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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.""
Guns ablazin', I'm SURE they could take on the entire Google fanbase.
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).
I agree. Who the fuck cares about APIs? It's not like people are joining Facebook just to add fifty million stupid applications to their profile.
-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
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?
There aren't 50 million Facebook developers. It only seems that way because there's 50 million 'really awesome super dooper wall' applications.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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?
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.
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.
Sure MS employees are going to take shots at Google services. But even if they're not perfect, Google is getting the services out there and putting the tools out there. While MS blogs about it. I'm sure MS will eventually field some Windows-centric competitive product...just as soon as they get done blogging about how bad Google is.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So says this article - http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/02/first-opensocial-application-hacked-within-45-minutes/
throw new NoSignatureException();
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.
When someone is paid to sit at work and comment on their web log about the competition, it is no longer a 'blog but a paid web log, or 'plog.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
OpenSocial isn't a social networking website. If Google had a version of Facebook, I would guess it would be Orkut, which is Google's social networking website. But OpenSocial is a set of technologies that several social networking websites -- including MySpace, which has more users than Facebook -- are committed to supporting.
The one from Don Dodge pointed out the most important fact that Facebook's success is based on its users' loyalty to the service. Do they really care about applications? Most of them dont care that much. If one developer leaves, there will be plenty of others who will do same thing, even better.
The second article looks at OpenSocial from technical perspective. It compared the two set of APIs to see whether facebook's or opensocial is better technically. OpenSocial should be seen as FREE APIs rather than "open" (which generally regarded as good, no evil) APIs. These APIs are owned and administered by Google, which they can withdraw anytime they want as with Google Map APIs.
Having said that, it's still interesting to watch the battle bw facebook and "the new microsoft"
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
Consider the source folks, this is the same online rag that hosts Maureen O'Gara articles. For those that aren't familiar with "MoG" she a SCO shill with an extreme anti-IBM bias that stalked Groklaw's PJ, posted her personal information and other sorts of gossipy crap which SYS-CON happily published. MoG is also the last holdout that believes the SCO lies (and who is, coincidentally, owed money by SCO as is shown in the bankruptcy debtors list).
At one time SYS-CON promised to get rid of MOG, right after a mass exodus by SYS-CON writers in protest over what was called a gross violation of professional ethics. Later in an interview for Free Software Magazine, Fuat Kircaali, CEO of Sys-Con, stated he felt Maureen did nothing wrong. Today they still let her secretly write pro-SCO rubbish, and in some cases outright incorrect information under a pen name.
Anyone who consideres SYS-CON an authoritive source of IT information would be better off reading eweek or TheOnion for that matter. Sys-Con has some sort of agenda and are (at least in my opinion) serving interests other than Free or Open source software.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
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.
I'm so glad Microsoft and Google are responsible corporate entities, and not fueling a new feeding frenzy of irrational investment. It's not like the sub-prime collapse has done any collateral damage to the economy, so heap on more bizarre, nonsensical investment strategies.
It's soooo much like the 1990s that I saw mention of "Web 3.0" a few days ago, as if the comical fluff that is Web 2.0 wasn't bad enough. I think it's time I get on the bandwagon. Know of many brain dead venture capitalists out there willing to give me a few million. If I can beat the bubble's burst, I should be able to pocket a lot of money, live in Hawaii and laugh my ass off at the idiots out there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
So, you know, before bagging out this person for being a Microsoft shill (which he may be, I don't know) did any poster bother reading the OpenSocial API spec? Because I did, in fact, read it and I have to say, its really very bad. I mean, it reads like some marketroids gathered up some stuff Orkut is doing into a binder (which itself did not have much forethought), did a deal with some partners, and threw it out there with the word 'Open' in the title for the GOOG fanboys.
I am usually a fan of GOOG API's but this is pure competitive play that is weak technically and has little or no merit beyond who is supporting it.
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