Dave Winer writes……

State of the Platform, 2007 edition

Wednesday, August 1, 2007 by Dave Winer.

1. The great thing about the Internet was and is that it’s the platform without a platform vendor. That’s why it has been the engine of growth and innovation for so long, over thirty years now. There’s no entity with eminent domain to forclose on a developer’s relationship with customers. And none of us are incentivized to care for a vendor’s garden in the same way we are with the community garden. 

2. Perhaps it’s for the best that the iPhone has no Apple-sanctioned SDK. That has forced developers to create their own, even though results so far haven’t gotten beyond “Hello World.” If Apple had provided an SDK, then Bug Labs would not be quite as welcome, and every developer that gained traction would be wondering when Apple was going to take their market. 

3. Facebook is a platform vendor, obviously, and when one develops a Facebook app, one is willingly climbing into the trunk, which has a lock, and only one entity has the key, the platform vendor. 

4. What about Twitter? 

5. What about Feedburner? 

I agree.

#6 - we now can change all this. By supporting OpenID and other burgeoning open standards for social networking and blogging.

That’s why we’re doing a DataSharingSummit Sept 7-8 in Richmond, CA.

Then we’ll have similar meetings in London and around the world. Until we can create an open, unvendored mesh of distributed apps and services that no one owns - we won’t have a platform to call our own.

Facebook, MySpace, Apple, Google and Microsoft have shown us the evil ways of platforms. No we can throw off our shackles and unite. As they say here in Italy “Avanti Populo!”

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