Examples

Example #1 - Tell the world about your special offers.

The Problem

It doesn't matter if you are Amazon, Walmart or a small boutique shop without a website - If you have special offers, you want to tell people about them (or there really isn't any point having them!). How do you tell people? You could send out thousands of emails (most would get ignored), post newsletters to peoples houses - expensive and they would still get ignored. Update your website or put a poster in the window and hope that people pass by at the exact time of your special offers... not exactly ideal.

The Solution

You create a LiveDirectory profile for your shop which lists useful information like: address, phone number, delivery costs, opening hours, website address and of course...your special offers.

All you have to do is update the special offers section of your profile and when they change, LiveDirectory will send out change notifications to all the applications and services that have subscribed to your shop profile.

If your shop sells something quite niche then your profile subscribers might re-publish your special offers in niche forums, blogs and social groups (Facebook etc) where their readers have a specific interest in your shops products. Thus, LiveDirectory can help drive the ideal customer to your shop.

Example #2 - When your company contact details change.

The Problem

Does your organisation rely on your clients and customers knowing your telephone number? What happens if your telephone number changes? How can you elegantly inform everyone that your telephone number has changed? Especially when your telehphone number maybe listed in business directories, corporate contact lists, official and government offices and probably countless other places that you may not know about. Simply updating your website is not a very pro-active solution and manually calling everybody is very time-consuming. Although I used telephone numbers as an example, the same problem exists for a change of address, email, fax number or website address.

The Solution

You can create a simple LiveDirectory profile that lists your organisations contact details. When anything changes you can update your own LiveDirectory profile. You can update your LiveProfile automatically, via the 'Profile Data API', or simply by logging in and editing your profile data.

LiveDirectory will then send out automated notification messages to all your 'data subscribers' informing them of the change and thus allowing them to individually update their own records.

Example #3 - When a news headline is published.

Everytime the BBC news headline changes, LiveDirectory will send a 'notification' to all subscribers. In turn, the subscribers could perform some useful function like translating the headline into German and publishing it to a German news feed, or to a Twitter account.

Example #4 - Notify users of new software releases.

The Situation

You are John Resig building jQuery. Everytime you have finished a new release you want to tell the world... and the world wants to listen! So how do you tell the world?

Solution #1

So you do your normal release process and publish the website and documentation changes and pretty soon people will notice the new version and start twittering about it etc - Mission accomplished, but not exactly elegant and certainly not very "real-time web".

Solution #2

You would create a LiveDirectory 'profile' (for example, like this one: jQuery profile) and when do you a release, simply call this URL: http://livedirectory.org/api/profile-data/1.0/update/jquery/latest_version/?api_key=[api_key]&data_value=[new version number here]. This URL could be called manually by pasting it into a browser or automatically during a build/release process.

As far as you (John Resig) is concerned, job done. You have told the world. Well actually, you would have told everybody that had subscribed to be notified of changes to the jQuery profile and all of those that had subscribed to listen to changes to the latest_version. This works because when any profile content is changed, LiveDirectory will check for any subscribed listeners and send an HTTP POST notification containing details of the change.

The only missing piece to this very elegant and very "real-time web" solution is subscribing to profiles (either the profile in its entirety or a single profile data item). Yep, you guessed it, subscribing is as easy as accessing or updating profile data - it's a simple RESTful URL call, for example to be notified whenever there is a new jquery version, simply call something like this: http://livedirectory.org/api/subscription/1.0/create/jquery/latest_version/?api_key=[api_key]&notify_url=[change notification url].