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.""

Comments

Microsoft employees bashing something non-MS?

[ByOhTek]

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.

Re:Microsoft employees bashing something non-MS?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

It's even funnier than that! It's Microsoft employees bewailing the notion that people don't follow standards!

fifty million Facebook developers

[mwvdlee]

fifty million Facebook developers "don't know what OpenSocial APIs are...and don't care."

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.

Re:fifty million Facebook developers

[MightyYar]

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. Yeah, that was a pretty retarded statement. Like saying that Linux is useless because Windows developers aren't interested in it. And 50 million? Uh, right...

New Redmond Ploy

[segedunum]

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!"

Users != Developers

[downix]

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?

Re:Users != Developers

[kebes]

Indeed, and the differentiation between users and developers is critical in this case. Basically, most users don't care about APIs and open standards and such (until, of course, the day they try to migrate all their perfectly tagged photos from one site to another... and discover they can't).

The developers are the ones who might care about APIs and open standards. Now, I'll admit that some casual developers of Facebook widgets don't care too much about portability and open standards. But, I would guess that many (most?) developers of social widgets do care about such things. As a developer, why would you want your work to be coupled to a single site, which is not under your control? Most programmers would prefer to have the ability to move their code from place to place, and for their widgets/applications to be accessible to as many people as possible (otherwise, why are they releasing it in the first place?).

So whereas users might not care about these things, I think many programmers/developers are going to be more interested in working on OpenSocial tools and widgets, rather than contributing to a walled garden that they have no control over. (E.g. Facebook can come up with a tightly-coupled widget that completely replaces your pet project.)

If the developers care, they could certainly shift the balance of power towards OpenSocial. Users may not care about APIs and open standards, but they certainly do care about awesome widgets, the ability to link with a large and growing social network, and (perhaps most importantly) the ability to migrate their current profile into this new network. If everyone except Facebook (for instance) is part of this OpenSocial network, then Facebook users will indeed be annoyed that they cannot interact with the cool toys everyone else is playing with.

Re:What social networks are really about...

[monkeyboythom]

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."

Re:What social networks are really about...

[clonmult]

Nope, you're absolutely right - its not fifty million stupid applications, its closer to 20 million.

And at least 99.999% of them suck.

Re:Json again

[orclevegam]

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.

"Open"

[DragonWriter]

It's even funnier than that! It's Microsoft employees bewailing the notion that people don't follow standards!

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:

There are all sorts of forums for proposing and discussing open Web technologies including the IETF, W3C, OASIS and even ECMA. Until all of the underlying technologies in OpenSocial have been handed over to one or more of these standards bodies, this is a case of the proprietary pot calling the proprietary kettle black.

Yeah, its the new Microsoft definition of "open": "open" means "submitted to a standards body".

Is it now assumed Microsoft = Facebook?

[mikemuch]

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.

Re:MS talks, Google walks

[arkane1234]

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.