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Gadgets Gone Commercial
Posted by
John Darrow
in Program Events & Developer Community
Wednesday, Apr.08.2009, 1:43 PM PT
Presenters: Farhang Kassaei, Platform Architect with eBay Inc., and David Glazer, Director of Engineering, Google Inc.
Wow, this presentation was well attended. First there 
was the big line to get in; then folks kept streaming in, filling the back and side of the room. This was certainly the topic of interest.
Farhang and David took turns delivering portions of the presentation. Farhang began with the opportunity: Over 270,000 eBay US sellers use Selling Manager to manage their eBay activities. These sellers want help. They are willing to pay for applications that help them manage and grow their businesses.
With eBay opening up its Selling Manager page for developers, think how many sellers will consider your application, if your eBay Selling Manager application is approved for production by eBay. Farhang playfully lamented how the alternative to putting your application on eBay and automatically getting 270,000 pairs of eyes on your app was to buy keywords from Google. David chimed in that that really wasn't such a bad idea... Appreciative chuckles in the audience.
These sellers collectively do millions of dollars of GMV per year and sell in almost all vertical shopping markets. What are their needs? How can you help them? A big benefit for developers in this new solution is that eBay helps market the developer's apps. Farhang gave special praise for the eBay managed billing platform aspect of this new developer opportunity: eBay handles the billing and payment processing, and your part as a developer, after initial signup, is to simply receive payment.
David dug into gadgets. Two years ago, several companies were looking at the opportunity to create social apps. Google wanted to help get more basic than that and establish the generic structure and mechanisms. And today we have gadgets, the extensibility technology underlying OpenSocial.
From Google's web page on Gadgets API:
Gadgets are simple HTML and JavaScript applications that can be embedded in web pages and other apps. Your gadget can run on multiple sites and products including iGoogle, Google Maps, Orkut, or any web page.
And regarding OpenSocial,
There are many web sites that support OpenSocial, including hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Ning, Orkut, and Yahoo!
Farhang and David noted that we have the gadget pieces that enable us to do everything. "There is nothing specific to domains." It is about the basic mechanisms to support what you want to do. "The gadget spec is agnostic--it doesn't care what you build on it."
MySpace built a social app on it to enable users to define characters for themselves. eBay built on it with a clear commerce focus.
David talked about the progression for distribution... Developers once made their apps available to users by mailing floppy disks. Then developers were able to point users to their web sites where users could download apps. Now, there is this interaction between companies, developers and users, and the user isn't necessarily of just how much inter-company interaction there may be related to things like authorizing the user, running an app, internationalization issues, etc. Gadgets is a very effect mechanism for this integration.
David noted why gadgets struck eBay as a particular solution to its interests. Gadgets has "two kinds of open": an open gadget specification of mechanisms specified by the developer community, and an open source reference implementation. There is no requirement for developers to use this reference implementation, but, hey, developers benefit by not having to code such mechanisms themselves. For example, eBay downloaded and used Apache Shindig (an implementation). David illustrated the benefit of transparency of this "open" approach: security auditors are already familiar with the technology since they have access to the source code.
Farhang added to the reasons that eBay chose to build Selling Manager Applications upon the gadget spec: So many developers have adopted the spec; an active community makes easy access to knowledge and experience. It isn't limited to social features; eBay could extend it to build commercial features. And it is a good architectural fit, providing application infrastructure such as security, identity, config management, portable deployment and internationalization.
Selling Manager Applications supports these gadget features:
- core (Prefs, io, json, util)
- dynamic-height
- RPC
- views
- window
And Selling Manager applications can interact with the eBay APIs.
An audience member who was unfamiliar with eBay's APIs asked what developers can do with the eBay APIs. 
Farhang chose two of eBay's APIs for his response: Shopping and Trading. The Shopping API gives developers access to data about listings on eBay.com and does not require any user authentication. The Trading API allows you to operate on behalf of buyers and sellers: listing, bidding, and so on, and therefore requires user authentication.
David pointed out that you will still have to think about many aspects of your own application, independent of the gadget spec:
- system architecture
- user preferences
- security
- performance
- process
- sandbox operations
- etc.
Another audience member asked, "When you built this platform, what did you want to support?" Farhang was quick to say,
If I could tell you, this platform would not be as valuable. eBay has already seen plenty of useful apps around inbox management, post-transaction management, listing, shipping management.
There is no requirement for a Selling Manager application to use the APIs he spoke of. "We hope people will develop apps we really do not expect."
Farhang talked about the deployment descriptor piece of this puzzle. "If you're familiar with Google gadgets, you recognize this," pointing to the gg:Module piece in a schema view of the deployment descriptor.
All the deployment stuff is there and we don't have to worry about it. eBay added the bits that are meaningful to eBay. Right now there is one container. We picked a design that will allow us to create more containers in the future, if we want to.
He pointed out another part of the schema that lets you set whether your app would be available to everyone or only to a specified list of users. He moved on to discussion of sandbox versus production considerations.
A key design he highlighted: the eBay subscription protocol. In contrast to the Selling Manager application approach, consider the situation for the user who comes to some web page and is thinking about subscribing to try out the app. What if the user is redirected to some other site, an unfamiliar site, to continue signing up? That's a big reason for the user to back away from signing up further.
But the user who comes to eBay's Selling Manager Applications page remains in the familiar and trustable eBay space and has increased confidence to subscribe to the application to try it out. It just makes sense. With eBays security mechanisms and interacting with third party services, eBay passes user request for subscription to the third party and the third party sends information back--and this is not visible to the user. The experience is good.
David asked for a raise of hands: who has developed gadgets, who has sold on eBay, who is now more interested in developing a Selling Manager app that would appear on eBay, and who wants to develop containers. Different hands raised for each question.
Farhang emphasized, "SEE it in action and you will see the potential. Visit the eBay booth and watch the video so you can realize the benefit of the great amount of traffic, of all those eyes that could see your app."
An audience member asked whether a browser on a cell phone can run gadgets. David said, "Sure, if the cell phone supports a rich browser with javascript support. If developers wants to support lower-tech phones, they can build apps that rely more on the server and serve up the app to a box on the phone. You get to decide how much work to do on client versus server side. You can build an app that has no dependence on the server (and depends on browser); vice versa, you could have the server do all of the work."
Anyone can register as an eBay developer and develop and test a Selling Manager application in the eBay Sandbox. If you are wanting to move your application to production, you submit an application for review of your application. (eBay wants to review your hosting infrastructure, business processes, and data security policies to confirm that you have the infrastructure in place to provide customers with a stable, available, and secure service.)
John Darrow
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