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Why not be truly open

I have been trying to digest Google’s Open Social over the past few days and then get hit by Google’s Open Handset Alliance today. Any more open and my brains are going to start pooling around my feet.

Then Derek Powazek writes a telling line:

Open Social, which is going to solve all the problems you didn’t know you had with social networking sites

I was tending towards positive thoughts about Open Social until I read that. I was thinking that while Open Social wasn’t ideal (Google own/control/define it) it might be a useful stop gap until true “social network portability” happened.

But then Powazek said the above and it struck me; I don’t want to run applications inside a social network. Applications on my desktop don’t run inside my address book. They run alongside it and dip into it when they need.

Before Open Social I bemoaned the walled application garden of Facebook. It was AOL for applications. Then along comes Open Social and the hype-train just bundles me along over that wall and into a new space that looks back on the wall, but from inside it. Suddenly I think Open Social is cool, applications in many social networks, wow!

Wait a minute…

So yeah. No applications inside social networks. That is an easy but wrong headed idea. It works now but doesn’t work in the long run.

I don’t even want my social network to be part of a social network. My network is mine, it belongs where I am, not inside some other application. And then the applications, and this is truly novel, just live on the web. Not inside Facebook or Ning or Bebo or MySpace. You host them where you want and how you want and they access everyones social networks which are stored where people want and how people want. You want to store it on Facebook? Sure, just make sure Facebook hasn’t sucked your network in and locked it up.

Open Social seems to fight the web a bit. It makes it easy to create applicatons with social network capabilities all inside a subset of the world wide web. It doesn’t work on the open web, your app. only works inside an Open Social container. Define, controlled and owned by Google. Nobody owns the web folks, not even our good, good friends Google (whose products I use everyday.)

As for Google’s Open Handset Alliance, I’m not sure. It is an operating system and some middle-ware with some PR behind it. Mobile app. development is pretty darned difficult I have found, you can’t do jack without giving your unborn children over to some mobile company and a telco or other. So an open mobile OS would be nice for mobile app. developers. Finally, a bit of freedom, right? But it could be too open, too unrestricted to the point where, as Andy Rubin says, the company supplying you the phone can totally lock it down. And then an app. designed for this Open Handset Alliance won’t work. It won’t install or it will but then it won’t be allowed access to the GPS or the camera or it might have all that but then the OS blocks VOIP calls and forces the app. to use the telco’s network and it all ends up as big a mess as we currently have.

Eric Scmidt says “why would you bother?” in response to a locked down OHA device. Because people do? Because not everyone chooses right? Because some companies are scared and clamp down instead of opening up? Because a company can get a free OS and middle-ware and then lock it down to squeeze every cent they can out of it? Not everybody believes in open yet.

I just think it could become highly confusing for the people who use the phones. OHA is currently a “developer announcement” but what/where is the user announcement? Where is my Plays For Sure that doesn’t come to a crushing end?

Funnily enough, the iPhone is pretty consistent. You know how to develop for it. Users know how to use it, what always works and what always doesn’t work.

Really, I am not sure about OHA. Truly open is chaos but potentially great.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 2 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    "I don’t even want my social network to be part of a social network. My network is mine, it belongs where I am, not inside some other application."

    Well, that's the key point, isn't it...
    I mean, i'm probably the last person on the planet who should be commenting on social networks - i'm social the way the girl behind the counter at the DMV is social. And yet, i belong to at least three "social networking sites" simply because i have family on them and the way they're set up i can't view photos or comment or read birth announcements unless i sign up and sign in. Most of these, i can't use feed readers or any other common tools to aggregate updates, i can't properly bookmark pages...

    ...but for the people using them, these networks have a lot of advantages. Easy page creation, updates, uploads, simple access control mechanisms, little need to worry about things like comment spam or unwanted images sneaking into your site... Most of the routine annoyances that you might consider just the cost of being on the web are taken care of automatically.

    So while my "social network" doesn't fit well into Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, the common case is much simpler: you join whatever network most of your friends are a part of, badger the ones that aren't into joining, play a few games of scrabble with 'em and that's that.

    They're popular because they fit the popular needs and wants. Twitter doesn't. Blog services don't. They fulfill other needs, and sure there's overlap, but there are also a lot of conflicting requirements, and being "truly open" doesn't exactly rate when the price of this "openness" is making my kid sister wade through stock touts, rude comments, and herbal Viagra spam in order to post pictures of her new hair style.

    The walled garden social network *is* the app. By all indicators, it's a killer app. And unlike the closed system so loved by phone companies, this one is appealing to users not because they don't know better, but because they know all too well the failings of the open alternatives.
    • ^
    • v
    Give it a few years and the limitations will hit even the most clueless user.

    We have already seen it with the steady herd migration from one social network to another. Friendster begets MySpace begets Facebook begets PlanetNine.

    It will also be a problem when Facebook makes a mistake and abuses the privacy of 50 million people with one developer upload. Boom.

    Control your own social network and no 3rd party can abuse you.
 

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