4 ms·

Remember Web 2.0? Remember the semantic web? Remember folksonomies? Mash-ups? The end of information silos? The democratizing power of HTTP APIs?Anyone? Anyone?

karaterobot 1y ago
I don't understand your point. Some of those things were buzzwords, some were impossible dreams, some changed the way the web works completely. Are you just saying that the future is unknown?
- klabb3 1y ago
  No. What they are saying is best said with a quote from Battlestar Galactica: > All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. ”It” here being the boom and inevitable bust of interop and open API access between products, vendors and so on. As a millenial, my flame of hope was lit during the API explosion of Web 2.0. If you’re older, your dreams were probably crushed already by something earlier. If you’re younger, and you’re genuinely excited about MCP for the potential explosion in interop, hit me up for a bulk discount on napkins.
  - bwfan123 1y ago
    And then, there are "architecture astronaut"s dreaming of an entire internet of MCP speaking devices - an "internet of agents" if you will. That is now requiring a separate DNS, SMTP, BGP etc. for that internet.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    I'm older and would like a discount please. The "this time it's different" energy is because assuming a human can interact with the system, and that vision models can drive a gui, who cares if there's an actual API, just have the AI interact with the system as if it was coming in as a human.
  - danielrico 1y ago
    I think battlestar Galactica must be quoting one of the Eddas. I've only read if it from Borges in Spanish, but Conner the same meaning: "Estas cosas han pasado. Estas cosas también pasarán."
  - Art9681 1y ago
    What's the point of stating the obvious if the obvious won't change anything? Things evolve. Winners win and losers lose. Change is constant. And? Does that somehow mean there's nothing to see here and we should move on?
    - klabb3 1y ago
      No, things can change but we programmers tend to see everything as a technical problem, and assume that if only we can find a good technical solution we can fix it. But the problem isn’t technical – the APIs were shut down because consumer tech is governed by ads, which are not part of APIs (or would be trivial to remove). You have surely noticed that APIs are alive and well in enterprise, why? Because they have customers who pay money, and API access does not generally break their revenue stream (although even there some are skittish). As mere ”users” our economic function in consumer tech is to provide data and impressions to advertisers. Thy shall not bypass their sidebar, where the ads must be seen. Nowadays the shutdown is not just of APIs but even anti-scraping, login walls, paywalls, fingerprinting, and so on and so forth. It’s a much more adversarial landscape today than during Web 2.0. When they threw copyright in the trash with the fair use loophole for AI, that obviously causes even more content lockdown panic. And in the midst of this giant data Mexican standoff, people are gonna take down their guns and see the light because of a new meta—API protocol?
- potatolicious 1y ago
  I take their point to be that the underlying incentives haven't changed. The same forces and incentives that scuttled those things are likely to scuttle this as well. I actually disagree with the OP in this sub-thread: > "No, the accident is that the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned." I don't think that's happened at all. I think some interoperability will be here to say - but those are overwhelmingly the products where interoperability was already the norm. The enterprise SaaS that your company is paying for will support their MCP servers. But they also probably already support various other plugin interfaces. And they're not doing this because of hype or new-fangledness, but because their incentives are aligned with interoperability. If their SaaS plugins into [some other thing] it increases their sales. In fact the lowering of integration effort is all upside for them. Where this is going to run into a brick wall (and I'd argue: already has to some degree) is that closed platforms that aren't incentivized to be interoperable still won't be. I don't think we've really moved the needle on that yet. Uber Eats is not champing at the bit to build the MCP server that orders your dinner. And there are a lot of really good reasons for this. In a previous job I worked on a popular voice assistant that integrated with numerous third-party services. There has always been vehement pushback to voice assistant integration (the ur-agent and to some degree still the holy grail) because it necessarily entails the service declaring near-total surrender about the user experience. An "Uber Eats MCP" is one that Uber has comparatively little control over the UX of, and has poor ability to constrain poor customer experiences. They are right to doubt this stuff. I also take some minor issue with the blog: the problem with MCP as the "everything API" is that you can't really take the "AI" part out of it. MCP tools are not guaranteed to communicate in structured formats! Instead of getting an HTTP 401 you will get a natural language string like "You cannot access this content because the author hasn't shared it with you." That's not useful without the presence of a NL-capable component in your system. It's not parseable! Also importantly, MCP inputs and outputs are intentionally not versioned nor encouraged to be stable. Devs are encouraged to alter their input and output formats to make them more accessible to LLMs. So your MCP interface can and likely will change without notice. None of this makes for good API for systems that aren't self-adaptive to that sort of thing (i.e., LLMs).
apgwoz 1y ago
I think we found a new backronym for MCP: Mashup Context Protocol. (The mashup hype was incredible, btw. Some of the most ridiculous web contraptions ever.)
- bigiain 1y ago
  And some of the most ridiculous songs. I remember (vaguely) a Bootie show at DNA Lounge back in the early 2000s that was entirely mashups. It was hilarious. Lady Gaga mashes up with Eurythmics, Coldplay and Metallica, Robert Palmer and Radiohead. (I hereby claim the name "DJ MCP"...)
kasey_junk 1y ago
Yes. Pieces of all of those things surround us now. And where we are wrt locking and interop is far beyond where we were when each of those fads happened. Mcp is a fad, it’s not long term tech. But I’m betting shoveling data at llm agents isn’t. The benefits are too high for companies to allow vendors to lock the data away from them.
- fragmede 1y ago
  I know we're all just soaked by a wave of hype right now but I think MCP will go the way of other "but it works" tech, like zip files, RSS and shell scripts.
  - baobun 1y ago
    Remember when GraphQl was making REST obsolete? This rhymes.
- overfeed 1y ago
  > Mcp is a fad, it’s not long term tech One that won't be supported by any of the big names except to suck data into their walled gardens and lock it up. We all know the playbook.
- bigiain 1y ago
  > Mcp is a fad, it’s not long term tech. But I’m betting shoveling data at llm agents isn’t. I'd bet that while "shoveling data at llm agents" might not be a fad, sometime fairly soon doing so for free while someone else's VC money picks up the planet destroying data center costs will stop being a thing. Imagine if every PHP or Ruby on Rails, or Python/Django site had started out and locked themselves into a free tier Oracle database, then one day Oracle's licensing lawyers started showing up to charge people for their WordPress blog.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
aorloff 1y ago
Nobody remembers the semantic web anymore
- walterbell 1y ago
  Palantir remembers.. https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology/overview https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology/overview
  - octopoc 1y ago
    That isn’t the same at all. Ontologies in Foundry are not defined with triplets like they are in the semantic web. Ontologies in Palantir are just a set of object types with properties, and objects of each type.
- 1dom 1y ago
  It was supposed to be Web 3.0, but then Web3 happened. In all seriousness though, I think HN has a larger-than-average amount of readers who've worked or studied around semantic web stuff.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    > It was supposed to be Web 3.0, but then Web3 happened There's a shocking overlap of GPU-slinging tech-bros hyping both. Crypto-bros turned LLM-experts out of necessity when mining crypo on their rigs became unprofitable.
thej4ck 1y ago
[dead]
overfeed 1y ago
Yahoo Pipes, XMPP, self-hosted blogs, RSS-based social networks, pingbacks; the democratized p2p web that briefly was. I bet capitalism will go 2 for 2 against the naive idealism that gatekeepers will stop gatekeeping.
- baq 1y ago
  Giving value away is unacceptable… for MBAs and VCs, anyway.

karaterobot 1y ago

I don't understand your point. Some of those things were buzzwords, some were impossible dreams, some changed the way the web works completely. Are you just saying that the future is unknown?

klabb3 1y ago
No. What they are saying is best said with a quote from Battlestar Galactica: > All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. ”It” here being the boom and inevitable bust of interop and open API access between products, vendors and so on. As a millenial, my flame of hope was lit during the API explosion of Web 2.0. If you’re older, your dreams were probably crushed already by something earlier. If you’re younger, and you’re genuinely excited about MCP for the potential explosion in interop, hit me up for a bulk discount on napkins.
- bwfan123 1y ago
  And then, there are "architecture astronaut"s dreaming of an entire internet of MCP speaking devices - an "internet of agents" if you will. That is now requiring a separate DNS, SMTP, BGP etc. for that internet.
- fragmede 1y ago
  I'm older and would like a discount please. The "this time it's different" energy is because assuming a human can interact with the system, and that vision models can drive a gui, who cares if there's an actual API, just have the AI interact with the system as if it was coming in as a human.
- danielrico 1y ago
  I think battlestar Galactica must be quoting one of the Eddas. I've only read if it from Borges in Spanish, but Conner the same meaning: "Estas cosas han pasado. Estas cosas también pasarán."
- Art9681 1y ago
  What's the point of stating the obvious if the obvious won't change anything? Things evolve. Winners win and losers lose. Change is constant. And? Does that somehow mean there's nothing to see here and we should move on?
  - klabb3 1y ago
    No, things can change but we programmers tend to see everything as a technical problem, and assume that if only we can find a good technical solution we can fix it. But the problem isn’t technical – the APIs were shut down because consumer tech is governed by ads, which are not part of APIs (or would be trivial to remove). You have surely noticed that APIs are alive and well in enterprise, why? Because they have customers who pay money, and API access does not generally break their revenue stream (although even there some are skittish). As mere ”users” our economic function in consumer tech is to provide data and impressions to advertisers. Thy shall not bypass their sidebar, where the ads must be seen. Nowadays the shutdown is not just of APIs but even anti-scraping, login walls, paywalls, fingerprinting, and so on and so forth. It’s a much more adversarial landscape today than during Web 2.0. When they threw copyright in the trash with the fair use loophole for AI, that obviously causes even more content lockdown panic. And in the midst of this giant data Mexican standoff, people are gonna take down their guns and see the light because of a new meta—API protocol?
potatolicious 1y ago
I take their point to be that the underlying incentives haven't changed. The same forces and incentives that scuttled those things are likely to scuttle this as well. I actually disagree with the OP in this sub-thread: > "No, the accident is that the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned." I don't think that's happened at all. I think some interoperability will be here to say - but those are overwhelmingly the products where interoperability was already the norm. The enterprise SaaS that your company is paying for will support their MCP servers. But they also probably already support various other plugin interfaces. And they're not doing this because of hype or new-fangledness, but because their incentives are aligned with interoperability. If their SaaS plugins into [some other thing] it increases their sales. In fact the lowering of integration effort is all upside for them. Where this is going to run into a brick wall (and I'd argue: already has to some degree) is that closed platforms that aren't incentivized to be interoperable still won't be. I don't think we've really moved the needle on that yet. Uber Eats is not champing at the bit to build the MCP server that orders your dinner. And there are a lot of really good reasons for this. In a previous job I worked on a popular voice assistant that integrated with numerous third-party services. There has always been vehement pushback to voice assistant integration (the ur-agent and to some degree still the holy grail) because it necessarily entails the service declaring near-total surrender about the user experience. An "Uber Eats MCP" is one that Uber has comparatively little control over the UX of, and has poor ability to constrain poor customer experiences. They are right to doubt this stuff. I also take some minor issue with the blog: the problem with MCP as the "everything API" is that you can't really take the "AI" part out of it. MCP tools are not guaranteed to communicate in structured formats! Instead of getting an HTTP 401 you will get a natural language string like "You cannot access this content because the author hasn't shared it with you." That's not useful without the presence of a NL-capable component in your system. It's not parseable! Also importantly, MCP inputs and outputs are intentionally not versioned nor encouraged to be stable. Devs are encouraged to alter their input and output formats to make them more accessible to LLMs. So your MCP interface can and likely will change without notice. None of this makes for good API for systems that aren't self-adaptive to that sort of thing (i.e., LLMs).

apgwoz 1y ago

I think we found a new backronym for MCP: Mashup Context Protocol. (The mashup hype was incredible, btw. Some of the most ridiculous web contraptions ever.)

bigiain 1y ago
And some of the most ridiculous songs. I remember (vaguely) a Bootie show at DNA Lounge back in the early 2000s that was entirely mashups. It was hilarious. Lady Gaga mashes up with Eurythmics, Coldplay and Metallica, Robert Palmer and Radiohead. (I hereby claim the name "DJ MCP"...)

kasey_junk 1y ago

Yes. Pieces of all of those things surround us now. And where we are wrt locking and interop is far beyond where we were when each of those fads happened. Mcp is a fad, it’s not long term tech. But I’m betting shoveling data at llm agents isn’t. The benefits are too high for companies to allow vendors to lock the data away from them.

fragmede 1y ago
I know we're all just soaked by a wave of hype right now but I think MCP will go the way of other "but it works" tech, like zip files, RSS and shell scripts.
- baobun 1y ago
  Remember when GraphQl was making REST obsolete? This rhymes.
overfeed 1y ago
> Mcp is a fad, it’s not long term tech One that won't be supported by any of the big names except to suck data into their walled gardens and lock it up. We all know the playbook.
bigiain 1y ago
> Mcp is a fad, it’s not long term tech. But I’m betting shoveling data at llm agents isn’t. I'd bet that while "shoveling data at llm agents" might not be a fad, sometime fairly soon doing so for free while someone else's VC money picks up the planet destroying data center costs will stop being a thing. Imagine if every PHP or Ruby on Rails, or Python/Django site had started out and locked themselves into a free tier Oracle database, then one day Oracle's licensing lawyers started showing up to charge people for their WordPress blog.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

aorloff 1y ago

Nobody remembers the semantic web anymore

walterbell 1y ago
Palantir remembers.. https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology/overview https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology/overview
- octopoc 1y ago
  That isn’t the same at all. Ontologies in Foundry are not defined with triplets like they are in the semantic web. Ontologies in Palantir are just a set of object types with properties, and objects of each type.
1dom 1y ago
It was supposed to be Web 3.0, but then Web3 happened. In all seriousness though, I think HN has a larger-than-average amount of readers who've worked or studied around semantic web stuff.
- overfeed 1y ago
  > It was supposed to be Web 3.0, but then Web3 happened There's a shocking overlap of GPU-slinging tech-bros hyping both. Crypto-bros turned LLM-experts out of necessity when mining crypo on their rigs became unprofitable.

thej4ck 1y ago

[dead]

overfeed 1y ago

Yahoo Pipes, XMPP, self-hosted blogs, RSS-based social networks, pingbacks; the democratized p2p web that briefly was. I bet capitalism will go 2 for 2 against the naive idealism that gatekeepers will stop gatekeeping.

baq 1y ago
Giving value away is unacceptable… for MBAs and VCs, anyway.