We are 9! The 9th Anniversary of the eBay Developers Program

Many changes have taken place since our 8th anniversary:

• In August 2009, eBay opened its new App Store for Sellers, offering developers the ability to embed their business productivity applications in My eBay, where hundreds of thousands of eBay Sellers currently manage their online business.
• As of Q3 2009, the eBay Developers Program has grown to more than 100,000 members who have created over 13,000 live applications.
• More than 60% of all eBay.com listings come through eBay Web services, with over 30% coming through third-party tools via the eBay Developers Program.
• In Q3 2009, the eBay Platform handled over 27 billion Web service requests.
• Five developers were honored this year with annual eBay Star Developer Awards for improving user experience, helping sellers adapt to rapid improvements in eBay Marketplaces, providing product input that improves the API platform for the eBay developer community, and more.

2009 eBay Star Developer Awards winners are:

• DSR Rockstar: Seller Machine CRM by BengalOne
• Most Innovative: Dynamic pricing feature by Monsoon
• Early Adopter: Mercent Retail for eBay by Mercent
• Service to the Developer Community: Jake Becker (helios825) of WatchCount.com
• Rapid Evolution: Sales Manager by InkFrog

Thank you all for another great year! :-)

eBay Architecture talk on the eBay API Platform @ SDForum, 10/28 in Palo Alto

Join Farhang Kassaei, eBay's Lead API platform architect on Wednesday, October 28th, @ 6:30pm in Palo Alto for a talk on  the technical challenges and issues solved to create the latest updates to the eBay API Platform, hosted by SDForum.

Participation is one of the important principals of Web 2.0. To encourage participation often Web 2.0 sites adopt an "open" strategy: Allow your developers to build the application for your end user. Architecturally, this approach is radically different than the traditional architecture where the entire site is built, deployed and operated by an internal team. Some of the aspects of architecture that should be examined in any open architecture are:

1.Overall System Architecture

2.Deployment

3.Development Cycle and Testing

4.Dependency Management and Graph

5.Security

6.Performance

7.Domain Specific API

8.Events and Messaging

9.Internationalization

10.State Management, Data Access

This talk will focus on how eBay dealt with these challenges when it opened its Selling Manager Applications platform to developer community. Get details about the talk here. Join Farhang at SDForum on 10/28!

- Delyn

Special $99 Offer for PayPal X Innovate 2009 -- Register by 9/15

Our friends over at the PayPal Developer Network are throwing their platform launch event, PayPal X Innovate 2009, over November 3 and 4 in San Francisco.

PayPal X Innovate 2009 is where you can learn how to leverage the new PayPal APIs to your advantage and easily monetize your ideas with more than 40 sessions, keynotes from technology leaders, hands-on labs, partner exhibits, and special networking events. Conference session descriptions and speakers now live on www.paypal.com/innovate2009.

Special offer to eBay Developers Program members that expires Tuesday, September 15th -- $99 conference registration for eBay API developers.  DON'T DELAY -- Use promo code 99EBAY915 and register now before this deal ends on September 15th.

For more information about the new open PayPal platform and the Innovate event – see the blog, news & announcements on www.x.com. 

- Delyn

New eBay Event -- eBay: On Location

Today eBay announced plans for a series of smaller events "within a day’s drive for as many sellers and buyers as possible." The new program is called eBay: On Location. eBay: On Location will kick off in Orlando in February, and wrap up in San Jose in August with a 15th anniversary celebration.

eBay Developers Conference plans are still being finalized for 2010, so keep an eye on the developer blog to see those plans unfold. We're pretty excited about eBay's 15th anniversary, and hope you are too!

For more information on eBay: On Location, see the announcement.

Selling Manager Applications Jumpstart

Here at eBay North campus, it's sunny but we’re inside listening to Madhu Gupta, Mikel Schwarz, Rolf Skyberg and Jon Weygant present an interactive jumpstart presentation about Selling Manager Applications. Most of the team that developed, tested, and documented SMApps is here, and we’re happy to meet the developers who will be creating a new kind of application: selling gadgets that run on the eBay site.

Selling Manager Applications: The Very Idea

As Madhu describes it, Selling Manager Applications grew out of the idea of putting together two things: Selling Manager, which is now becoming a free service at eBay, and the opening of the eBay platform, which has created a small industry that serves the eBay selling community and expands eBay in ways we could not have predicted.

Selling Manager Applications, or SMApps, is the result of asking this question: “What if we mashed together the best parts of our innovative developer community, with the traffic and trusted experience of My eBay?”

So now you can build eBay selling applications that run in My eBay, in the trusted eBay Selling Manager interface. You can launch to sellers in August, if you get started now. The on-boarding cycle is happening now. Applications that submit to the business readiness review by July 3 will be exempt from eBay’s 20% revenue share until 2010.

SMApps is build on the gadgets specification. The gadgets specification lets you build an application that’s re-usable across eBay and across the web.

Madhu took some detailed questions that showed that plenty of developers are already working hard on SMApps.

Billing and Subscription

Mikel, pictured above with Rolf, presented the upcoming billing platform, to be released to developers next week. Once you set it up, eBay handles all invoicing and billing on behalf of your application. Your users will see their invoices and billing histories in an interface within their My eBay pages.

There are several billing options. You can have a free application, or a billable plan. With a billable plan, you can charge a one-time fee, or a regular subscription. We support recurring fees, non-recurring fees, non-recurring setup fees, and usage fees, and we require a 7-day free trial.

Mikel walked us through the subscription flow that users will go through to subscribe to your Selling Manager application. He explained that you submit your terms of service and privacy policy in the deployment descriptor for your application, and eBay displays them to the user in the subscription flow.

Walkthrough of Setting Up an Application in the Sandbox

Madhu, Mikel, Jon and Rolf walked through the entire deployment of a new application to the sandbox, and then subscribed a user to the application and demonstrated views of the application.

The main point of this, for someone just beginning to develop a Selling Manager application, is that it is pretty easy to submit an application to the sandbox and start working with it right away.

You create your deployment descriptor, go to your My Account page, and use the interface to browse and upload your deployment descriptor to the sandbox.

Madhu demonstrated how the application looks, running an IFrame on the Selling Manager page.

Rolf demonstrated the Applications Directory, and the flow for submitting your application to it.

Implementation Details

Jon Weygant presented considerations for implementing gadgets, beginning with a discussion of the differences between URL and HTML type gadgets. He said that the choice came down to different programming styles, and whether you want to use a URL type to reference an already existing application, or create an HTML type eBay-resident application that uses makeRequest and other standard DHTML techniques.

Jon dug in to the implementation details of other features as well. The curious can find details in the linked sections of the Selling Manager Applications User Guide.

• Processing a render request
• Processing user preferences and other parameters
• Verifying the integrity of the request
• Using the gadgets.* API

eBay opens up SM Apps beta plaform to gadget developers

eBay has always supported open standards for Web development. We have been an open API platform for over 8 years, but now that we've opened up Selling Manager as a beta platform for developers, we've chosen to embrace the gadgets specification as defined within OpenSocial. Using the concept of gadget containers, developers are able to take existing gadgets and re-mix and re-use them in innovative new ways across the Web.

Our platform architect, Farhang Kassaei spoke to Chris Schalk of the Google Code team at Web 2.0 Expo last week about eBay's decision to standardize our architecture for this platform to the OpenSocial gadgets specification. If you missed Farhang's session at Web 2.0 Expo with David Glazer, the Director of Engineering from Google, then make sure to check out Farhang's post on the OpenSocial blog or the video below.

Open standards allow developers to innovate more quickly across platforms, and that makes the Web better for everyone.

Enjoy the video!

-Delyn

Web 2.0 Keynotes: Mark Carges on Five Things That Matter for Developers Today

The keynotes were thoughtful and down to earth today at the Web 2.0 conference. The hall was packed, and you have never been in a room with so many iPhones in your life.

Tim O'Reilly opened, with a visionary presentation (viewable here) on the general themes of "Web 2.0 Five Years On" and "The Power of Less." He cited interesting ideas in Web 2.0 history (the web as a platform, the Google index as a "database of intentions"), Web 2.0 present (the web is growing up and learning how to use its data), and Web 2.0 future (your houseplants tweet you when their potting soil is getting dry; items are reflected throughout the web in "information shadows" that can be recognized even without global identifiers such as ISBNs ).

O'Reilly's view of Web 2.0 future takes in much that is less trivial than tweeting petunias. He addressed the state of maturity of Web 2.0, and looked forward to probable next stages. To illustrate the direction in which Web 2.0 is evolving, O'Reilly said, "Meaning does not have to be formalized. It can be statistically extracted." Don't worry. O'Reilly supplied examples and practical implications of that dense aphorism.

For example, just as the length and sequence of songs can identify a CD, a sensor's data about the heat and exhaust signature of a major appliance can identify the appliance's make and model. Sensors in homes, factories, hospitals and schools are even now being used to construct a "smart grid." The implication: useful information about things like our cities, global healthcare, and the state of the environment can be extracted from data that is already available to us, without the expense of sending a lot of people around with questionnaires and clipboards and measuring devices. In other words, we can afford the information we need, because we already have it.

Well-received presentations followed, from John Maeda (designer of a friendly inaccurate clock and foreseer of flattened hierarchies), Stephen Elop of Microsoft (who sat down with Tim O'Reilly and told him that Microsoft is becoming much more interoperable), Amanda Kosto (of salaamgarage.com), and Michael Abbott (of Palm).

Mark Carges, eBay CTO and SVP of Global Platform, wrapped it all up with a short, hard-hitting closing keynote (viewable here) entitled "Five things that matter to developers today." Given the economic crisis, his down-to-earth approach seemed the most tailored to the moment. "What do developers care about right now?" is a question that, in the immediate present, is probably not best answered by sweeping or visionary answers. This moment calls for thoughtful, practical measures that embrace new opportunities while minding the bottom line.

Mark's choice of subject matter demonstrates that eBay knows the value of its developer community. Each of his points (summarized below) demonstrates a strong vision of how the Developers Program both depends on developers, and benefits developers.

1. Making money

Of course. Since the first data-scraping and sniping tools... well, wait, make that since eBay first opened its APIs to developers, the eBay development ecosystem has grown with the volume of eBay transactions. eBay sellers sold $60B last year, and the 80,000 developers who helped sellers research, list, and service all those transactions also received their cut.

2. Useful technology

eBay has some of the greatest technology and data assets on the web.

The technology of eBay and PayPal is useful on a massive scale. PayPal has 70 million users. eBay sees 150 million unique visitors per month, and supports 70 million sellers worldwide.

The developer community that provides applications for eBay sellers and buyers uses the eBay APIs to drive as much as 60% of eBay transactions.

3. Accessible technology

Mark emphasized the importance of mobile applications.The eBay iPhone application is a strong start. It is clear that he believes eBay should make a powerful effort to enable mobile usage. eBay and its third-party developers still need to make some breakthroughs to enable accessibility.

4. Technology adapted to you

Today, your cell phone is a communications device, an entertainment center, a mall, and a social network. Tomorrow, it may also be your wallet. Already you can instantly repay a loan to a friend who has a PayPal account. Soon, In-N-Out Burgers may accept PayPal, and you will be able to pay for your burgers at the counter from your cell phone.

PayPal is uniquely adaptable for this kind of use, because it is a single global payment network, with end-to-end transaction visibility, good risk protection and fraud detection, integrated with more than 15k banks. PayPal unifies the world's disparate money systems to enable payments anywhere.

The big news in adaptable technology is that the PayPal Developer Program is opening up later in 2009. Third-party developers will use flexible APIs for sending money to create mobile payments applications that will change the way people pay for things.

5. Open platform

eBay released a new developer opportunity today.SM Apps lets developers embed seller applications in ebay.com, just as you can embed applications in Facebook. The difference is that with SM Apps developers can make money, charging a one-time fee or using a subscription model for use of their application.

Because the SM Apps platform uses the Gadgets specification, applications built for eBay can also operate elsewhere on the web, including on other portal pages.

The Selling Manager tool has 270,000 active, paying businesses operating in the U.S. alone. As Mark said, "While other platforms are trying to figure out monetization... we are set up for you [the developer] to take a cut, and we hope you will."

Gadgets Gone Commercial

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
API Tech Docs and Tools

Join eBay at Web 2.0 Expo, Mar 31-Apr 3 in SF

Join the eBay Developers Program at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2009, March 31- April 3 in San Francisco at Moscone Center West. We're speaking, keynoting, sponsoring and looking forward to checking in with some of our developers at the event.

If you are attending Web 2.0 Expo, don't miss our keynote by eBay Marketplaces CTO and SVP of Platform, Mark Carges on Wednesday, April 1 @ the afternoon keynote.

Another don't miss talk is being given by Farhang Kassaei, Lead Platform Architect at eBay and David Glazer, Director of Engineering at Google, who will be giving a talk on building commerce applications based on the gadgets specification as defined within Open Social. Their talk will be on Wednesday, April 1 @ 1:30pm.

eBay is also a platinum sponsor of the event, so make sure to swing by our booth #608 in the Expo Hall. We'll be showcasing demos from a number of our developers, such as Terapeak, HostedSupport and ahTEXT, and rocking the Expo Hall from Wednesday - Friday, April 1 - 3, so make sure you come up and introduce yourself to one of the friendly folks on our eBay platform team.

If you haven't registered for Web 2.0 Expo yet, we've got some deals for you that will help make this great event more affordable. Register with websf09ecm1 if you want to register for a FREE Expo Hall pass, a $100 value. Or if you are looking to register for a full conference pass that will get you in to see all of the sessions and talks at Web 2.0 Expo, register with websf09spr35 to get 35% off of your registration.

Register today with one of our discount codes & get ready to join us @ Web 2.0 Expo!

- Delyn

What Does the Future Hold? Find Out by Using the Dev Program API Calendar

You may have noticed that there's a lot of change happening on the eBay site. Stay informed about what is happening and when by checking out the eBay API Release Schedule calendar.

I've color coded the events to give you a sense of the likely impact. Here is what the colors mean:

Red = Must adopt by date. May break listing or other important functionality.
Yellow = Should adopt sometime. May be technically optional, but important to seller strategy.
Green = Nice to adopt. May still want to adopt as a differentiator.
Blue = Developer Program events like DevCon.

Note that the impact may be higher or lower for you depending on your individual application and business model.

Features

In the Month view, you get an overview of everything released or enforced that month.

Click the Agenda tab and you can use it as a checklist for adopting upcoming features.

 

Click the event and a detail balloon pops up. You can also copy that event to your own calendar.

 

And since it's powered by Google Calendar, you can subscribe to it just like any other public calendar. Subscribe just to the High Impact calendar, or subscribe to all of them.

Caveats

Dates are subject to change. But the benefit of the dynamic calendar is that you find out immediately after I do.

Where possible, exact dates are given. Otherwise, a window is given. And yes, sometimes that window is very big. As I get more information, I make the window narrower.

If there's a project you'd like to see on the calendar, email me at developer-webmaster@ebay.com. I won't always be able to find a release date for you, but I will do my best.