Everyone has a Personal API these days. Look at my blog sidebar – I put my photos on flickr, my messages on twitter, my location on dopplr, my places on foursquare, my bookmarks on delicious, my music on last.fm, and they’re just the regular ones let alone everything else.

Your mix of APIs might look slightly different, but that is what makes it your personal API. When we connect these feeds together lots of interesting things can happen. You can take all of my APIs and mash them into a single feed, like you see at FriendFeed. You might friend me on dopplr so that you can compare your location to mine and figure out if we might bump into each other somewhere soon. We don’t turn these feeds on or off, they are beacons that we send out occasionally.

Having these personal data profiles available is enabling the concept of ambient intimacy – it makes us feel more connected to the people around us. The best example I have seen so far is a simple app called FoursquareX that pops up little growl notifications in the corner of your screen to show the flow of your friends check-ins at places around the city. This continual stream of simple messages gives you a really interesting awareness of where your friends are, what they are doing, and who they are meeting with.

You can also see a map that shows recent checkins from your friends to visualise what is happening across the city. This might not sound like much by itself – but when it is your friends on the map it becomes really personal. If you see an old friend is just down the street chances are you could catch up with them for a drink tonight. This is the kind of information that might lead you to change your plans tonight.

This is where the web is really connecting our offline world with our online worlds, they are integrating. We are starting to see the awesome nature of the mixture of ambient intimacy with personal APIs.

By Ross Hill - February 6th, 2010 at 11:15am with 386 views - delicious dopplr flickr foursquare last.fm twitter