You contradict yourself a lot in this post. In many cases, “being open” means compromising the user experience. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
For example, if you allow any Tom, Dick & Harry to write apps for your platform then you’ll get malware, crapware and viruses mixed in with the cool open source and commercial apps. If you police every app that comes through your system you may miss out on some of the hits but will get the benefit of eliminating a large class of the garbage as well.
These are the kind of statements that get me up in the morning and writing blog posts!
There are so many things I wanna say - here we go!
1. Dare covers our industry from a technical perspective as he is a practitioner and implementer. His statements on letting other developers into a platform (and what happens) ring true of the realities that Facebook (and others) have encountered when “opening up” their platforms.
Developers are greedy, aggressive, sometimes desperate folks - especially when funded by VCs. So they’re apt to break the rules, cheat, find every angle to manipulate users to achieve the ‘viral effect‘ which leads straight to the holey grail “acquisition” (or even better - MORE - VC cash!) But you can’t really fault these folks - they’re just acting like developers. Remember what Dare’s boss says: “Developers, developers, developers!” That’s why it was such a big deal that Facebook did what they did. Now we’ll see if the same thing happens in the OpenSocial developer community.
2. BTW this is exactly the kind of opening up I was trying to explain to Steve Gillmor yesterday on a Gillmor Gang episode. In that episode Steve ONLY sees open as the ability to enable micro-blogging messages to move freely between vendor’s platform. Which Facebook doesn’t do. And because Facebook doesn’t do that - Steve thinks Facebook is closed. I totally disagree. Any kind of open is a good thing. Look at what Microsoft is doing! As I’ve said before - Facebook is like 98% oppen. That may not be perfect, but its far better than the world we had 3 years ago! We’re at least moving in the right direction!
3. Now getting back to what Dare said “being open means compromising the user’s experience“. Here’s where Dare and I are singing from the same hymn book. Providing a compelling, intuitive user experience to users is what its all about. You see my speech and rant would go something like this “USERS, USERS, USERS, and just make sure we deliver them coolio experiences!”
Lots of people work very hard on doing just that at Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. And what’s very clear - RIGHT NOW - is that the Open Stack experience just ain’t there - yet.
I don’t think any of us “open” dudes and dudesses would disagree. See #2 above for “whether we roll over and quit or keep working hard on this issue” Hopefully the recent election of a new board at the OpenID foundation will help solve this challenge. And hopefully Dare’s company Microsoft - will throw some coins into the hat to help facilitate solving this challenge. Cause everything costs money.
4. I certainly feel for platform developers who will have to police their sites for bad developers, just like they have to police their site for bad users. In exchange for this policing - they get billions of dollars of revenue. That seems like a fair tradeoff to me. 5. As we move forward - this balancing act between open and proprietary, between specific forms of two-way APIs, dataportability, interoperability, distributed friending, etc. will all unfold in a myriad of implementation scenarios and details. It’s NOT gonna be just one thing.
Some will utilize Live Mesh. I’m sure Google will come up with their OWN Live Mesh. Some standards will emerge while proprietary solutions will be around - forever.
I had been planning and working on this panel for six months, ever since Loic and Cathy Brooks asked me to do it - during the summer. The timing was perfect because MySpace had just announced their MySpace ID platform at the show, while Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect both shipped last week.
And on top of all that, Microsoft shipped a major upgrade to the Windows live suite of apps and services - and SixApart had shipped a product called TypePad Connect - so every single panel member had made a major announcement and was shipping their “open technologies” - within the past few weeks.
What transpired was a fairly comprehensive panel discussion on the state of open platforms in the web today (even though we would have liked to have had more time to go into the positioning of OpenID as either a technology or a solution) and other ideas on how these platforms can connect together. However we simply didn’t have enough time.
So here’s the panel - I think it went really well:
During the panel we triangulated between the interests of the major platform vendors and their business models and agenda - with that of “what’s best for end-users.” We gave the audience an overview of the various approaches to open social networking - Facebook (highly integrated experience, 98% open), OpenSocial (a set of APIs for providing Facebook ‘like’ apps) and Live Mesh (which is a synchronization, cloud computing/local server mesh approach.)
I tried to give each approach it’s own day in court and as far as I’m concerned, I think all three of these approaches can play together and work with each other - to create a viable, happy ‘open mesh’ of inter-conncted networks. I know that’s an idealistic dream, but all the pieces of the puzzle are coming together.
We even got heckled from the audience by Michael Arrington, who claimed that being an open platform isn’t always the best user experience and that maybe Facebook was gonna win cause it WAS closed.
“We have a new president and he’s shown us that through working together with people, we can achieve good. The old school Republican attitude was to call out Facebook for what they’re doing WRONG, but our new attitude is to work together with folks to move forward. We owe allot to Facebook, as we do to Doug Engelbardt, and we all make our contributions to what ‘open’ is.”
The panel started off by identifying “Open is the new Black” as the latest trend permeating the major platforms today. We went over the ‘Open Stack” and what each of the panelist’s companies define as “open”.
Dave Morin of Facebook informed us that Facebook had 130M users worldwide, 650,000 platform developers (from 180 countries) and 14.5B page views - a month. But when I asked him how Facebook connects into the open stack and which of the layers of the stack Facebook would connect to - he didn’t have an answer. [NOTE: Privately we know that Dave Morin supports us, but he's not the boss at Facebook.]
What I WAS able to get out of Dave Morin was that we’ll be able to get access to the Facebook feed - whch we don’t today. Then David Recordon eloquently pointed out that building on top of open technologies (like our Open Stack) is better for developers and end-users. David is on the Board of the OpenID Foundation and there is movement to morph the OpenID brand into a full solution.
Max Engel then explained what MySpace announced (MySpaceID) and how MySpace users are used to have their ID as a URL (myspace.com/marc) and that fits right into the OpenID approach.
Dave Glazer then explained the difference between OpenID and OpenSocial (Glazer is on the board of the OpenSocial foundation.) OpenSocial brings Facebook app functionality - to “the rest of us”.
We then had a high level Microsoft executive named Jeff Hansen who explained how Live Mesh is a key component in their future and how it is a gateway technology to create and maintain symmetrical synchronization of one’s data and social graph - across a wide range of devices and your desktop. By implementing two-way APIs, Microsoft will enable any of us to access any Microsoft’s customer’s profile data (or any other implementation of these ‘live mesh’ protocols) and then put it right back from whence it came.
Then panel covers all the important issues of our industry today.
5. As we move forward - this balancing act between open and proprietary, between specific forms of two-way APIs, dataportability, interoperability, distributed friending, etc. will all unfold in a myriad of implementation scenarios and details. It’s NOT gonna be just one thing.
