2 ms·

Too often, people confuse the idea of open standards with "things that have to be implemented". If an open standard doesn't serve any significant portion of a u

Too often, people confuse the idea of open standards with "things that have to be implemented". If an open standard doesn't serve any significant portion of a user base (e.g., most Google Talk or Hangouts users) and is very commonly abused (by spammers or otherwise), it's not worth having in a product. It's simply not sensible to make a business decision to support something (open standard or otherwise) if the negative aspects far outweigh the positive ones. Where's the outrage that Twitter stopped letting users post via SMS and XMPP? Should we shame Firefox for exporting my bookmarks as HTML and not as OPML? Should I be mad at Facebook for not allowing me to export my Like information in APML format and instead providing it in Facebook Archive format? Of course not, that's silly. RDF is an open standard, but that doesn't mean websites should bring Dublin Core back.

drdaeman 12y ago
I think open standards are things to be implemented if you want to interoperate with others. Google used to do that but doesn't want interop anymore. That hurted communities that used those open standards. I guess, that's a pretty valid reason to complain. It all boils down to millennia-old issue that if business interests aren't aligned with minorities' demands, those are being ignored. Don't think this can be solved in reality. > Where's the outrage that Twitter stopped letting users post via SMS and XMPP? Lost in time. Personally, I had complained. I heard the other rant, too. I had registered for an API token and set up personal XMPP-to-Twitter gateway. And then I got bored with all this stuff and just trashed it and gave up. But, hey, is it really silly that I had complained and cursed them evil? Well, maybe it was...