#open vs closed

[radioquailty-blog]

Techstuff - Open vs Closed: A TechStuff Debate - Friday June 15, 2018

Hi everyone . Thanks for listening . If u like this video please dont forget subscribe :) RADIO QUALITY Techstuff Open vs Closed: A TechStuff Debate Friday J...

[vedantvarma]

Quoted from the piece:

" Accuse me of overreading, but I propose a revision of the old adage: closed can beat open, but you have to be genius. Under normal conditions, in an unpredictable industry, and given regular levels of human error, open still beats closed. Stated a different way, a firm gets to be closed in exact proportion to its vision and design talent."

[karltryggvason]

When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using Flickr photos because Instagram's meager metadata sucks, and the app is only reluctantly on the web at all. We get excuses about why we can't search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.

Anil Dash - [The Web We Lost](http://dashes.com/anil/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html) via [Kottke](http://kottke.org/12/12/the-web-we-lost)

[suryaray-blog]

Think App.net is just a Twitter clone? Then you’re missing the point

#SuryaRay #Surya Much of the coverage of App.net — the ambitious project from entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell that just finished raising $500,000 through a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding campaign — has focused on the idea that Caldwell is building a “paid version of Twitter.” That has led a number of critics to complain that no one wants an alternative to Twitter and therefore App.net will almost certainly fail. But whether it succeeds or not, the idea behind the venture is actually much bigger than just building a paid Twitter clone. What Caldwell wants to do is create what he and others think Twitter could have been before it decided to become a global media entity: namely, a unified message bus for the social web, or a way of tying together multiple apps and services into a single real-time information delivery system. This is a much more ambitious goal than just cloning Twitter or duplicating some of its features. And while Caldwell has beaten many people’s expectations by even getting funded in the first place, it remains to be seen whether enough users and developers will be willing to pay for the service to make it an effective resource — especially since other similar efforts to create an open ecosystem for the social web have mostly failed. Are there enough supporters of an open standard to make a difference, or is the social web doomed to be a world of competing proprietary walled gardens? App.net wants to be a platform, not just an app Orian Marx, the creator of New York-based startup Siftee, does a good job in a recent post of describing the difference between what the alpha version of App.net looks like now and the broader ambitions of Caldwell and his partners. What you see when you go to the site appears to be a very stripped-down version of Twitter, but with far fewer users and features, and that has led many to dismiss it as a short-lived clone — one that will die because it won’t be able to compete with the kind of network effects Twitter has developed (although Caldwell argues network effects can be a negative as well as a positive). As Marx describes it: “App.net will combine the simplicity of cloud infrastructure with the power of web frameworks to deliver the best platform for developing social web applications.” In other words, the alpha is more like a test case or prototype of what could be built by using the platform App.net is trying to construct — one that uses open standards such as PubSubHubbub and ActivityStreams and other protocols that make it easy to distribute information through multiple networks, as well as allowing users to find and “follow” other users, and other things that we associated with Twitter or social networking in general. One comparison would be to Amazon Web Services, which is a collection of tools like the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 that developers and companies can use to build services on top of. Another way of thinking about what App.net is trying to do is to think about what email used to look like, or (for those who aren’t quite as old) what instant messaging used to be like. There were competing platforms and competing standards, and nothing like an open API or any of the other things we associate with allowing different services to exchange information. Users of CompuServe Mail couldn’t easily send mail to other mail-hosting services, and later on users of ICQ or AOL’s Instant Messenger couldn’t easily chat with users of other competing platforms such as Microsoft’s MSN or Google’s GChat. As Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures notes in a recent post about the potential benefits of App.net, what the social web is lacking is a way of tying together various standards and protocols that allow anyone to integrate or exchange information easily with any other similar service — in the same way that anyone can send email to anyone else on the internet: “It would a huge benefit to society if we can get with social networking to where we are with email today: it is fundamentally decentralized with nobody controlling who can email whom about what, anyone can use email essentially for free, there are opensource and commercial implementations available and third parties are offering value added services.” Will the promise of an open platform be enough? While Twitter has become a powerful information-publishing system and a kind of real-time newswire, it is still a private corporation with its own commercial interests, and as it expands its attempts to control more of its network — in order to monetize it more effectively — it is clamping down on the use of its API in ways that have caused friction with both developers and users. Much of the impetus for Caldwell’s project came from that dissatisfaction, and the feeling that Twitter at some point gave up on its desire to be an information utility and chose to become an advertising-based media entity instead. As one App.net supporter put it: “[App.net] provides a solid API platform that is less likely to be yanked out from under our feet when the VCs get antsy and want to see a profit or acquisition.” There have been other efforts to create a kind of open platform for the social web, however, and most have not ended well: one was an attempt to create a public standard for social connections called OpenSocial, which was driven by Google but designed to be an open protocol. Although the project still exists, it made very little headway, and was more or less doomed when Google recently killed off its Social Graph API. Rightly or wrongly, the project was seen as Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook — but its efforts have since been diverted to promoting its own Google+ network (which ironically still doesn’t have a fully open API of its own). In some ways, Caldwell’s App.net also has similarities to FriendFeed, the federated social network that former Google staffers Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit (one of the original developers of Gmail) created in 2007, which allowed users to pull in messages and updates from multiple networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. FriendFeed was eventually acquired by Facebook in 2009 for $48 million and Taylor became the company’s chief operating officer and one of the architects of its market-dominating “open graph platform.” Will App.net ultimately wind up on the scrap heap along with other attempts to create an open social ecosystem, a victim of the market power of incumbents like Facebook and Twitter and/or the ambivalence of users? Or will it gain enough support to become a real alternative to the walled gardens that currently make up the social web? _Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and See-ming Lee_ --- http://dlvr.it/20HmTV @suryaray

[suryaray-blog]

There’s only one truly open platform — the web

#SuryaRay #Surya As Twitter and Facebook continue to fight a variety of skirmishes in the ongoing “platform wars,” with both companies trying to control as much of their networks as they can in order to monetize them as quickly as possible, it’s worth remembering what Sir Tim Berners-Lee did 21 years ago, when he created the first truly open internet-based platform: namely, the World Wide Web. In an early interview about his invention, Berners-Lee confessed that there was a time where he considered taking a different route and trying to profit from what he had developed, but he chose a different path — and the amount of social and commercial value that has been created as a result is almost impossible to calculate. This is something that’s worth thinking about as we see the social web becoming a mainstream phenomenon, with all that implies. The choices we make when it comes to the platforms we use, and the choices those platforms make about how they choose to monetize their networks, will have far-reaching implications. The story of how Berners-Lee created the web is pretty well known: how we was working as a researcher at the CERN Institute in Switzerland and decided to try and put the theories of earlier thinkers such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush into practice, and developed a series of programs and standards that would allow a scientist in one lab to connect his thoughts or research to information that was located on a computer somewhere else. The result was hypertext markup language or HTML, as well as the hypertext transport protocol or HTTP — concepts that most of us barely even think about any more, they have become such an integral part of our lives. A critical feature: No centralized control It’s interesting to note that the initial response to Berners-Lee’s idea was skepticism, primarily because others in the field wanted all hyperlinks to be approved by a central authority, so that no one would click on a link and find nothing (or something unexpected) at the other end. As a _Time_ magazine feature on Berners-Lee from 2001 described it: “When Berners-Lee attended hypertext exhibits and asked designers whether they could make their systems worldwide, they often said no, citing this need for a clearinghouse. Finally [he said], ‘I realized that this dangling-link thing may be a problem, but you have to accept it.’” That willingness to give up some form of centralized control may not seem like a big deal, but I think it was a crucial aspect of what Berners-Lee and CERN did in throwing the development of the web open to anyone, provided they abided by certain minimal standards. And it’s directly related to his other decision, which was not to try and commercialize what he had invented — something he left to people like Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who turned the graphical browser he developed at the University of Illinois into a corporation and launched the initial wave of commercial web companies in the mid-1990s. As Robert Wright (who did the interview with Berners-Lee for _Time_ magazine in 2001) notes in a recent post at _The Atlantic_ about the anniversary of the web, it would have been fairly easy for Berners-Lee to build on what he had developed and create some kind of commercial entity — in fact, he had a graphical browser/editor before Mosaic or Netscape came along (and the two-way or social web was very much part of Berners-Lee’s initial vision). But he didn’t, and one of the main reasons was that he didn’t want the web to become Balkanized, with multiple versions of the browser that wouldn’t be truly interoperable with each other or the open web. As Wright described it in 2001: “Berners-Lee envisioned competitors springing up, creating incompatible browsers and balkanizing the Web. He thought it better to stay above the fray and try to bring technical harmony.” What kind of web do we really want? Reading about Berners-Lee and thinking about the development of the web — and all the ways in which it could have become something very different — made me think about the recent furor over the evolution of Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, and how the nature of those networks is changing as commercial pressures come to the forefront. Twitter in particular is no longer just an open platform for real-time information, with an API that anyone can use to add value to the network: now, it is a commercial media entity with corporate partnerships and advertising relationships that will determine much of its future behavior. As Hunter Walk of YouTube has pointed out, a big part of the impetus for this change is the massive amount of venture financing Twitter has taken on over the years, and its attempts to justify an implied market value of $8 billion or so. Facebook is in a similar situation, since it has gotten billions in venture funding and is now a public company with shareholders and investment bankers to satisfy. Thanks to Berners-Lee, the web has never been a commercial entity, or it probably would have turned into something like AOL or CompuServe. Even potential competitors to Twitter like App.net, which entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell is trying to develop, are driven by their funding models: Caldwell argues that his service would be better because users and developers would pay for it, but others — including blogger-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler — maintain that in order to become successful App.net would eventually have to do many of the same things Twitter is doing, and that the only real alternative would be a truly open platform (something blogging pioneer and developer Dave Winer has been talking about for some time). Berners-Lee has also raised a warning flag before about “walled gardens” such as the Apple ecosystem and Facebook, which he says threaten the open nature of the web. In the end, the debate about what Twitter and others are doing is about more than just competitive concerns or even capitalism vs. non-profit models — it’s about what kind of internet we want, and what we are prepared to do in order to get it. _Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Fabio Venni and Faramarz Hashemi_ --- http://dlvr.it/1zdmNq @suryaray