It's started
ostatus.org
ostatus.org
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.
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?
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.
Why is making social networking distributed rather than centralized and 'silo-ed' a bad thing?
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.
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.
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[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.
You use one single web browser when you use twitter, facebook, blogging, email, buzz, and HN, don't you? You are standardizing on HTTP and HTML, but you already knew that.
I am certainly not suggesting only ever using one platform to publish. In fact I specifically mentioned 3 as a strawman that I might use (flickr+twitter+blogger). They serve different writing styles, but are not necessarily different audiences. My wife might be interested in following all 3, you might only be interested in my blog. That makes sense.
In the analogy to the internet, there are a million ways to run a website: apache, frontpage, nginx, blogger, geocities, angelfire. Yet, these websites all work in the same way at some level. I can read them all in one browser (*mostly), I can link between them, I can crawl and index them, and they all participate in the same DNS system making it easy to find them.
PS: The need to choose a title for a blog post isn't really relevant - there is nothing about blogging that requires content to have specific titles. Some specific blogging packages do of course.
Indeed. That's an excellent point. If HTTP and HTML didn't exist, we would be compelled to invent them... as we were fifteen years ago when we did invent them.
However, HTTP and HTML do exist. And all these other tools are already built on that common platform. So exactly what are we trying to further standardize? What remaining problem are we trying to solve?
Because the remaining technical barriers to publishing the same text on (e.g.) Twitter, Flickr, and Blogger are very few: A bit of login hassle (ameliorated by persistent cookies), a bit of copying and pasting. You can automate even more of these keypresses away [1], but I suspect that such efforts are approaching the point of diminishing returns. Because the ultimate bottleneck to publishing the same content on multiple platforms isn't really the time required to paste it. It's the time required to recraft the content to fit each different medium, and the (far longer) time which you must spend living in each medium's community before you learn the difference between what is locally appropriate and what is painfully tone-deaf.
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[1] See, e.g., http://www.janrain.com/.
Constraint matters, and different constraints produce different forms of media. (I'm a big fan of McLuhan on this.)
<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>
1. Write draft spec
2. Implement it (steps 1 and 2 are backwards from the usual)
3. Use implementation experience to revise the spec
4. Lock down the spec into a standard
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?