I will try to explain in simple terms what the problem is here. Email and the web itself are based on open standards, and that's why they are so successful, so useful and have been around for decades.
What does it mean? You can use any email program to send and receive messages with people using any email program. You can use websites like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, or desktop readers like Thunderbird or Outlook. They all understand to:, cc:, bcc:, display names as opposed to actual email addresses. You can store your emails in the cloud, store them on your machine, or have a copy on both.
The same holds for the web. People make websites with (theoretically standard) HTML and JavaScript served according to the HTTP protocol, knowing that you can read it from any operating system - Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. - and any browser that honours the standard - Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc.
Chat is not perfect, but it has the XMPP standard, so you can use GAIM to talk to both Gmail users and AIM users.
Blogging and microblogging are another story. You can't use whatever blog editor you want to post to whatever blogging service you want. And you can't use whatever microblogger you want to post to whatever microblog you want, nor can you read whatever microblog you want to with whatever microblog reader you want. Most of them probably support reading by RSS and posting by email and SMS, but that's it.
(I recently contributed to the problem by buying e7kima3i.com just to post a very basic example microblogger I made with Google App Engine and the Google AJAX Transliteration API. If you want to contribute to the problem too, Google announced that Jaiku, a Finnish one acquired by Google, was open-sourced, so you can use the Jaiku Engine.)
Blogging suffers from much the same problem as microblogging. A solution for one could probably be a solution for both.
So the interesting thing to do here is not to buy Twitter, or do more content creation. That is best left to the New York Times and YouTube commenters and many, many other non-technical people. It is to push for an open standard that takes microblogging, which many of us find useful, to the next level, the level that email and websites achieved.
Something like this has been done, with some success, for the problem related to that of no communication standard, namely the problem of no authentication standard: OpenID. An OpenID requires a unique URL representing you and a trusted party - like Google, Microsoft, AOL, LiveJournal, PayPal and many others - to authenticate you, so if you have a blog, you can easily have an OpenID, which Blogger does indeed give you automagically.
OpenID
Feb 20, 2009 ... An open and decentralized identity system, designed "not to crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business".
openid.net/ - 13k - Cached - Similar pages -More results from openid.net » OpenID » How do I get an OpenID?
If you don’t have an OpenID yet, here are a few which are generally recommended by various members of the community. In the end you should choose a Provider ...
openid.net/get/ - 15k - Cached - Similar pages -OpenID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
OpenID is an open, decentralized standard for user authentication and access control, allowing users to log onto many services with the same digital ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID - 123k - Cached - Similar pages -
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen