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Open Social - It’s a Storm in a Teacup!

Posted by Money.Power.Wisdom in November 2nd 2007

I’ve suddenly been hearing a lot about ‘Open Social‘ - and read a bit about it, which led me to do some thinking.

Looking at it and speaking from purely my standpoint as a NON-technical person, I feel this is all a ’storm in a teacup’!

The analogy that comes to mind is EMAIL.

It’s been around since the beginning of the World Wide Web, as we know it. I still think it’s the quintessential ‘killer app’ of the Internet. And there is no standardization or uniformity beyond certain core concepts - yet it works well for many million users for one reason… it is USEFUL.

Social networking services creating a hoopla around ‘Open Social’ and similar initiatives sounds like overkill to me, because if the things they are making ‘open’ are really useful, people (and businesses) WILL find a way to make it work for the majority despite any lack of standards or uniformity.

Likewise, if it isn’t really meaningful or ‘essential’ to many (most?) Web users, it won’t matter how ’standardized’ or ‘compatible’ each component is with another - it won’t get used by many, for too long.

Yes, the world (and Web) would be a great, nicer place with uniform standards.

But we’re all human. It ain’t happening soon.

We still have racism, discrimination, poverty, mistrust and global enmity/intolerance - and it all stems from a lack of ‘uniformity’.

How are we, who are incapable of establishing coherence and compatibility in our offline world, going to ‘enforce’ or ’strong arm’ universal standards onto online social media?

And why would we want to do it?

What do you think?

Interesting links on Open Social:

under: Social networks
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2 Comments Received

pixites
November 2nd, 2007 @12:23 pm

http://blog.dogster.com/2007/11/01/10-reasons-why-open-social-will-be-very-beneficial/

Juho
November 2nd, 2007 @6:14 pm

I agree and I disagree.

I agree that a standards based web is probably never going to fly, just because restrictions to growth and usage are just not going to be accepted en masse.

Semantic web? Codewranglers’ wet dream.

However… even though I haven’t been following the discussion much, Open Social does sound somewhat useful.

Maybe it’s true that social networking needs its own ‘protocol’.

That’s what makes email work, after all. Despite all the different clients etc., the underlying protocol stays intact and interoperability stays intact.

And the mobile networks we have today would never be able to work with the thousands of different clients without uniform protocols.

So, yes to protocols and no to standards?

Kind of.

I can’t say I like the walled-garden future Facebook and others like it have drawn for us, so I hope SOMETHING useful happens in this space at any rate.