Bill Burcham’s memeRocket

Country & Western Gentleman

Michelle Jones. UK

The kind of openness promised by OpenSocial isn’t particularly valuable to users (oh that billion people.) Tim O’Reilly nails it with his economic analysis:

If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that’s a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

It’s just an open widget API. Great. So as an app vendor my widget can kind of be portable. Or at least the back end code can kind of be reusable. But users still have no ability to combine the services of multiple vendors. This whole web platform wars thing has got to go.

At a deeper level, think about the value, or lack of value that the platforms actually provide. At the OpenSocial level the platforms are just providing widget containers. Portlets anyone? The Web experience is retrograde enough without taking a giant step backward and spending your whole day inside Facebook.

Rather than trying to suck Google/Yahoo!/Facebook/Microsoft’s sticky-locked-in version of the web through a lame portal straw, the real hope lies in innovative expansion of the browser-to-user link (as exemplified by Mozilla Prism which e.g. lets Web apps work much more like desktop ones) and in secure mashup technologies (like JSONrequest which turns the current platform-centric model on its head.)

update: Prism prototype now available for Mac and Linux.

Douglas Crockford, purveyor of the JSONRequest spec, is cranky in a polite sort of way. He also happens to be right! Check out the video of his recent talk on The State of AJAX.

Crockford takes us through a brief history of computing reminding us, as we’ve been reminded before, that the Web interaction model is practically the same as the mainframe 3270 interaction model circa 1972.

The most potent moment in the talk however, is when he shows a shot of a mermaid rendered via a run of the mill nvidia subsystem and dryly points out “look, rounded corners”. The upshot: the 1984 Macintosh had rounded corners — browsers were obsolete from the git go and there is a huge and widening gap between what you do in a web app and what you do in a non-web one.

Oh and I’m making Crockford my Personal Hero of the Month for pointing out that not only are our web technologies based on eight-year-old standards (HTML 4.0.1, ECMAscript ed. 3, CSS 3 um… started in ‘98 and still under development) but that of those, CSS is the worst of the lot and should be replaced with urgent haste. Refreshing respite from the usual CSS love.

“Don’t take any crap.”

update: watch this space for my growing list of web standards revolutionaries:

Why can’t I copy the URL for a Gmail thread into e.g. Google Calendar? That would be so useful!

Actually I think there is an URL syntax that would work if I only knew the incantation. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was simply in the address bar of the browser?