU to invest time or energy, but enough for someone outside to do so. Provide the tools, therefore, and you get a lot of stuff for free - stuff you wouldn’t have the £££ to do yourself, but which other people want. And more importantly, once it’s made with Guardian content, it won’t be made with, say, stuff from the Telegraph. So you lock out the long tail for everyone else. Win!
A third reason is that it makes internal development easier in the long run. I’m currently designing the API for the BBC project Matt Biddulph announced here, and half the point is that the API will make it *much* easier for later in-house people to come along and build their own stuff from the data. But once you have a nice API internally, why not expose it to the public?