

It's started - evanpro
http://ostatus.org/2010/03/04/its-started

======
teej
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.

~~~
ggrot
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_fish
_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.

~~~
ggrot
You and I don't disagree in the least. I never claimed as a publisher that I
didn't want to write to a specific audience, just that I didn't want to write
to a specific platform. The audience I want to reach doesn't hang out on just
one reading platform unfortunately.

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.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_You are standardizing on HTTP and HTML_

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.

\---

[1] See, e.g., <http://www.janrain.com/>.

------
SandB0x
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.

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

~~~
wmf
How many million users counts as ready?

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

~~~
wmf
I think there's room for different approaches to standardization. For example:

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

------
anatoly
"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?

