Slashdot Mirror
Redmond's Heavy Guns Go After OpenSocial
jg21 writes "It is probably coincidental, but two responses to OpenSocial from well-respected members of the Microsoft blogging community have each in their own way come out against Google's OpenSocial initiative, Dare Osabanjo because in his view OpenSocial while billed as a standardized widget platform for the Web, actually isn't. And Don Dodge because his claim is that fifty million Facebook developers "don't know what OpenSocial APIs are...and don't care.""
Shocking! Shocking I say!
What is wrong with the world, this day in age, when a company's employees will come out and bash the competitors competing products?
</sarcasm>
This is about as surprising as Ballmer bashing Apple, Apple bashing MS or Google, [insert any other corporate rivalry here]. News it ain't.
Grammar Nazis: Yes, I am aware that "ain't" really isn't a word.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Well yeah, if you're going to base the usefulness of something on how many Facebook developers know about it, pretty much nothing is useful.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It might be just me, but there seems to be an awful lot of blog posts coming from Redmond employees these days based on the new tactic of "If we get enough people banging on our blogs and rubbishing it enough, and then claim that we're the victims in all of this when someone raises a valid point, maybe people will believe that it's true!"
Facebook does not have 50 million developers. It has 50 million users. Active developers are an incredibly small minority within that community.
Or are you saying that Miss take-a-self-portrait-at-arms-length-on-her-cell-phone is a developer because she knows how to post a picture as her background?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
"Dare Osabanjo because in his view OpenSocial while billed as a standardized widget platform for the Web, actually isn't." Did Microsoft really just criticize Google for creating a non-standardized standard? What?
Actually, I don't care that you don't care. In addition, the Facebook crowd does not care either. But I do, because less developer competition is a bonus for me.
However, the Facebook crowd will care when they see a nifty new plug-in or tool that allows them to have a social calendar robot(tm) or ad hoc open forum(tm) or anything else that will make their Facebook experience more pleasant, more useful, or just plain old stupid but with really interesting eye candy.
And by then, you'll care because you don't want to be left out of the "cool crowd."
No they don't. They have 50 million -accounts- which completely fails to be the same thing.
Some of these are held by people who have two or more accounts. Some are held by spammers, and a great many are held by people who at some point or other signed up out of curisoity, but haven't actually used the site even once the last month. These aren't "users" of the service.
Nope, you're absolutely right - its not fifty million stupid applications, its closer to 20 million.
And at least 99.999% of them suck.
I'm not sure what exactly your point with this is, but I'd like to contribute some interesting facts. First, JSON isn't a Google thing. In fact, it was created by a Yahoo employee (Douglas Crockford), and is an open standard which is available as RFC4627. Having worked with JSON in the past, it's a much simpler, and much lighter markup language than XML (yes, that's right, it's a markup language, nothing more, just like XML, and HTML). I'm not certain how google is using JSON in their API, but in my experience deciding to use JSON over XML is probably a smart idea, as JSON is much more compact, and much easier to write (a lot less typing) and can easily represent all the standard data constructs available in almost any language.
If you want to bash the design of Googles API versus Yahoos that's fine, but please don't confuse the issue by saying JSON is somehow more complicated than XML, as that couldn't be farther from the truth.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Its not about not following standards, its about not submitting work to standards body, and specifically, about not being "open" because the technology isn't submitted to a standards body. Osanbanjo writes:
Yeah, its the new Microsoft definition of "open": "open" means "submitted to a standards body".
I haven't seen the comment made anywhere that perhaps the real motivation for the bit OpenSocial announcement could be that Google lost the bidding war for a stake in Facebook. This could explain MS's lack of interest in creating a cross-SN API, though I can't picture them doing that anyway, except maybe as an option in their dev tools.
And to go along with their usual naming convention they'll call it "Microsoft Social Network"... wait til it's an abysmal failure then rename it to "Microsoft Live Friends & Family" and integrate it into the Windows profile somehow.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
All of this for a stupid social networking site.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wow, is jg21 taking a jab at Dare Obasanjo by calling him Dare Osabanjo? Maybe it was just a typo, but I digress.
Dare seems to present his thoughts in a well written manner and doesn't seem to be ranting, so I dismiss jg21's one liner to describe Dare's article as a cheap shot. I'm no fan of Microsoft but if Google can learn from Microsoft's developers (hint, hint, free secrets about Microsoft's strategy) to make Google's API better then why not. However Don Dodge's comments are exactly the kind of "Na-na-na, naa-naa-naaaa", "in your face" kind of bullet-point ranting I'd expect from a Microsoft developer.
In any case this topic is sure to get more press here then it's worth, even my time spent commenting on it seems to be a total waste now that I think about it.
Seth
"Is that real poncho or a Sears poncho?" ~~FZ
Yes, but you're still missing the point. It needs to be designed from the beginning for developing network based applications. That means it needs real graphics and animation capabilities. Sure you can kludge it in JavaScript and HTML by using 1 pixel by 1 pixel colored divs, but that's really really slow and terribly wasteful, not to mention a real pain in the butt to program. It would also be nice if it could integrate into the native OS to a certain extent (tray icons, in OS X have the menu across the top of the screen, etc.). But most importantly it needs to be lightweight. Most if not all the data (barring graphics) should be in some sort of text format like HTML and CSS, not binary blobs like class files. It also needs to put a lot of thought into security issues. For an example of something that I think is very close, but fails at least the proprietary test, check out Adobe AIR.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
NY Times had an article "In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism" that discussed how social networking sites had huge economic potential for the impoverished in India. I don't have much use for myspace, but social networking via the internet could have profound impact.
And by then, you'll care because you don't want to be left out of the "cool crowd."
Uh, we're on slashdot, remember?