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[Source/disclaimer: I was working on a number of these markup parsing & unstructured data mining projects at Google in the 2009-2014 timeframe, and also wrote a

[Source/disclaimer: I was working on a number of these markup parsing & unstructured data mining projects at Google in the 2009-2014 timeframe, and also wrote an HTML5 parser with the cooperation of the WHATWG. I left for about 6 years during the time period when Google began to be seen as this evil goliath, but I'm back now. My views are my own and don't represent my employer.] You've got the cause & effect backwards. Google invested heavily in existing standards-based microformats (RDF, schema.org, OpenSocial, various rel= standards) before ultimately concluding that web developers cannot be trusted to get markup right, and most don't want to do it in the first place. It was only after this failure that we threw out all the markup parsing and went to machine-learning & algorithmic approaches, and then eventually to just owning a bunch of the content platforms where people write content. Customer desires - in the form of what people will actually do, not what they claim they want to do - ultimately decide the structure of a market. If a large number of competing publishers all decide they want to publish content and users divide their attention evenly among them, you get open standards, protocols, and aggregators. If users decide they all want to view the most popular content, then the dominant firms become more dominant, you get silos and walled gardens (and eventually paywalls), and power shifts from an open ecosystem to a few dominant players. Google was built on the open web and embraced the philosophy of it for longer than any other major company, but people there are very pragmatic. When it became clear that there would be a few dominant companies, the priority shifted to being one of them rather than investing in (and getting screwed by) an open ecosystem that was disappearing.

Karrot_Kream 6y ago
> You've got the cause & effect backwards. Google invested heavily in existing standards-based microformats (RDF, schema.org, OpenSocial, various rel= standards) Mm yes, much like XMPP and Google Chat/Facebook. Pay lip-service to a standard when you _don't_ own the mindshare, drive mindshare to you, then sunset the standard for your implementation when you have the mindshare. An innocent play, for sure. That said, of course Google was not a founding member of WHATWG. The reason the association is so stubbornly believed is because WHATWG's Ian Hickson went to Google. At the risk of an aside, one of my "favorite" Ian Hickson quotes goes as follows: "The Web is, and should be, driven by technical merit, not consensus. The W3C pretends otherwise, and wastes a lot of time for it. The WHATWG does not." I suspect in today's world this phrase would be out of place. But of course, this was a more innocent time. > before ultimately concluding that web developers cannot be trusted to get markup right, and most don't want to do it in the first place I think a massive conflict of interest needs to be disclosed here: ad revenue. Microdata and schema.org was a change from the original promise of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web was about exposing semantic data on pages so that search engines and other data processors could compete on discovery. Microdata and schema.org took a lighter-weight approach that _specifically focused_ on fields relevant to incumbent search engines, a la Google. The legacy lives on as Microdata today is only used as a form of SEO ranking boosting. > Customer desires - in the form of what people will actually do, not what they claim they want to do - ultimately decide the structure of a market I'm going to disagree here. Customer desires dictated nothing of the sort. (From what I remember (though I was young at the time), the general public really didn't have much desire or education about the net or the web as a whole at the time.) The big web companies started to understand the value of data. Even a decade ago, the FAANG equivalents (Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, et al) were already very open internally about how much of their value was in their data or in their network. It wasn't customer desire that drove any of this, it was monetary desire. > When it became clear that there would be a few dominant companies, the priority shifted to being one of them rather than investing in (and getting screwed by) an open ecosystem that was disappearing. What a sad sentiment. I disagree. This reads like something out of Machiavelli's The Prince.

Karrot_Kream 6y ago

> You've got the cause & effect backwards. Google invested heavily in existing standards-based microformats (RDF, schema.org, OpenSocial, various rel= standards) Mm yes, much like XMPP and Google Chat/Facebook. Pay lip-service to a standard when you _don't_ own the mindshare, drive mindshare to you, then sunset the standard for your implementation when you have the mindshare. An innocent play, for sure. That said, of course Google was not a founding member of WHATWG. The reason the association is so stubbornly believed is because WHATWG's Ian Hickson went to Google. At the risk of an aside, one of my "favorite" Ian Hickson quotes goes as follows: "The Web is, and should be, driven by technical merit, not consensus. The W3C pretends otherwise, and wastes a lot of time for it. The WHATWG does not." I suspect in today's world this phrase would be out of place. But of course, this was a more innocent time. > before ultimately concluding that web developers cannot be trusted to get markup right, and most don't want to do it in the first place I think a massive conflict of interest needs to be disclosed here: ad revenue. Microdata and schema.org was a change from the original promise of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web was about exposing semantic data on pages so that search engines and other data processors could compete on discovery. Microdata and schema.org took a lighter-weight approach that _specifically focused_ on fields relevant to incumbent search engines, a la Google. The legacy lives on as Microdata today is only used as a form of SEO ranking boosting. > Customer desires - in the form of what people will actually do, not what they claim they want to do - ultimately decide the structure of a market I'm going to disagree here. Customer desires dictated nothing of the sort. (From what I remember (though I was young at the time), the general public really didn't have much desire or education about the net or the web as a whole at the time.) The big web companies started to understand the value of data. Even a decade ago, the FAANG equivalents (Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, et al) were already very open internally about how much of their value was in their data or in their network. It wasn't customer desire that drove any of this, it was monetary desire. > When it became clear that there would be a few dominant companies, the priority shifted to being one of them rather than investing in (and getting screwed by) an open ecosystem that was disappearing. What a sad sentiment. I disagree. This reads like something out of Machiavelli's The Prince.