Personal APIs in the converging diagram of the
different research visions of social machines

We have been using the term “Personal APIs” basically to refer to the use of Open Application Programming Interfaces (Open APIs) to programmatically access information about a person (e.g., personal basic info, health-related statistics, busy data) and/or trigger his/her human capabilities in a standardized way.

Personal APIs can indeed be used to blend computational and social aspects into Web-enabled systems and, consequently, support the development of certain families of Social Machines (SM). We claim that “APIzing” people is also a way of “PERSONifying” software. Given that, should we extend our classification scheme for SMs by including Personal APIs as a new SM-related topic of research inquiry? We believe so. Stay tuned! New results are coming soon… 🙂