Building the internet on standards…
groho from Google Wave Communities:
The second thing Google did right is build on top of the XMPP protocol. (The protocol is an XMPP extension, look it up. It runs on an XMPP server, look it up. Enough said.) This is important because in order to participate in a conversation with someone or something you need to be able to talk to it. Right now, we are in a world of walled gardens:-Myspace
Enterprise applications
Home applications
These are very proprietary systems and you certainly cannot talk between them without something translating in the middle. If you wanted to write an application that worked across Facebook and Linkedin, for example, you’d have to write it twice, and translate in the middle. And then there is still no standardized way to talk with OTHER applications. But once you can talk directly with someone or something, bypassing the proprietary gatekeepers, the value of the entire network grows exponentially with each new connection.
I strongly agree with him on these points. I am a firm believer in supporting (well thought-out) standards on the internet. It’s why I don’t support Facebook.
Standards are created to help ease the communication boundaries between competing protocols/coding languages/etc. Open source projects are there to help make the internet (and software projects) stronger and better by letting everyone contribute to the solution. Email would not be so widespread if it were not an agreed upon standard, and I believe that until we all agree on some new communication standard, we are going to face a repeating history of new social networks that grow huge and when they die, take everything created on them with them.
