walkah: Open, Social for the rest of the web
Open, Social for the rest of the web
This past weekend, I had the privilege of being one of the chosen attendees for Social Web FooCamp. Needless to say, I was flattered and had an amazing time (thanks again, @daveman692 and @davemorin ) . One thing, however, became very apparent: the conversation, currently, is being dominated by the 'big players' (Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Myspace predominantly). In several discussions I found myself increasingly dropping the phrase:
... on the rest of the web
the big guys
First off, this is not a critique of the Google's and Facebook's of the internet. They are incredibly valuable to the growth of the openweb. The fact that Google, Yahoo and Myspace all three have various OpenID and OAuth initiatives in the wild and are actively pursuing additional ways to open their data is awesome (and Facebook wants to get there). It helps raise awareness and bring (slash confirm) "legitimacy".
The big guys also have resources. They can attend the conferences (and camps!) and have dedicated resources to write the standards, participate in the discussions and help shape the future.
However, they are only part of the discussion.
perspective
The issues the major providers face are different from the rest. They have a few sites with large numbers of users (hundreds of millions). Out here on the rest of the web, we have millions of websites, each with a "small" number of users (hundreds or thousands). We all understand the necessity for open data, identity, standards and protocols, but our reasoning tends to be slightly different.
The big guys recognize the benefit of exposing their data and most are providing OpenID and various levels of OAuth. How many are consuming it?
Sure, the big players want to be the primary authority for your identity and your information. In some cases, it is their business. But, rather than ranting against 'the man', I ask: have we - the rest of the web - given them a compelling reason to yet?
open source platforms for the open web
It's one thing for a major site (with hundreds of millions of users) to act like a silo, but on the rest of the web it amounts to isolation.
Those of us working on open source web platforms have an enormous potential for influence here. Implementing the various open standards "from scratch", while possible, is not realistic or even necessary. Increasingly, individuals have Wordpress blogs or perhaps their company, organization or club has a Drupal site. Web developers are increasingly turning to these platforms, or development frameworks such as Rails and Django. These platforms all have a real opportunity to bake in implementations of these open standards. The DiSo project offers a central place for co-ordination around these efforts.
We have data - gobs of it. We also, collectively, have the users and, in most cases, have more authoritative information about them (we know ourselves, our employees and our members).
We - the rest of the web - need to join the conversation: attend the events, participate in the mailing lists, and build the code to power the open, social web.
James Walker
Welcome to the conversation
Welcome to the conversation Chris Messina, myself, and several others have been having for a while :) A lot of people have done a good job of keeping "the rest of the web" in mind when talking about this stuff. But we, the rest of the web, haven't been doing as much as I'd like to follow through with that and actually build it out. We need to spend less time talking about how the rest of the web should be part of this conversation, and spend more time actually writing code so that it really IS part of the conversation.
Hey Will
Thanks for stoppin' by :-)
I agree that you, Chris, Steve, Stephen, etc are playing your part - but you hit on the key point: getting implementations out in the wild is crucial. I've certainly not done as much personally as I would have liked by now either.
Here's to more code!
Sure, the big players want to
I fight this all the time at work. All our software vendors (IBM, Oracle, MS, etc) say things like "Now with RSS and The Social™" meaning they can pull things IN to their proprietary crap, but what I need is a way to get the data OUT of their proprietary crap! Not as easy as it should be.
I guess what I'm saying is, it's easy for these mega-global-corps to adopt open technologies when it's convenient for them. Even when they DO adopt these technologies, they sometimes do it on a selective basis.
Frustrating, but I think things are progressing, albeit slowly!
open information
I think that the information holders currently are behaving exactly the same way that the record labels were behaving back in the napster days.
Someone smart came along and made it easier to buy music that to steal it, and now we have iTunes. People are making money from their music, and consumers get (almost) whatever they want whenever they want it. It's a decent solution.
Someone will come along and do the same thing in this area, I think.
The answer would be to link up all those little communities you're talking about with a persistent identity, I think. Not that I have a good idea how to do that at present, of course.
This was very useful
This was very useful information :) Many thanks to the poster
I remember a while ago
I remember a while ago squirting Jameson's out my nose while reading a valleywag article where someone described open ID as "too San Francisco". Somehow the phrase struck a chord with me, regarding the disconnect between the relatively small dev/internet conference/mailing-list/freaks who know who actually know who Tim O'Reilly is , and the great frontier of internet users who above all hate technology, and will only use it for shear personal amusement, or gain.
You know:
- there's a lot of people who still have aol.com, and hotmail.com accounts.
- there's a lot of people who will flip out and panic if your website shows them that you know their zip code because of their IP
- there's a lot of people who still use IE 6 for f#cks sake
- a lot of people still fear that anythign they say on the internet might be seen by potential employers
I mean, its all fine and jolly if the myriad open source little guys, and google get on the same page, but at the end of the day, there will be no more people using open ID than there are regular readers of valley wag. IMHO. This is not to say that I don't think its a good idea -- just to say that I think we are rare in that we are even willing to listen to the argument.