OuroburosAs-A-Service

How Klout builds and distributes an API on top of APIs

11/6/14

Tyler SingletaryDirector of Platform

@harmophone

What is Ouroburos?• Symbolically: a snake that eats itself.

• Metaphorically: adaptation, rebirth, renewal, cycles

• Examples in literature and film:

• The Neverending Story

• Adaptation

• LOST

• Stephen King’s The Dark Tower cycle

Klout eats social data.

• Collection from Twitter is on a streaming keep-alive through Gnip’s APIs for “Twitter Mention Hose”

• All other networks are REST API consumption via user OAuth keys.

• Rules engine for adhering to rate limits, traffic shaping

• Queuing to get through pull behavior

• Separate boxes for dealing with streaming

Klout digests data.

Klout exhausts data.• All of this

crunching leads to our primary data:

• Klout Scores

• Klout Topics

• Content Discovery

• Targeting

Before we serve food…

Prepare the menu.

Klout data gets eaten.

• Over 1,500 active applications:

• MassRelevance

• HootSuite

• Meshfire

• Salesforce (ExactTarget, CRM, Radian6)

• SimplyMeasured

• FullContact

• Dinner is served through Mashery API Proxy and its caching layers

• FlatFile access for limited partners needing extreme real-time enrichment.

Klout data influences social data.

• Klout API Partners use data to influence user and brand behavior and content creation online and in the real world.

•

Klout eats social data.

• Here we are again.

• Eating social data that now incorporates the outputs of what came in.

Conclusion• A healthy platform creates opportunity for

adaptation by creating data and customers that leads to better products.

• Only by consuming APIs can you design and serve an API

• Your API should be able to “eat” data about your API

• Your customers should contribute to the foundation of your API

OuroburosAs-A-Service

How Klout builds and distributes an API on top of APIs

Tyler SingletaryDirector of Platform

@harmophone