淘宝网，国内最大个人网上交易社区在今天正式推出了开放平台（Taobao Open Platform，TOP），用户可通过淘宝开放的API，创建各种不同的电子商务应用。
淘宝开放平台项目是淘宝软件公司面向3rd App开发者，提供API接口和相关开发环境的开放平台。软件开发者可通过淘宝API来获取淘宝用户信息 （卖方和卖方用户信息，私有信息需要授权）、淘宝商品信息 （全淘宝超过1亿个商品的名称、类目、型号、介绍等信息）、淘宝商品类目信息（全淘宝商品索引及分类明细）、淘宝店铺信息（全淘宝店铺信息）、淘宝交易明细信息（在取得用户授权的情况下，查询每笔交易的详细情况）、淘宝商品管理（淘宝商品的上传、编辑、修改等接口）等信息，并建立相应的电子商务应用。同时，作为淘宝开放平台TOP项目的唯一合作平台——阿里软件平台在其中也扮演着重要的角色，它将为开发者提供整套的淘宝API的附加服务：测试环境、技术咨询、产品上架、版本管理、收费策略、市场销售、产品评估等等。
几个月前，刚刚华丽推出、欲挑战国际B2C“巨鳄”亚马逊的淘宝商城在还没有吸引外界足够眼球的情况下，淘宝就再一次将自身的产品线拉长，试图通过开放的API来做电子商务领域的公共平台，这不免让我产生了种种疑问。首先，需要强调的是，我对于开放对互联网的发展持着积极乐观和肯定的态度；但是，我并不觉得任何有着开放态度的决策层都应该将自己的社区网站做出Facebook 那样的社会性网络操作系统。里面需要考虑的东西很多，尤其对于一家拥有超过6200万注册用户、数十万从事长期网上贸易卖家、每日交易总额超过3.5亿人民币，日交易笔数超过150万笔的淘宝网而言，开放对于保护这部分用户的数据安全保护似乎并没有促进作用，相反，如果开放程度底线设置不合理的话，该平台的开放将很有可能成为用户对于淘宝信任危机战爆发的导火线，在做一点上，我个人是相当地保守。
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译文:
Taobao.com Has Officially Launched Taobao Open Platform for Users to Create Business Applications
Taobao.com, the largest domestic personal online trading community, has officially launched its Taobao Open Platform (thereinafter refer to as 'TOP') today, on which users can create various e-commerce applications through API opened by Taobao.
The TOP project is an open platform that Taobao Software Company opens for 3rd App developers and provides API interface and related develop environment. Through Taobao API Software developers can obtain Taobao's user information (the sellers and the buyers information, and authority needed if private information involved), commodity information (the whole information of names, categories, models, and introductions, etc. about over 100 million commodities on Taobao), commodity category information (the whole Taobao's commodity indexes and classification details), shop information (the whole Taobao's shops information), trading detail information (inquiry details of each trading with user's authority), commodity management (the interfaces to upload, edit and modify commodities, ect.), and create related e-commerce applications. Meanwhile, Ali Software Platform, as the unique cooperating platform with TOP project, has also played an important role in this project. It will provide a whole set of Taobao API additional services for developers: testing environment, technical advisory, product shelving, version control, charge strategy, marketing sales, and product assessment, etc.
Several months ago, Taobao Mall was just gorgeously launched and would challenge the international B2C giant Amazon. But under the situation that it hasn't attracted enough outside attentions, Taobao has again extended its product line and tried to become a public e-commerce platform through open API. And this unavoidably brings me various doubts. First of all, it needs to be emphasized that I hold a positive and optimistic attitude on the development that open platform gives to internet. However, I don't think any decision maker with open attitude should make his own community site like Facebook, the social network operation system. There are too many things to be considered, especially for Taobao.com, which owns over 62 million registered users and hundreds of thousands of long-term online trade sellers, and whose daily total trading amount exceeds 350 million yuan and daily trading number exceeds 1.5 million. Open platform seems not to promote the protection of those users data safety. On the contrary, if the bottom line of open degree is set irrationally, then such open platform will most probably become a fuse for users to outbreak the crisis of confidence on Taobao. At this point, I am personally quite conservative.