Being online: Your identity in real life--what people know

But he that writes of you, if he can tell
that you are you, so dignifies his story.

(This post is the second in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

Long before the Internet, much of our private lives were available to those who took an interest, and not just if we were a celebrity chased by paparazzi or a lifelong resident of a small village. Investigators with many good reasons for ferreting out such knowledge--non-profit organizations, college development offices, law enforcement professionals, private detectives--pursued their quarries with incredibly sophisticated strategies for uncovering as much information as they could and shrewdly deducing even more. The Internet has simply infused these methods with new ingredients.

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Why Using ShopSavvy Might Not Be So Savvy

Reading this morning's New York Times story, Mobile Phones Become Essential Tools for Holiday Shopping, I was reminded again of the fundamental shortsightedness of so many of our economic decisions, that flaw in human nature that makes us seize on temporary advantage without thinking of the long-term consequences.

The article focuses on the use of applications like ShopSavvy and RedLaser to do comparison price checking while in the store. On the surface, these are great tools for consumers (and there are other applications besides price comparison.) But remember, cutthroat pursuit of the lowest price will hasten the demise of many retailers, while strengthening others (usually, the biggest and most efficient, who can make money on the slenderest margins.) But what happens once those mega-retailers are the last one standing? Prices are likely to go up.

Particularly troubling is the trend to shop in the store, but then to buy online. From the Times article:

Matthew Tractenberg, for example, was recently shopping in a Silicon Valley bookstore, where he picked out five books for a total of $80. Before taking them to the counter, he typed the titles into the Amazon app on his BlackBerry Curve. Amazon had the books for $50 and would not charge sales tax or shipping. He placed the order on the spot and left his small pile of books in the store.

A few months ago, I was talking with one of my most loyal retail customers, a specialty computer bookstore in Massachusetts. "We survived the chains, and we survived Amazon," he said, "but I don't know if we're going to survive the online discounters. People come in here all the time, browse through the books on display, and then tell me as they leave that they can get a better price online."

Now, you might say, as the Hawaiian proverb notes, no one promised us tomorrow. Businesses, like individuals and species, must adapt or die. And if the Internet is bad for small, local retailers, it's good for the online resellers and it's good for customers, right?

But think a little more deeply, and you realize that my friend wasn't complaining that people were buying books elsewhere. He was complaining that people were taking a service from him--browsing the books in his store--and then buying elsewhere. There's a world of difference between those two statements. Online shopping is terrific: you can get detailed product information, recommendations from other customers, make a choice, and have the product delivered right to your door. But if you aren't satisfied with the online shopping experience, you want to look at the physical product, for example browsing through a book in the store, you owe it to the retailer--and to yourself--to buy it there, rather than going home and saving a few dollars by ordering it online.

Think about it for a minute: the retailer pays rent, orders and stocks the product, pays salespeople. You take advantage of all those services, and then give your money to someone else who can give you a better price because they don't incur the cost of those services you just used. Not only is this unfair; it's short-sighted, because it will only be so long before that retailer closes his or her doors, and you can no longer make use of those services you enjoy.

Maybe it's all for the best, part of the creative destruction of capitalism. But as a consumer, it's wise to realize the long-term implications of your choices. Shop at the big box store for the better price, and lose the small local store that was so convenient; browse the shelves or racks in a brick and mortar store, then buy online? How long do you think you'll be able to do that?

My advice remains the same as it was in 2003: Buy where you shop. If you discover a product online, buy it there. But if you discover it in a store, buy it there. Don't save a few dollars now, and lose the opportunity to shop at a local merchant in the future.

Of course, if you're happy to lose local bricks-and-mortar merchants, that's your choice. I've never been much of a physical shopper - I do most of my shopping online, and I love the convenience. But when I do go to local stores to browse physical products, I make sure to buy there, even if there's a better price online. I'm paying a little extra for that right to walk up and touch the product before I buy it.

Four short links: 18 December 2009

Ethics, Parallel Matrices, Browser Math, and Open Source EtherPad

1. In Character -- a journal that addresses a different virtue each quarter. I've been thinking of practical philosophy a lot, lately, as we see ever-more-dodgy behaviour. (via bengebre on Delicious)
2. Lessons from Parallelizing Matrix Multiplication -- a reminder why low-level knowledge of your platform matters, and why motivating examples should be carefully chosen.
3. MathJax -- MathJax is an open source, Ajax-based math display solution designed with a goal of consolidating advances in many web technologies in a single definitive math-on-the-web platform supporting all major browsers. (via Hacker News)
4. EtherPad Source -- released as part of their Google acquisition. The announcement says: Our goal with this release is to let the world run their own etherpad servers so that the functionality can live on even after we shut down etherpad.com. This is the resolution to the bad reception of the news that EtherPad would close in March with no plan B for users. The cult of entrepreneurship worshipped the customers only as a vehicle to an exit, but I don't believe that it's moral to do well personally but leave your customers high and dry. This is a message that the EtherPad founders seem to have got loud and clear.

Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between

To be or not to be: that is the question.

Hamlet's famous utterance plays a trick on theater-goers, a mind game of the same type he inflicted constantly on his family and his court. While diverting his audience's attention with a seemingly simple choice between being and non-being, Hamlet of all people would know very well how these extremes bracket infinite gradations.

Our fascination with Hamlet is precisely his instinct for presenting a different self to almost everyone he met. Scholars have been arguing for four hundred years about Hamlet's moral compass, whether his feigned insanity masked a true mental illness, whether the suffering and death he inflicted on those around him was a deliberate strategy, what psychological complexes fueled his cruel excoriation of Ophelia, and other dilemmas that come down to questions about his identity.

We can appreciate, therefore, why actors up to the present day have to memorize Hamlet's "Speak the speech" passage. As a thespian, Hamlet outshown all the Players.

We can bring this critical perspective on identity into our own 21st-century lives as we populate social networks and join online forums. When people ask who we are, questions multiply far beyond the capacity of a binary "to be" digit.

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The Best and the Worst Tech of the Decade

It was the best of decades, it was the worst of decades...

With only a few weeks left until we close out the 'naughts and move into the teens, it's almost obligatory to take a look back at the best and not-so-best of the last decade. With that in mind, I polled the O'Reilly editors, authors, Friends, and a number of industry movers and shakers to gather nominations. I then tossed them in the trash and made up my own compiled them together and looked for trends and common threads. So here then, in no particular order, are the best and the worst that the decade had to offer.

The Best

AJAX - It's hard to remember what life was like before Asynchronous JavaScript and XML came along, so I'll prod your memory. It was boring. Web 1.0 consisted of a lot of static web pages, where every mouse click was a round trip to the web server. If you wanted rich content, you had to embed a Java applet in the page, and pray that the client browser supported it.

Without the advent of AJAX, we wouldn't have Web 2.0, GMail, or most of the other cloud-based web applications. Flash is still popular, but especially with HTML 5 on the way, even functionality that formerly required a RIA like Flash or Silverlight can now be accomplished with AJAX.

Twitter - When they first started, blogs were just what they said, web logs. In other words, a journal of interesting web sites that the author had encountered. These days, blogs are more like platforms for rants, opinions, essays, and anything else on the writer's mind. Then along came Twitter. Sure, people like to find out what J-Lo had for dinner, but the real power of the 140 character dynamo is that it has brought about a resurgence of real web logging. The most useful tweets consist of a Tiny URL and a little bit of context. Combine that with the use of Twitter to send out real time notices about everything from breaking news to the current specials at the corner restaurant, and it's easy to see why Twitter has become a dominant player.

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Four short links: 17 December 2009

Desirable Devices, iPhone Piracy Numbers, Internet Trend Numbers, Value of Privacy

1. New Device Desirable, Old Device Undesirable -- "I'm going to take my new device wherever I go," said Larson, holding the expensive item directly in the eyeline of several reporters. "That way no one on the street, inside the elevator, or at my place of business will ever mistake me for the sort of individual who does not own the new device." Added Larson, "The new device brings me satisfaction." (via liza on Twitter)
2. iPhone Piracy -- over 70% of submitted game scores for this game were from pirated copies. Having seen our data and the fact that not a single pirate bought Tap-Fu after playing it, these arguments all sound a bit delusional to me. It seems like an attempt at trying to be legitimate while hiding the real reason. They should just change their page to say "We pirate because we can". That seems to be a much more honest statement based on the data we've seen. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. World Internet Project -- global research into Internet adoption and trends. Found via the New Zealand partner who published their dataset in the New Zealand Social Science Datasets repository.
4. The Eternal Value of Privacy (Bruce Schneier) -- powerful notes about the right to privacy. Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance. [...] Privacy is a basic human need. [...] For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

Global Ignite Week: 40+ Ignites Coming Next March

Just over three years ago, Bre Pettis and I threw a geek night in our home town. We called it Ignite Seattle. About 200 people joined us for a hectic night of geek contests, five-minute talks, and beer. I've been hosting them ever since--we just held our 8th Ignite Seattle and had over 700 people in attendance. Since that first amazing night in 2006, Ignite has spread to over 60 cities, bringing together thousands of geeks and generating hundreds of videos of Ignite talks.

This March, it gets much, much bigger. O'Reilly is launching the first-ever Global Ignite Week, to bring together as many local Ignites as possible. As of right now there are almost 40 Ignites scheduled from March 1st through the 4th. The Ignites will span the globe and you'll be able to watch them streaming online every day. So far, Global Ignite Week is represented on 4 continents and 10 countries. Our goal is to have participation from all 7 continents (Nairobi is looking good, and we're working on Antarctica).

I'm happy to say that Bing has stepped up as our first sponsor, helping us make Global Ignite Week possible.

If you'd like to be apart of Global Ignite Week (either by throwing an event or as a sponsor) contact us via Ignite@oreilly.com. Here are the participating cities (so far).

Ann Arbor, MI
Atlanta, GA
Auckland, NZ
Austin, TX
Baltimore, MD
Bangalore, India
Bay Area, CA
Boston, MA
Boulder, CO
Brussels, Belgium
Cardiff, UK
Columbus, OH
Denver, CO
Fort Collins, CO
Lansing, MI
London, UK
Los Angeles, CA
Lisbon, Portugal
Madrid, Spain
Missoula, MT
Montreal, Canada
Nashville, TN
New Haven, CT
New York, NY
Paris, France
Philadelphia, PA
Portland, OR
Pune, India
Raleigh, NC
Salt Lake, UT
San Diego, CA
Sault Ste. Marie, Canada
Seattle, WA
Sebastopol, CA
Sydney, Australia
Toronto, Canada
Waterloo, Canada
502/Louisville, KY

Four short links: 16 December 2009

Global Broadband, A/B Testing Stats, Streaming with SSDs, Online Videos Sell

1. OECD Broadband Portal -- global data on broadband penetration and pricing available from June 2009.
2. Easy Statistics for A/B Testing -- it really is easy. And it mentions hamsters. This is worth reading. (via Hacker News)
3. last.fm's SSD Streaming Infrastructure -- Each single SSD can support around 7000 concurrent listeners, and the serving capacity of the machine topped out at around 30,000 concurrent connections in it’s tested configuration. Lots of hardware and OS configuration geeking here, it's great. (via Hacker News)
4. Videos Sell More Product -- Zappos sells 6-30% more merchandise when accompanied by video demos. By the end of next year, Zappos will have ten full working video studios, with the goal of producing around 50,000 product videos by 2010, up from the 8,000 videos they have on the site today (via johnclegg on Twitter)

Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust?

Isn't it about time that we started holding our online brands to the same standards that we hold our offline ones?

Case in point, consider Facebook. In Facebook's relatively short life, there has been the Beacon Debacle (a 'social' advertising model that only Big Brother could love), the Scamville Furor (lead gen scams around social gaming) and now, the Privacy Putsch.

By Privacy Putsch, I am referring to Facebook's new 'Privacy' Settings, which unilaterally invoked upon all Facebook users a radically different set of privacy setting defaults than had been in place during the company's build-up to its current 350 million strong user base.

To put a bow around this one, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), not exactly a bastion of radicalism, concluded after comparing Facebook's new privacy settings with the privacy settings that they replaced:

"Our conclusion? These new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data." EFF adds that, "The privacy 'transition tool' that guides users through the configuration will 'recommend' — preselect by default — the setting to share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet, even though the default privacy level that those users had accepted previously was limited to 'Your Networks and Friends' on Facebook."

Ruminate on what that means for a moment. You are a parent, and you regularly upload photos of your kids to Facebook, blithely assuming that they are free from the roaming eyes of some sexual predator. While previously, these photos were only viewable to the Friends and Networks that you explicitly connected with, now, without consulting you, Facebook has made your son or daughter's pictures readily accessible to friend or felon.

Or, perhaps you are a typical 'thirty something,' sharing your weekend escapades with what you thought was a bounded social circle. Now, your current or prospective employer is just a click away from concluding that, perhaps trusting the company's marketing department to you is not such a good idea after all.

So as not to split hairs, let's just agree that some potential existed for either of these scenarios to have occurred under the old privacy model, and also worth nothing, if you actually understand what these new settings mean to your world, you can reverse (many of) these settings.

But, that's beside the point. Why? Because three separate instances now (i.e., Beacon, Scamville and Privacy Settings) have underscored a tendency of Facebook to not only make fairly key strategic decisions without first engaging it user base in a bi-lateral dialog, but to make decisions that are decidedly at odds with consumer protection/interest.

On a human level, one can look at the new privacy changes as akin to going to sleep at night with the assumption that the various doors and windows of your house were locked, only to wake up and realize that while you were sleeping, the 'locksmith' decided that you/they were better served if the doors were left unlocked.

Upon waking up to discover this unilateral decision, would you be pissed? Would you trust the locksmith to keep you safe at night going forward?

One last example before I move on, here's another excerpt from EFF's analysis on the 'Good, Bad and Ugly' of the new privacy settings:

The Ugly: Information That You Used to Control Is Now Treated as "Publicly Available," and You Can't Opt Out of The "Sharing" of Your Information with Facebook Apps.

Specifically, under the new model, Facebook treats information, such as friends lists, your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a 'fan' of — as 'publicly available information,' a new definition of heretofore personal information that Facebook held off disclosing in any material way -- until the very day it was forcing the new change on users.

Blogger Jason Calcanis puts this policy in perspective in his excellent post, 'Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky?'

I'm sorry, what the frack just happened? I turned over my friend list, photos and status updates to everyone in the world? Why on earth would anyone do that with their Facebook page? The entire purpose of Facebook since inception has been to share your information with a small group of people in your private network. Everyone knows that and everyone expects that. In fact, Facebook's success is largely based on the face that people feel safe putting their private information on Facebook.

Do with this information what you will (forewarned is forearmed, after all), but me personally, after reviewing each Facebook photo album of mine with personal, family and/or friend oriented photos within it, I couldn't help but feel that Facebook should be given a new name: Faceless Betrayal.

Some Relativity from the World of Offline Brands: Perrier and Tylenol

I read an interesting stat in Fast Company about the US Bottled Water Industry. Americans now spend more on bottled water than they do on iPods or Movie Tickets - $16B dollars.

Now, think back to 1989. Perrier Water was the imported water market leader in North America, with an eponymous water product marketed as 'naturally sparkling' water sourced from a mineral spring in the south of France.

But then, Perrier ran into serious trouble when the noxious, cancer-causing agent, Benzene, was found in the water that Perrier sold in the United States.

Seeking damage control, the company gravitated between silence and evasiveness, with Perrier initially stating that the problem was an isolated one, when in actuality, it had turned out to be a global issue.

Perrier's ultimate mistake, though, was responding to a serious brand integrity crisis in a less than above-board, consultative fashion with its customer base.

The net effect is that, despite a massive global boom in bottled water consumption, a once-trusted, dominant brand, in essence, collapsed. In the end, Perrier's sales fell in half; the company was later sold, and the brand never recovered.

By contrast, when seven people died after taking cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules, the company did a massive education and outreach effort, culminating with the recall of 31 million bottles of the product, at a then-cost of $100M. Like Perrier, Tylenol's market share initially cratered.

But, because the company had been proactive, public and always acting in the best interests of its consumers, within a year, its share had rebounded dramatically, and within a few years, had come all the way back.

The moral of the story is that two companies faced crises that threatened to kneecap their brand, but only one maintained a consistent focus on living up to the trust that its customers had put in the brand. Tellingly, the market rewarded the brand that was truest to its customers (Tylenol).

Netting it out: In light of the company's past consumer-unfriendly initiatives, Facebook's privacy settings change should serve as a wake up call to its 350M users that they are entrusting a Fox to guard the Hen House; a truth that is destined to erupt into a crisis for the company. Will they handle it like Tylenol or Perrier?

Related Post:
Why Facebook's Terms of Service Change is Much Ado About Nothing

Government 2.0: Five Predictions for 2010-12

Under no pressure from anyone, I’ve forced this obligatory “end of year predictions” post upon myself. People always ask me where I think Government 2.0 is going anyway, I may as well get some writing mileage out of it, right? So, here are some non-exhaustive, somewhat creative, and entirely debatable trends and ideas that I foresee taking shape in the next three years or so. Why the next three years? Well, it's hard to predict what will happen within a year - there are too many strange short-term factors, like natural disasters and Congressional behavior (but I repeat myself). Plus, the next three years is the remainder of Obama's current term in office, so these are things we can expect to see either before his second term, or before the new President's first term. So, that said, here are my five predictions for 2010-12:

Local governments as experiments - Increasingly some of the most innovative ideas are being independently developed in small communities. For example, the tiny city of Manor, TX has launched Manor Labs to improve services. Citizens sign up and suggest ideas for local services like law enforcement, and their ideas are ranked by the community. Good suggestions are rewarded with “Innobucks” that can be redeemed for prizes. Innovative thinking plus government-citizen interactions plus individual incentives can result in big wins for everyone involved. How can the Federal government best keep track of local innovation, and how can everyone best keep track of Government 2.0 news in general? Where's the TechCrunch of Gov 2.0?

The rise of Citizen 2.0 - Just as governments are adopting new media communications, cloud computing mentalities, and social networking skills, so are the citizens they represent. The implication is that if citizens want a website that mashes up environmental and tourist data, or desire open chat and dating platforms for soldiers stationed overseas, or find out what their Member of Congress does every minute of the day, they might just find a way to do it themselves. Early examples like ChicagoCrime.org showed that it was possible, but with people flocking to smart phones, niche social networks, and unconferences, how long will it be before the citizens are beating the government at its own game? (I think that a lot of what we call Government 2.0 is in actuality Citizen 2.0...)

Mobile devices as primary devices - Most discussion I hear about everything from social media to cybersecurity concentrates on desktop computers plugged into a wall. Sure, those are important, and the average government-issued BlackBerry is a little out of date. But soon those mobile devices will be replaced and upgraded, and employees will increasingly demand advanced capabilities like access to social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, embedded cameras, and customized applications (“apps”) for news and other functions. What are the implications for government when an iPhone becomes more powerful than a Dell desktop running all the Microsoft that money can buy?

Ubiquitous crude video content - High production value for Internet-only video is overrated. Sometimes, if a video targets a highly specific niche audience, great content is good enough. A small company named Demand Media, valued at $1 billion, creates thousands of videos a day and posts them on YouTube and other places - more than many other “media companies” combined. Their business model involves a specific algorithm that predicts highly specific questions people are likely to ask - “What’s the best color to repaint a red Camaro?” - and then assigns freelancers to film crude videos as appropriate. People have a lot of questions about their government - could they in part be answered using Demand Media's somewhat controversial techniques? I've written about this in a post about "proactive social media."

Always on-the-record - When you combine the ideas above (local innovation + citizen 2.0 + mobile as primary + crude content) a fifth prediction emerges. I think that more and more, politicians and government officials will always be on-the-record. By this I mean that the multiplication of inquisitive citizens with mobile devices, wi-fi, and social networking know-how implies that everything from local government hearings to Senators' travel habits can easily be documented, published, and shared. Imagine if you had a group of 20 "health care legislation enthusiasts" - what if each of them took one business day a month to follow (stalk?) members of (say) the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee around? In this episode of The Right Idea, I discuss this notion of always-on-the-record with some political experts. Think "George Allen's macaca meets Code Pink."

In the way of an open-ended conclusion, let me quote Clay Johnson, Director of Sunlight Labs in Washington, DC: "What if there was as much data about John Barrow (D-GA) as there was about Manny Ramirez (LF-Dodgers). There are 750 players in Major League Baseball, and only 535 Members of Congress. Most of the data [about government] exists and what doesn't we need to demand. The answer to healthy democracy lies not in rhetoric, but in our data." (from Seth Godin's new e-book, What Matters Now, p. 35)

Government data doesn't get me hot and bothered, but Clay's writing made me ask: Why exactly do we collect, analyze, and share more data on baseball than on our own government? To some degree, it's a combination of interest and ease. Bonus prediction, an easy one: It will be much easier to collect, analyze, and share government information in 2010-12 than it was in 2009. And we only need about one percent of citizens to be interested for something big to happen.

Four short links: 15 December 2009

Open Source Imagery Analysis, GPL Lawsuits, Small World, Regina v Internet

1. Opticks -- Opticks is an expandable remote sensing and imagery analysis software platform that is free and open source. Hugely extensible system. (via geowanking)
2. Best Buy, Samsung, And Westinghouse Named In SFLC Suit Today (Linux Weekly News) -- the Software Freedom Law Center is suing them for selling GPL-derived products without offering the source. They've been unresponsive when contacted outside the legal system.
3. Twitter Helps Reunite Owner with Camera -- Kiwi blogger saw camera fall from car in front of him, posted a picture from the camera to his blog and asked "anyone recognize someone from this picture?". How long do you think it took to get a hit? I love that New Zealand is a village with a seat at the UN.
4. R vs The Internet -- seminar held in New Zealand about the effects of the online world on law, including matters of suppression and contempt. See session notes from TechLiberty and video of the sessions from R2.

Innovation from the Edges: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps

Developer Challenge offers big prizes for best apps using new APIs

Two enduring tenets of Web 2.0 are "A platform beats an application every time" and "All the smart people don't work for you." Companies that take those bits of wisdom to heart find ways to engage developer communities to extend their products--and the result can be creative, surprising new applications that would never have been developed from within. Online payment giant PayPal recently announced the PayPal X APIs, a new group of developer APIs designed to enable new applications that can more tightly integrate with PayPal services. To encourage developers to create some awesome applications with the APIs, PayPal is offering prizes $100,000 and $50,000 (in cash plus waived transaction fees) for the best new applications. We caught up with PayPal's director for their Developer Network, Naveed Anwar, as he prepared to deliver a talk in Beijing, and he filled us in on what the new PayPal APIs bring to the table for application designers, and laid out the details of the challenge.

James Turner: In the last week or so, you've released new API. Can you talk a little bit about what's different with them, in comparison to how people have interacted with PayPal in the past as developers?

Naveed Anwar: We have always had APIs to help our developers at PayPal. The difference is that all the original APIs resulted in actions on PayPal.com, you had to access the web check out flow on our website. On November 3rd we announced the first ever truly open global payments platform. Part of that announcement was new APIs that let developers build PayPal’s payment service into their applications. We made the adaptive payments APIs available to everyone and gave attendees who attended our conference access to other APIs that make it easy to create user accounts (individually or in batches) within a developer’s application. We’ve had an overwhelming response from our developers to these Adaptive Accounts APIs, and so we decided to open them up to the rest of the community as soon as we could.

Very briefly, Adaptive Payments Platform has a lot of core features. In addition to the traditional features like send/receive money in P2P and B2B market segments, the Adaptive Payments Platform APIs provide new ways to make parallel and chain payments, and pre-approvals with PIN authorizations that enable several new possibilities. To provide a better user experience for both our customers and merchants, the Adaptive Accounts and Authentication APIs provide ways to make the account creation process contextual and allow merchants to authenticate their PayPal customers as part of their own order management or account related flows. These are just a few very high level sets of APIs that enable new capabilities and uses of PayPal’s payment service.

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