Now that the internet has become defined as a mashup over a collection of service APIs, we have a little problem: for clients using APIs is a lot like drinking beer through a straw. You never get as much beer as you want and you get a headache after. But what if I've been a good boy and deserve a bigger straw? Maybe we can use game theory to model trust relationships over a life time of interactions over many different services and then give more capabilities/beer to those who have earned them?
Let's say Twitter limits me to downloading only 20 tweets at a time through their API. But I want more. I may even want to do something so radical as download all my tweets. Of course Twitter can't let everyone do that. They would be swamped serving all this traffic and service would be denied. So Twitter does that rational thing and limits API access as a means of self protection. As does Google, Yahoo, Skynet, and everyone else.
But when I hit the API limit I think, but hey it's Todd here, we've been friends a long time now and I've never hurt you. Not once. Can't you just trust me a little? I promise not to abuse you. I never have and won't in the future. At least on purpose, accidents do happen. Sometimes there's a signal problem and we'll misunderstand each other, but we can work that out. After all, if soldiers during WW1 can learn how to stop the killing through forgiveness, so can we.
The problem is Twitter doesn't know me so we haven't built up trust. We could replace trust with money, as in a paid service where I pay for each batch of downloads, but we're better friends than that. Money shouldn't come between us.
And if Twitter knew what a good guy I am I feel sure they would let me download more data. But Twitter doesn't know me and that's the problem. How could they know me?
We could set up authority based systems like the ones that let certain people march ahead through airport security lines, but that won't scale and I have feeling we all know how that strategy will work out in the end.
Another approach to trust is a game theoretic perspective for assessing a user's trust level. Take the iterated prisoner's dilemma problem where variations on the tit for tat strategy are surprisingly simple ways cooperation could evolve in API world. We start out cooperating and if you screw me I'll screw you right back. In a situation where communication is spotty (like through an API) there can be bad signals sent so if people have trusted before then they'll wait for another iteration to see if the other side defects again, in which case they retaliate.
Perhaps if services modeled API limits like a game and assessed my capabilities by how we've played the game together, then capabilities could be set based on earned and demonstrated trust rather than simplistic rules.
A service like Mashery could takes us even further by moving us out of the direct reciprocity model, where we judge each other on our one on one interactions, and into a more sophisticated indirect reciprocity model, where agents can make decisions to help those who have helped others.
Mashery can take a look at how API users act in the wider playing of multiple services and multiple agents. If you are well behaved using many different services, shouldn't you earn more trust and thus more capabilities?
In the real world if someone vouches for you to a friend then you will likely get more slack because you have some of the trust from your friend backing you. This doesn't work in one on one situation because there's no way to establish your reputation. Mashery on the other hand knows you and knows which APIs you are using and how you are using them. Mashery could vouch for you if they detected you were playing fair so you get more capabilities initially and transit the capability scale faster if you continued to behave.
You can obviously go on and on imaging how such a system might work. Of course, there's a dark side. Situations are possible like on Ebay where people spend eons setting up a great reputation only to later cash in their reputations in some fabulous scam. That's what happens in a society though. We all get more capabilities at the price of some extra risk.
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Sunday, December 2, 2007 at 11:59AM