Yesterday at Web 2.0 I did a workshop on ‘Open Data’ (with Joespeh Smarr (Plaxo) and Tariq Krim (NetVibes) and asked 2 questions of the big shot social networking CEOs - Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Chris DeWolfe (MySpace.)

I asked them both essentially the same question: “will you allow us developers access to your end-user’s profile data including unique identifiers associated with each of these user’s friends.”

The answers I got were actually pretty heartening:

Zuckerberg said: “we want to get there” and that “we realize this is a flaw in the system” - he just wouldn’t commit to a timeframe (which says to me - it ain’t happening anytime soon!) (Richard MacManus has a good report on it.)

DeWolfe didn’t really seem to understand the question - but Battelle helped me get the message across to him. He answered that openness was “largely a good thing for users.” (So I gotta wonder when is openness NOT a good thing?) (Again - Richard MacManus has a report on this - as well - go Richard!)

So what we have is the two leading platforms saying that they’ll open things up more - specifically to allow unique identifiers to leave the system. I wonder if any of this will change once Google makes their announcements on Nov. 5th?

Our ‘open data’ workshop isolated the issues and brought up some interesting discussions - “when is pragmatism more important than idealism?” Tariq and Joeseph both have companies which need to monetize people and navigate the standards waters - with NetVibes actually helping to create standards for widgets.

The issue is that proprietary formats get pushed by vendors - to solve specific problems. This then leads to us identifying what the solution CAN be. But THEN the issue of lock-in arises. Do we commit to a specific vendor’s APIs or push for open standards?

This is what’s going on with Twitter right now? Shouldn’t there be a way to connect Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku?

This balancing act of proprietary versus open - is gonna be an on-going issue - as new technology continues to emerge and vendors solve specific problems, but yet don’t want to help the competition. I see it as “think about the end-user FIRST and then build a business model which has you working WITH your competitors.”

So platform vendors like myself should support BOTH existing and future standards that exist - as that’s what helps the end-users get the experience they deserve. The vendor need to provides open APIs - whether they’re proprietary or not - cause eventually the community should own the standards. The vendors get to invent them. So if a particular vendor is pushing a standard - make sure that they’ll give that format away.

IMHO

It was quite a day yesterday - so now I have to go downstairs and experience today.

Needless to say its amusing to hear that Adobe is shifting towards the web - literally 10 years after I told them to do that.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 11:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.