My own thoughts on ‘Unite’
Chris adeptly rips a new asshole into the ignorance of our tech community to not focus in on the real issues which Unite highlights and which are staring at our collective souls. To summarize:
1. Its not enough to billow and rage about ‘user’s controlling their own data! That is so, so, so, so….. 2007ish! Nowadays we must focus on the BENEFITS to openness, why owning your data is BETTER and EASIER and (IMHO) why we need to prove these benefits to other vendors so that THEY can benefit as well. If we don’t have an ecosystem where ALL benefit - it ain’t gonna happen.
Take COMCAST for example. Here’s a schizophrenic company that on one side is metering bandwidth and about to define what destroying net neutrality is all about, while at the same time running cutey videogame-like TV commercials of an integrated DLA-like environment and sponsoring Joseph Smarr and John McCrea to help us build our open stack and change the world. COMCAST desperately needs to be shown the BENEFITS of working with others, not locking users data in and they need to keep on the trail of making up for Plaxo’s PAST transgressions.
Joseph and John have been doing a great job at that repentant task, but we all know that at any time the bosses can come in, lock up that Plaxo data and help Haliburton and SAIC send us back to the stone age. So until its painfully obvious that open systems, cooperative cross-vendor efforts and an on-going open web are the ONLY courses to take - we have more work to do!
2. Microsoft Live Mesh, bit torrent, Dave Winer’s Frontier platform and all sorts of ‘client side’ servers have shown that distributed architectures are a piece of our future. So having one baked into Opera seems coolio.
But as Chris points out “why do we care about Opera, if its not even open source?” We might as well use Live Mesh!
IMHO Unite should be a plug-in for all browsers. But then that wouldn’t help Opera’s installed base - right?
3. I won’t even go into the other issues that Chris brings up; but owning the namespace, lack of OpnID support, filtering and proxying and the other requirements that Opera demands to use Unite - make it a non-starter.
The real issue is: ‘where’s Michael Arrington or Eric Schonfeld on these issues?” “What’s up with GigaOm?” Whatever happened to blogger intelligence and insights - in regards to this product launch?
4. Hearing that Unite supports Activity Streams say a bunch of things to me:
- there are good things in all dark clouds
- Activity streams is the buzzword du jour
- Unite may have some sort of future in our distribted world
Anyway - back to building cities in Northern Ohio.
Just found out that Craig Newmark, Paul Buchheit and Don Knuth are all alumni of CWRU - where I’ll be teaching.
Church!!I miss my Dad.I’m thankful for those who still have their’s. Happy Father’s Day!!Twitter Family have a great day! Stay on the wall.
Paul Buchheit and Don Knuth