It's started

http://ostatus.org/2010/03/04/its-started

by evanpro • 16 years ago

40 18 16 years ago

teej• 16 years ago

Am I the only one that doesn't think this makes any sense?

Perhaps the programmer in me is dying, but this seems like a programmery thing to do. "Look at this cool new trend! Let's genericize it! Let's make a protocol for it for the whole web to use!" I understand that open standards are the backbone of the web. but as far as I'm concerned - that's where I think it ends. I'm sure there's a standardized system for how water/electricity/gas goes in & out of my house, but once it's there I get to decide what happens.

Perhaps I don't see any value in the web where this standard is pervasive. OK, so my Facebook status, Twitter tweets, and Livejournal musings are all on this fancy standard. Now what? It can be crawled better? It can be aggregated? Why do I care? I can't think of a single thing that helps me as the content producer or helps me as the consumer.

Maybe it's better that I wasn't around when things like CSS were first being specified. I can't say if I would have complained or not. But this doesn't seem like CSS being spec'd. This seems like someone taking note of Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod in 1999 and proposing a DIY website publishing specification. It seems stupid.

ewjordan• 16 years ago

I don't think the idea itself is so terrible - there are a lot of social networks that largely duplicate each others' functionality, and it would be great if newcomers to the field could link in to a meta-network so that they were actually useful without building up huge userbases first. Facebook would have a lot less lock-in if I was able to build my own social service with some set of better features and people could choose to use it instead of Facebook, yet still reach everyone they used to interact with on Facebook without them all switching, too.

But...

OK, so my Facebook status, Twitter tweets, and Livejournal musings are all on this fancy standard

...and this might help somebody, somewhere, if any of those services were actually on this fancy standard.

I don't see any evidence that they are - I only see "Google Buzz, StatusNet, WordPress.com, and Tumblr have implemented some or all of these protocols today", which is a long shot from any true unification.

Or am I missing some other large set of supported sites?

thristian• 16 years ago

I believe this "OStatus" is the revamped, revised version of the OMB (Open Micro-Blogging) spec that Status.net/Identica introduced. Identica is naturally the biggest Status.net-based site, but apparently they have intranet microblogging systems too (Motorola is one customer they brag about).

It's true that there's not many OStatus-based services around to link up yet, but similar ideas like OpenID took a while to get momentum too. I very much like the idea of a world where OStatus does for my social circle what RSS and Atom did for the websites I follow, and I wish the OStatus folk all the best in attempt to make my life better.

pyre• 16 years ago

> This seems like someone taking note of Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod in 1999 and proposing a DIY website publishing specification. It seems stupid.

Why is making social networking distributed rather than centralized and 'silo-ed' a bad thing?

wmf3• 16 years ago

You'll care right after Twitter steals your username and gives it to someone else... but by then it will be too late.

ggrot2• 16 years ago

Imagine that to read my blog, you had to first sign into your blogger account. And that to read a wikipedia article, you first had to sign into your wikipedia account. And, when you want to read your email from your AOL friends, you have to first sign into your AOL account, but to read your email from GMail friends required first signing into your GMail account. And imagine this was the case everywhere. You could even take this further and imagine that to read techcrunch, you first had to load the techcrunch browser.

To various degrees this is the current state of microblogging services (or whatever you call them). I can't read my friend's facebook updates in google reader. I can't read the boston big picture in twitter. Even if my friends wire up their accounts so that their tweets end up in facebook, my facebook replies don't appear in their twitter stream. It's a big bucket of suckage.

As a user, I don't care about how the electricity gets to my house, but I really really care that all my appliances can use that electricity, not just the ones that PG&E made. So I care that someone else cares about the how and standardizes this. As a publisher, I want to be able to pick my publishing platforms - maybe more than just one (flickr+twitter+blogger) - based on how well their features meet my style. I don't want to have to choose my platform based on where my readers might be. As a reader, I want to pick my reader application(s), like Google Reader, Bloglines, or Facebook, but only have to pick one or two and to pick them based on features and usefulness to me, not based on where the people I'm interested in reading publish their content.

Is ostatus important to this? Maybe not. Are open communication standards important? You betcha.

mechanical_fish2• 16 years ago

I don't want to have to choose my platform based on where my readers might be.

That's too bad, because if you don't target your writing style to your medium you're never going to have any readers.

You're going to produce the literary equivalent of a Java desktop application: Generic, out-of-place no matter where it goes, and slightly tone-deaf, like a sentence in a foreign language that's gone through an automated translation system.

Twitter is a social space with its own rules, traditions, and capabilities. Facebook is its own thing. Blogging is its own thing. Email is its own thing. HN comments are their own thing. Get these genres confused and you're gonna pull a Google Buzz. "Oh, I can derive a social network out of people's email address books and suddenly email will work just like Facebook!" Um, no. That's creepy and wrong, because my address book isn't my friends list, and email isn't like a Facebook status update.

These days, my own favorite writing medium appears to be the HN comment. I can't really explain why. But the style is unique: This comment wouldn't work on Twitter, chopped up into a slew of 140-character haiku. It would make a poor blog post -- it's too dependent on HN context, it doesn't stand on its own, and I'm mortally afraid to try and title it. [1] It would scarcely make an article or a book -- that would require actual thought! My Facebook friends don't care about hypothetical issues in social media design. If I wanted to email this to people, what list of recipients would I choose, and how could I be sure that I wasn't just spamming them?

Electronic media haven't diversified because we're somehow unable to figure out a standard. They've diversified because people like them that way. We like a variety of media, perhaps because the audience we find in one medium is never quite like the audience in another, and because the constraints of a particular medium help us to shape our creations.

---

[1] Perhaps my problem with blogging as a medium is that blog posts need both a headline and a body. They say that every additional field in a form halves the response rate.

When I'm in the mood to write a block of text I want to write, not waste time trying to sum up that writing with a pithy title and figuring out which tags to apply to it. The urge to be a writer is different from the urge to be a publisher or a librarian.

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

well said. this is probably the most reasonable, logical, and level headed statement ive seen on this entire topic over the past 5 years.

anthonyb• 16 years ago

It makes plenty of sense to me - currently Facebook, Twitter, etc. control all of your data. Imagine if there were one big web company which controlled all the servers, and you had to create web pages by logging into it. How much less useful would it be? Would as many programmers work on it?

<plug> I've actually started something similar as a side project, although I'm approaching it from the other end - build a system and then have some sort of spec. The idea is some sort of OpenID/OAuth setup to allow people to friend each other from different servers.

Very, very early days at the moment, so there's no code, but the manifesto is up at http://openf.oarsum.com/ </plug>

joshu2• 16 years ago

I think it is incredibly stupid to collapse practice to standard before it is ready. It calcifies and damages innovation.

wmf3• 16 years ago

How many million users counts as ready?

joshu2• 16 years ago

That's irrelevant. Are you prepared to have the format never change again? That is when you codify a standard, not before.

SandB0x• 16 years ago

Isn't there enough automatic duplication of content on the web already? I hate looking for a blog post and having to sift through a load of horrible feed powered link farms - can't wait to be spammed from yet more angles.

anatoly• 16 years ago

"Hard to believe it, but the OStatus process is underway."

Why is it hard to believe? It seems like four people from StatusNet wrote up a spec and are trying to turn it into an open standard. What was the hard to believe part?

It's started

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