Are Toll Roads Open?
Twitter proved me wrong. Well, sorta. After my last article I had a whole slurry of rebuttals by Twitter employees suggesting my last article had “serious factual errors” and that the move by Twitter to charge $360,000 a year for 50% access to their full firehose through Gnip actually made Twitter “more accessible” and “open”, […]
Read more...The Next "Facebook Platform" for the Modern Web, and Why Twitter’s Running the Wrong Way
I’ve talked previously about “the web with no login button”, a vision of the Building Block Web that follows the user where they go, knowing who they are and adapting as they move. With the advent of mobile, entire operating systems running on the browser, cloud-based personal information stores and APIs such as Kynetx to […]
Read more...Yes, Facebook Broke Your Trust, and Yes, That’s a Good Thing
It seems like every other post I read these days is about whether Facebook violated users trust, or whether they were wrong, or right in opening up more. It’s eerily repetitive for someone that’s written 2 (and 3rd on the way) books on the subject and who’s been following Facebook pretty intimately for the past […]
Read more...Facebook Launches OpenGraphProtocol.org: Adds Second Product to the OWFa
Just two years ago at OSCON, Facebook, Google, Myspace, and others all joined forces to create the Open Web Foundation, a sort of GPL-like agreement for platform builders to have a common agreement users could understand. Facebook announced their first support of the OWF agreement in November of 2009 with the launch of the OAuth […]
Read more...Did Google Reinvent the Wheel by Adopting the Protocols They Chose?
In a response to my article here, DeWitt Clinton of Google defined what he deemed the definition of “open” to be. According to DeWitt, “the first is licensing of the protocols themselves, with respect to who can legally implement them and/or who can legally fork them.” I argue if this were the case, then why […]
Read more...The Web is No Longer Open
“So it can benefit everyone.” That’s what a Google employee said today as he tried to explain Google’s recent push to have websites use the ‘rel=”me”‘ meta HTML tags to identify pages a user owns on the web. It’s not a bad strategy – index the entire web, know every single website out there, and […]
Read more...Twitter Keeps Fighting While Facebook Continues to Grow
Ev Williams was quoted recently saying, “The world is big enough for both Facebook and Twitter”, almost as though we were supposed to think Twitter wasn’t trying to be a competitor. Don’t be fooled though, Twitter’s recent lists feature is just one step towards providing the privacy controls Facebook itself is known for. Before we […]
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