A good platform needs to eat itself. A good platform tells a story that becomes part of a larger story.

1. Ouroburos
As-A-Service
How Klout builds and distributes an API on top of APIs
11/6/14
Tyler Singletary
Director of Platform
@harmophone

2. 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

3. 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

4. Klout digests data.

5. Klout exhausts data.
• All of this crunching
leads to our primary
data:
• Klout Scores
• Klout Topics
• Content Discovery
• Targeting

6. Before we serve food…
Prepare the menu.

7. 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.

8. 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.
•

9. Klout eats social data.
• Here we are again.
• Eating social data that now incorporates the outputs
of what came in.

10. 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

11. Ouroburos
As-A-Service
How Klout builds and distributes an API on top of APIs
Tyler Singletary
Director of Platform
@harmophone