

The Register slams OpenSocial, OpenID and Google Gears - "destined for the dustbin" - jwilliams
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/dziuba_anti_revolution/

======
jasonlbaptiste
I couldnt have said it better. Get past the whining and hyperbole... but try
and prove anything he said wrong.

OpenID- pipe dream. Clickpass is the only shot of making it work.

OpenSocial- Anyone actually make real live open social apps? Anyone making a
real business or gain with them? At least facebook apps were able to do that
for a good while.

Gears- Not sure why this is lobbed in there, except for the fact it isn't too
widely implemented.

~~~
alaskamiller
Gears will win out of the sheer will of force -- a.k.a Google's war chest.
Considering that it's only been in development for about a year makes calling
a pipe dream premature.

OpenSocial and Android both plays the heel to the the bigger and better
counterparts. But like all things in life, it's much better to have decent
alternative than none at all. They may not ever achieve dominant positioning
but they don't have to, no one will outright give up on them.

OpenID is just weird but god bless those folks that keep wanting to get a
crack with this.

~~~
jwilliams
My first reaction was "no - gears has been out for _ages_ "... but no, you're
totally right.

Gears + Android might be an interesting play for Google as well.
[http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/03/power-up-
you...](http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/03/power-up-your-mobile-
web-applications.html)

~~~
DougBTX
Wasn't the sell for Gears originally offline apps? And now it is supported on
a mobile phone... which has always-on internet access...

~~~
kylec
This makes it even more useful. Bandwidth on a mobile phone isn't unlimited
and it can be extremely slow loading.

------
nihilocrat
Your headline is wrong, it's "Ted Dziuba, that guy who swears a lot while
making macho comments about technology, slams x, y, and z".

That's not to say his arguments don't have merit, just take it with a grain of
salt because he's getting an article on The Register /because/ of of the
highly-critical-invective-filled-pretty-funny-to-read style. See also:
Zeropunctuation reviews of video games.

------
enomar
Oh no. Some guy at The Register was able to point out 3 new technologies that
haven't seen wide adoption. The world is ending. Google is a one hit wonder.
San Fransisco is just a bunch of dumb hippies. OMG.

~~~
josefresco
I'm sorry (I'd love to poop on this) but this little gem:

"Therefore, if you collect a bunch of Web 2.0 engineers in San Francisco, the
inevitable outcome is the OpenSocial Foundation: a nonprofit organization that
only exists to support an API for programming social network applications."

Is hilarious. +1

------
centuren
"Good to be able to rant rant, nicer to somehow get links to even the silliest
of them. His complaint about the buzz behind web development this days renders
your use of "Web 2.0 engineers" an absolute absurdity (talk about having drunk
the "Kool-Aid" you're complaining about). As for APIs, all developers use
tools they find accessible and productive. Those they don't, they don't use. A
string of social networking sites have brought in massive amounts of profits;
it would be silly for the market to ignore that. However a particular Google
product/service fares is always irrelevant, when considered against the bigger
picture of their continuing growth and success as a business.

If he's asking why we should care about OpenSocial, OpenID, and Google Gears,
he's a little too late; I don't care, not enough to find any interest in his
post beyond a fascination with it's complete separation from anything relevant
or substantial. Perhaps he'd like to complain about Google Web Toolkit next? I
suppose he may have already. In any case, good job riding the Google hype to
get hits on content so completely pointless!

Congratulations to Aaron Holesgrove for his comment also. His amusement at
watching a company, whose search and ad SOFTWARE has so utterly blown away the
competition and dominated the market, do something as bizarre as act like the
software company they've ALWAYS been, is a fantastic blend of lack of
comprehension and emotional reaction to hype.

This response was a mandatory attempt to reclaim the time lost here with a
rant of my own, only tailored to the specific absurdities at hand."

Seriously! Who keeps posting these silly little blog entries that don't say
anything? They are listed as though they contain valid content, and then are
so short and pointless that it's impossible to abort reading them before they
are over (and the stupidity is experienced).

If these somehow keep making it to the front page, I'm certainly going to
leave this site out of my routine entirely.

------
theschwa
This is about the winiest thing I've ever read with no real content.

"Unfortunately, excitement died off quickly as people remembered that they
don't really give a shit about social networks."

Really? So, those 100 million or so for facebook myspace and orkut don't
count?

~~~
unalone
They care about one social network at a time, at most.

People don't give a fuck about anything social outside of Facebook. Not most
people.

------
axod
"Like every other product Google has released since search and ads, OpenSocial
has been a dud."

This is just plain wrong. Although maybe some of the issue comes when you
compare things to search+ads. When compared against those, perhaps things look
'dud'. But taken alone they are successes.

~~~
omouse
MySpace uses OpenSocial:
[http://developer.myspace.com/Community/forums/default.aspx?G...](http://developer.myspace.com/Community/forums/default.aspx?GroupID=19)

MySpace has _how many users_ again? Even if a tiny percentage of them
interacts with OpenSocial, I would hardly call it a dud.

Also:

"There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com,
Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo,
Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING."

That is a _lot_ of users that someone can reach with an OpenSocial app. If
this is failure, I want some.

------
froo
> _"Like every other product Google has released since search and ads,
> OpenSocial has been a dud."_

Talk about one's perspective being waaaaay off.

Gmail, Reader, Maps, Chrome, Groups, News, Orkut - all of these products have
clearly been duds when you consider how profitable Google's search + ads
business has been.

Then again by that same yardstick you could say that 99.99% of online
businesses are complete duds, even though there are a lot of them out there
that are quite profitable.

Look at Orkut, when compared to a Myspace or a Facebook it is an absolute dud,
however with some perspective it is among the largest social networks in some
of the world's fastest growing economies (Brazil, India) - not a bad position
to be in whatsoever.

> _No, a revolution means that somebody gets beheaded._

Well, then if that's the case, Google's search was definitely not a
revolution. Sure it was an innovative product, but I still see Yahoo running
around with a search team and with a still sizeable chunk of the search
business (~25% isn't anything to scoff at whatsoever)

------
axod
Gears seems a very strange choice to put in here, especially now Chrome is
out.

~~~
netcan
Because it has failed (thus far) to make a substantial impact on the way
people use web apps.

How many people have it installed? How many sites have it enabled? What
apps/sites exist & are popular that wouldn't be useful/popular without gears?
What apps/sites exist that are replacing installed apps thanks to gears? For
an example to count it needs to include more people outside the top 5% of
internet users.

Personally I wouldn't call it a dud yet. It's mostly for readers, online
office apps & calendar. These are used mostly by the top 5% anyway, so it'd be
hard to take a stab outside that segment with Gears. Mail is the online app
that has penetrated, but those that need off-line mail generally have a client
installed already. It'll take time to move them since 'you don't need to
install a client' isn't an incentive if you already have one. But this is a
pretty big change they're trying to pull off. A lot of people are going to
have trouble even finding gmail without a Google search.

Like I said, I wouldn't call it a dud. I wouldn't call it a success either.
Like the post says, Chrome might bring it all together.

------
dbrush
Note that this article was written by the same guy that is behind Uncov.

------
ricree
Am I missing something with the whole "OpenID is hard" thing? As far as I've
used it, OpenID has pretty much consisted of going through a fairly normal
registration with the open ID provider, getting a login name url, and then
just using that at sites that support openID.

At most, it's been marginally more complicated than a normal ID, but it saves
me the trouble of creating yet another new account at every little site that
seems like it might be interesting to check out for a few minutes.

~~~
sachinag
This is the thing: the "yet another new account" thing isn't a problem for
real users. Real users use the same damn user/pass on every site. This is
terrible for their security, but it just works.

~~~
tptacek
Of the minority of users who have enough accounts on web applications to care,
only a small fraction have accounts they care about that are ever likely to
support OpenID.

I don't think most users see this account/password thing as one of their major
Internet challenges.

------
nradov
IBM has had a tool for building off-line web applications for many years.
[http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/domino/dols.ht...](http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/domino/dols.html)
It works OK, but never really caught on even among customers who already have
Lotus Domino. Seems to be a solution in search of a problem. So I'm not
surprised that Google Gears uptake has been slow.

------
metatronscube
Gears has huge potential. I have no idea why that's in there.

~~~
netcan
Because it hasn't reached it.

