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Masked Intentions Blog by mikevizard

A discussion of the underlying trends driving the news events of the day

Posts: 44 | Created on April 10, 2007 |  

Break Down the Garden Walls

By mikevizard in Masked Intentions on Friday, February 01, 2008 7:12 AM  
Tags: application development cio web | Post a Comment

No matter how pretty, nobody really wants to live in a walled garden. And yet, on the Web that’s what we all do when we visit sites like Yahoo, Facebook, AOL and all the rest. What people are yearning for is the ability to move seamlessly between all these sites because each of them offers some unique service. As a result, the ultimate Web application of the future is going to be a mashup, also known as a composite application, that allows people to seamlessly interoperate with data from all of these sources.
Unfortunately, the owners of all these sites have always thought in terms of owning the customer versus making it easier for more people to use the services on their sites. As a result, there is no standard today for importing and exporting data across these Web sites.
Microsoft, in its desperate efforts to battle Google, has now made a $44.6 billion bid to buy Yahoo. Integrating Yahoo with its existing MSN services on the Web would be a Herculean task so the best immediate course of action would be for Microsoft to create a standard way to integrate services across Yahoo and MSN. More importantly, it would give Microsoft a unique set of capabilities across its Web sites that would ultimately attract more users because the sites themselves would fundamentally be more useful.
There’s a lot of talk today about the need for data portability and OpenID 2.0 across all these Web sites, but the problem with all these initiatives is they are all mired in the industry politics of what it means to actually be open.
If the backers of these efforts really want them to succeed, they need to first create some sort of compelling application that shows users the real benefits of an open Web architecture. Once people really comprehend that their personal productivity is being limited by all these walls surrounding all our Web gardens, they will on their own accord starting taking sledge hammers to those walls as part of a mass rising of users that no short-sighted business plan is going to be able to stop.
In Microsoft’s case, this is an imperative because it will show skeptical users a clear differentiation compared to competing Web services. In the case of the rest of the Web, it’s only a matter of time before it happens so better to embrace it now than be seen resisting it later.
For more on this topic, check out http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/data_portability/feeling_social_yahoo_avails_openid_to_its_masses_1.html
For more on the rising importance of cloud computing, check out http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Management/App-Development-Head-in-the-Cloud/

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