aldissandmore

Simply unbelievable that a big brand like Tesco should decide to go and do something as far out as this! I mean can anyone quite envisage what the outcome of letting the world’s developers manipulate your inventory database from what is effectively a glorified grocery store! Amazing.

Interestingly a few months ago now, one of last bastions of the of the daily printing press, The Guardian, also unveiled an API which they called Open Platform. Now correct me if I am wrong but I haven’t exactly seen that put to much use!

Of course the whole notion of the API sits firmly within the Open Source movement, and came into the spotlight when Twitter launched, as a minute offering, with an API to allow developers to do anything they wanted to with the data. Indeed this is how Twitter rose to stardom – it’s not the geeky nature if being able to share every engrossing detail of your day, but the ability to chop up and present that data in as many ways as anyone might like to.

So for Tesco – well I guess a whole load widgets might come out of this. They do sell more than groceries these days… can anyone else come up with anything off the cuff? What is the most useful thing you could do with Tesco’s database? There’s a bunch of bananas in it for the best idea!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/14/tesco-api-programming-shopping