Last night I read DHH's post on The Accept Header and it got me reading about REST and the Atom Publishing Protocol (atompub).

REST sounds complicated and/or intimidating until you read a lucid explanation of it, of which there are few. It turns out it's not that hard.

It's great that Ruby on Rails is making it easier to be RESTful in the next version (1.1), so it'll be easier to make FanConcert RESTful.

How does being RESTful help FanConcert? Besides making it easier for people and search engines to find resources on the site, REST turns out to be a good way to make an API.

FanConcert can use a RESTful API to receive information from applications that aren't web browsers. At the same time, it can use the API to operate as a web service -- an information source for other web sites or end-user applications.

If FanConcert can accept information from an API, people can write their own software to automatically stuff FanConcert with information. Sometimes these programs are called bots because they can work autonomously, crawling around an information source (like a website or document), processing the information and then sending the information someplace else.

I'd like to encourage this type of development with FanConcert because people like hackable software. But I can't leave the read end of the API wide open or it could end up costing me a lot of money. There are other implications of using bots on social sites like FanConcert: Should they be explicitly pointed out? How will their 'reputation' be calculated if they can submit much more information? Will they be easy to correct if they make a mistake, like a parsing error?

There are a lot of interesting implications but it's been done before. Wikipedia uses bots to maintain some of it's geographic articles (like city data) and probably other pages. It would be a mistake to ignore that precedent.

I'll have to figure out a reasonable solution for people that need to use the read end of the FanConcert API a lot, maybe a CDDB-like business model to pay for the bandwidth. Regular users should still be able to use the read part of the API as long as they don't go above a certain limit.