88 ms·

Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol

161 points by bckmn 12y ago

bkurtz13 12y ago
So we should never create anything new, then?
- zcdziura 12y ago
  I think the author is trying to say that we should build products on top of established, open standards. Or, where applicable and within reason, we should integrate them into our product. Allows our users to more easily integrate our products into their existing workflows.
  - aikah 12y ago
    AFAIK canvas is an open standard. the OP is like someone criticizing a website that chose to use canvas over svg to display graphs,because canvas isn't accessible. It has nothing to do with using Open standards or not.
    - renekooi 12y ago
      It's not about graphs, it's about the entire app. That includes lists and paragraphs of text.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- anonymfus 12y ago
  No. You just must build your new things in such ways that your competitors can easily repeat them and your customers can easily migrate to your competitors.
  - daemonfire300 12y ago
    How does replying to a service via email, make the service easy to repeat / vulnerable to competitors? It's just an additional feature.
  - EvanAnderson 12y ago
    Your competitors are going to "repeat" you and take your Customers anyway. If lock-in is your value proposition then you have no value proposition. Using open protocols allows your Customers to do interesting things with your service that you never envisioned.
- ebbv 12y ago
  That's clearly not what the author is saying. You can easily create something new while embracing standards. You can open your app up to existing standard means of consumption like RSS, email, SMS, etc.
  - spiralpolitik 12y ago
    The problem is that you can't make (as much) money using standard means of consumption. Why would a company charge for access via a standard protocol when there is much more money to be made by walling up the garden and blasting advertisements at the inhabitants. And sadly making money is the purpose of 99% of the companies out there.
  - coldcode 12y ago
    So how do standards come about? Someone does something new. Which means it isn't a standard yet. Otherwise we would still be using 1980's technology "standards".
    - zanny 12y ago
      There are very discrete routes to standardization through the IETF, ISO, ANSI, etc - you submit proposals, get them vetted, etc. Two examples would be HLS and DASH. HLS is a draft standard of the IETF proposed by Apple, but Apple has never pursued standardization beyond that. This effectively means Apple maintains complete control of HLS and can change it however they want while still passing it off as a pseudo-standard. DASH was made by MPEG-LA, mainly to continue forcing their patent ridden nightmare video codec down everyones throats, but they got through full ISO standardization. The third wheel there would be Flash - not a standard at all, a proprietary streaming protocol that is only usable by Adobe. They have no intent to standardize, and no intent to open the tech up ever. That is the kind of vendor lock in the OP talks about. All three were "something new", but each one did something different. And when you are making a product, you could take explicit steps to document your protocols and architecture, or you could keep it all proprietary and user hostile and try to maintain maximal control of everything. Another good example is messaging. XMPP is another IETF standard, Telegram is a proprietary server with an open protocol, while Skype, iChat, Hangouts, and Whatsapp are wholly proprietary. You can implement XMPP servers or clients, and clients and servers can interoperate (assuming the server lets you, Facebook uses XMPP but their server isn't a full implementation, so you cannot add non-facebook friends in the service, for example). Telegram lets you implement clients however you want, but the protocol is designed to only work with their messaging servers, so you would have to fork the protocol to have server independence from Telegram. The others are all black box protocols nobody else can interoperate with and have no documentation.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  No, just don't be greedy and don't try to capture all the value you're creating. Using open protocols, you can let your users build stuff that you could have never imagined yourself, and guess what - that only means more users for you.
  - spiralpolitik 12y ago
    You realize any CEO that didn't capture all value that the company created would probably be sued into the ground by the shareholders for not maximizing the return on their investment ?
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      In other words, you'd be fired by idiots who don't give a damn about anything than their wallets. That's the problem with shareholders. As someone explained on HN recently, "share holding" periods are often stupidly low. Shareholders are in no way interested in long-term good of the company. So if as a CEO you end up in a situation where shareholders are forcing you to do things that are bad long-term, there were likely some stupid decisions made that gave them so much power over you. But anyway, you can't have cake and eat it too. If you care only about maximizing shareholder value, then don't lie to customers that you care about providing them value.
xyby 12y ago
From the Flipboard page: > You cannot build a 60fps scrolling list view with DOM. I simply do not believe that. I have no problems scrolling around the internet. And the examples they give (flipboard.com/@flipboard) give me no clue about what their problem with the DOM is. I find it really hard to imagine you couldn't do that in the DOM. I wonder what is going on over there.
- engendered 12y ago
  Their use model is specifically on mobile devices, and it is certainly true that many sites run absolutely abysmally on smartphones/tablets. While these devices are powerful, they're still weak compared to most of our desktop machines. Flipboard spent an enormous amount of effort making a rendering to canvas platform, humorously to allow an "open" option aside from their app (which makes the complaint about it in the submission rather perplexing). I suspect they did a lot of analysis. And the DOM is notoriously slow, one of the reasons being that it is now a catch all/everything and the sink platform that has an enormous number of modifiers -- the flexibility that we hail is also what leads to engine slowdown. We need a new, simpler layout standard that simplifies all of the various sidepaths and diversions that got built into the standard.
  - xyby 12y ago
    > I suspect they did a lot of analysis I heard the same "argument" when Facebook went from HTML to native. Personally, I never attribute to expertise what adequately can be explained by stupidity.
    - engendered 12y ago
      And they're still native. Most users find it a much better experience, and the general experience with the wrapped browser Facebook app was horrendous. I'm not quite sure what your point is. http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ After Facebook went native, LinkedIn did some "why we went with HTML5" thing...and then not long after they went native. You mentioned in another comment that you need to see a list that has troubles on your Nexus 4. I find it difficult to believe you use the web much on the device with such a claim -- I regularly use a Nexus 4, 5, 7 (2013), and I regularly encounter horrendous websites where the site is so grotesquely overloaded that scroll requests are acted on literally a second+ later. I love the web. I endlessly evangelize the web. But it has serious, profound problems that its biggest champions had to completely work around or avoid altogether.
mangecoeur 12y ago
Perhaps a bit naive - these companies that start by embracing open standards then pull back from them are just pulling a classic bait-and-switch, with a bit of freeriding off open-source efforts thrown in. They bootstrap their user base and arrive to market quickly by using tools built by others. Then once they grow and gain market and mind share, they can start closing themselves off, walling the garden. And it's just business - it's a logical step for a profit motivated organisation. You're value is in your users and your brand. So you take steps to lock in your users, prevent third parties from using your services with through open protocols (which dilutes your brand). Nearly all the current crop of (once-idealistic) companies are at it. It's really time to start learning from history that you can't depend on private, for-profit companies to act in the common good - because doing so spreads the value around, and a company wants it all for itself.
- amelius 12y ago
  Here's an idea: there should be a maximum number N of employees a company can have. This enforces companies to think about the greater good, because if you're in a company that is split because of size, you might end up in a different company. Also, a maximum on the number of employees stimulates the "modularity" of the market: large conglomerates with internal markets will not be possible anymore. I'm not sure of all the repercussions, but perhaps we can start with N at a large value, and slowly (over several decades) decrease it, and see what happens.
  - sosborn 12y ago
    How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?
    - O____________O 12y ago
      He indicated that the law would limit a company to N employees. The stated goal was to benefit the greater good, but the metric was simply a number.
randomsearch 12y ago
I think the question is - better for who? Clearly for many businesses, walled gardens, avoiding "openness", works. That might be because they use it to create an artificial moat to protect their business (arguably LinkedIn here), or because it's the best way to serve their customers (Steve Jobs' argument, not saying I agree). For customers, if the best experience is gained through a native app, then a native app makes sense from the company's point of view. This is why native apps took off in the first place, right? Just because you or I believe in open standards and information sharing doesn't mean it's better from everyone's point of view.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Native apps and open standards are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there are ways to make the data exportable both on the app side and cloud side. The reason companies tend to go for their own protocols is mostly greed. "Because why should I support RSS if I can't monetize it?". That's basically exploiting the common good without giving anything back.
  - matthewmacleod 12y ago
    I don't think it's fair to describe that as greed. The fact that a business can't monetise a service it provides is a bad thing; if Twitter for example provided access to everything over an RSS feed, the first thing you'd see would be applications that simply stripped or refused to display advertising etc. I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide.
    - bad_user 12y ago
      Huh, access to Twitter's API is one of the reasons that Twitter took off, then they started locking that down, adding restrictions meant to destroy alternative clients, because advertising. To me this is a breach of trust - i.e. the underdogs are all about openness, they're growing based on the goodwill of the early adopters, then once they get big, they forget about openness. Personally I couldn't give a damn about Twitter's need to monetize, they should have thought about that since the beginning, before promising things they couldn't deliver and growing based on the generated trust. Twitter is not alone in this, there are many other offenders, including Apple and Google. And they should really pay attention to what happened in the past, because once you piss off a significant portion of the industry, you can only go downhill from there. Companies like Microsoft can testify for that and oh look, they are the underdogs again.
dpark 12y ago
I feel like I'm missing something. We should use open standards like WhatsApp, who actually use a proprietary protocol that just seems familiar? We should avoid creating custom technologies like Flipboard, who actually embraced the open Canvas standard? Let's reminisce about SMS on Twitter in 2010 when smartphones were exploding and SMS was likely no longer the primary mode of interaction... This all makes no sense.
kcole16 12y ago
Flipboard addresses the accessibility issue in their article. While moving to canvas limits it for now, at least they are making an effort to incorporate it, which is more than can be said for most sites.
- onion2k 12y ago
  They're saying "Whooshy effects are more important than disabled people accessing our app. We'll let those people in when it doesn't impact our fancy UI." It could definitely be worse, because they could ignore accessibility completely, but that doesn't make their approach good.
  - cwyers 12y ago
    > They're saying "Whooshy effects are more important than disabled people accessing our app." It's a world of trade-offs. There are contexts where accessibility is obvious more important than most other concerns -- the IRS's web site should obviously be as accessible as possible because everybody needs to pay their taxes. On the flip side of things, the point of Flipboard IS the UI. Flipboard is all about aggregating other people's content and providing a different user interface to it. What Flipboard is doing is it is taking limited resources and trying to allocate them, and they're choosing to focus on improving the user experience for the vast majority of their users. Is that the right choice? I dunno. But I don't think condescendingly referring to their focus on user experience as "whooshy effects" adds anything to the conversation.
- txu 12y ago
  The only concern raised about the new Flipboard in the post is "accessibility" being "eschewed", but afik text in canvas tag aren't encoded proprietarily. If screen readers don't work well with canvas tag then the fix should be making more screen reader friendly than criticizing its adoption.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    It's not just the text. It's links and the overall structure of the document - the screen reader has no context for this. How does the screen reader know that what's on the canvas is a menu, and that you can tab to it and select menu items with the relevant keys?
ottoflux 12y ago
True - and hopefully you'll keep that up with your new site/app once marketers, CFOs, and investors get involved, I think that's when things start growing walls and controls. As soon as someone mentions "monetization," hopefully it's only explored as charging your users a reasonable rate for a good service.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Pretty much any time someone mentions "monetization" they mean abandoning "reasonable rate for a good service" and "tricking users into paying more for subpar service" instead". The whole talk about "monetizing" and stuff reminds me of 'dsirijus comment[0], "Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam." [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941
matthewmacleod 12y ago
I totally appreciate the point, and I think there's a certain amount of validity to it. Open standards and interfaces make it better and easier to consume data – in theory. That said, there are complexities. Monetisation is the obvious one; if you have an app or service that relies on advertising—Twitter is the obvious example—then the first thing that you'll find is an app that strips your advertising out. It also seems quite reasonable that a company like Twitter is entitled to payment by people who want to use the data they aggregate. Sure, they're not the publisher, but they do provide the infrastructure. We could hypothesise about replacing that with an open, peer-to-peer infrastructure, but nobody has done so yet.
Someone1234 12y ago
SMS isn't an open protocol. So using it as an example of "what to do" is strange in and of itself. This article falls flat because the author never defines what they mean by "open." SMS is a walled garden, it is controlled by the cellular industry in case the author missed that. Costs you actual cash money to use too (!) which might be a detriment to many.
aapierce 12y ago
I dunno, Instagram did pretty well for itself, despite being an (iPhone exclusive!) app at first. For a while, they didn't even have a web interface for viewing images, much less posting them.
antidaily 12y ago
"When I built out..." Saw that coming.
BinaryIdiot 12y ago
This is far too naive. User Experience drives everything. If your open protocol is the best thing since sliced bread but it's too complicated for the audience who should be consuming it? It will die and an application with great user experience will take its place. While I love open protocols and will use them as much as possible, at the end of the day I'm still going to do whatever it is that provides my users with the best user experience.
- liotier 12y ago
  Lack of open protocol implies that client choices will be essentially limited to what the service provider offers. This is bad user experience.
  - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
    > Lack of open protocol implies that client choices will be essentially limited to what the service provider offers. This is bad user experience. You're conflating the inability to develop for a protocol / platform for user experience. Having an open protocol can make a user experience better but it certainly doesn't have to.
    - liotier 12y ago
      I understand your point - the proprietary applications offered might be so vastly superior to any potential alternatives that would use an open protocol as to make the whole idea irrelevant. But that supposes that all user needs can be met that way, which in a resource-constrained world cannot be true: the proprietary application provider will inevitably have to prioritize some classes of users over others. Those users whose needs are not within the functional scope of the application are going to find their experience quite horrible. Only open protocols guarantee the potential for diversity that can cover provide all users with good experience - or with an experience at all...
      - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
        > But that supposes that all user needs can be met that way[...] No, it doesn't. Giving the user a good user experience does not mean it's the absolute best-end-all experience. > the proprietary application provider will inevitably have to prioritize some classes of users over others. Those users whose needs are not within the functional scope of the application are going to find their experience quite horrible. The problem you're outlining here completely applies to open source communities, standard bodies and companies (it has nothing to do with open versus proprietary protocols). Everyone has to prioritize things and certain priorities will not meet the needs of all users. I would also argue that users whose needs are not within the functional scope of an application...should look for an application that meets their needs as best as possible. Not everyone is going to have all of their needs met with anything.
walterbell 12y ago
The iOS 8 extension model could improve support for open standards. Some active iOS apps already support open standards: WebDAV: GoodReader, Notebooks (Alfons Schmid), OmniFocus, Textastic, TouchDraw, Transmit (includes extension) CalDAV: 2Do Other recommendations?
CmonDev 12y ago
"...Flipboard just announced their migration to full-canvas..." Ha-ha-ha, awesome! So it's open, but you are not practically allowed to fix inconsistencies due to compatibility (especially outside of turtle-speed committees) and you are also not allowed to do things own way? No, no. You have to use a document-oriented mark-up to create GUIs and for business logic you have to use/compile to a legacy language flawed from the day one which cannot be fixed! "Open"? Really?
jowiar 12y ago
I don't like the shot at Flipboard here. HTML was designed for marking up (hypertext) documents. It's a perfectly fine language for marking up documents. It's a terrible kludge for defining application user interfaces, as anyone who has ever built such an application can attest. What we're seeing now is a shift to JSON-over-HTTP from HTML-over-HTTP as the protocol of choice for connecting the internet, along with a whole pile of different tools for defining application user interfaces (partially because, up to now, no decent standard exists).
- vcarl 12y ago
  Not to mention that they open sourced their interface for rendering React on canvas, which is opens the door for more (smaller) companies to do the same. What they did is phenomenally friendly to the open source community.
  - spyc3r 12y ago
    Also Flipboard is no less accessible then it already was as a native application. The problems with making an app rendered in canvas can be solved (largely because they open sourced their work).
fiatjaf 12y ago
This is crazy. Every open protocol starts with a proprietary app. Also, the examples cited make no sense.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > Every open protocol starts with a proprietary app. Historically not true.
untog 12y ago
Your app might be better than an open protocol if the open protocol doesn't do what you want it to. RSS is great, until you want to add a feature that RSS doesn't include. And let's face it, if you tie your business to standards ratified by standards bodies you're going to need funding for the next ten years or however long it takes them to ratify something.
api 12y ago
People don't pay for open protocols.
- mkagenius 12y ago
  The aim should be to use protocols as a tool rather than direct source of revenue.
  - api 12y ago
    That's not what I mean. What I mean is that given two products -- one with an open protocol and one with closed -- very, very few customers will exercise a buying preference for the former.
rogerbraun 12y ago
But how do you disrupt the industry, then?
- mkagenius 12y ago
  In my opinion, disrupting an industry is more of "what you do" thing than how you do it.
freshyill 12y ago
> When Twitter was gathering steam back in 2009-10, it did so because tweeting was done via SMS and not over a proprietary interface. I don't believe this for a second. In 2009-2010, there were already a huge number of smartphones and Twitter clients out there. In fact, that time was probably better for third-party Twitter clients than today. Smartphone growth exploded in 2009-2010, so the idea that "everyone was getting a featurephone" is complete bullshit. Has anybody here ever even used Twitter via SMS? Desktop and mobile apps made Twitter. SMS was a niche thing at the very beginning. I wouldn't even bother raising the issue if he weren't trying to premise his bigger point on it. So that gets to his bigger point, which I'm not so sure about. Yeah, I can reply to Jira tickets from my email. But it's a huge pain. The replies end up with a whole bunch of email crap jammed into them, and it makes it harder to follow conversations. I usually edit other people's email responses to remove that stuff. So yes, it can be done. And maybe it's just Jira, but in this case at least, it's a much degraded experience.
- illicium 12y ago
  Don't forget about Twitter's API and liberal usage policy that made the plethora of clients and mashups possible -- I think this accelerated their growth more than anything. Their API is not so "free" now -- you need to register your app, always authenticate, and there's no public firehose access any more.
  - ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
    This is a far better point. Twitter happened along in that magical time of AJAX when everyone was willing to share their data because we all talked about how everything should be free and open. Then the social media companies realized that this was a gigantic mistake, and started to seal everything up. How could they be expected to make their billions when their services were so open that they were essentially becoming abstracted protocols for third party apps? The opportunity to sell advertising and personal data is far greater when what you have is closed. I understand why they did it; I just hate that they did. It always felt like a massive bait and switch and I'm betting that Facebook and Twitter aren't going to be the last ones that do this.
  - 12y ago
ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
First: "Open protocols power the web...RSS, SMS, plaintext-email, HTML5 - these are the easiest, fastest ways to get users into your system." Then: "Flipboard just announced their migration to full-canvas" Unless we have different understandings of what HTML5 is, I think you just invalidated your own point.

161 points by bckmn 12y ago

bkurtz13 12y ago

So we should never create anything new, then?

zcdziura 12y ago
I think the author is trying to say that we should build products on top of established, open standards. Or, where applicable and within reason, we should integrate them into our product. Allows our users to more easily integrate our products into their existing workflows.
- aikah 12y ago
  AFAIK canvas is an open standard. the OP is like someone criticizing a website that chose to use canvas over svg to display graphs,because canvas isn't accessible. It has nothing to do with using Open standards or not.
  - renekooi 12y ago
    It's not about graphs, it's about the entire app. That includes lists and paragraphs of text.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
anonymfus 12y ago
No. You just must build your new things in such ways that your competitors can easily repeat them and your customers can easily migrate to your competitors.
- daemonfire300 12y ago
  How does replying to a service via email, make the service easy to repeat / vulnerable to competitors? It's just an additional feature.
- EvanAnderson 12y ago
  Your competitors are going to "repeat" you and take your Customers anyway. If lock-in is your value proposition then you have no value proposition. Using open protocols allows your Customers to do interesting things with your service that you never envisioned.
ebbv 12y ago
That's clearly not what the author is saying. You can easily create something new while embracing standards. You can open your app up to existing standard means of consumption like RSS, email, SMS, etc.
- spiralpolitik 12y ago
  The problem is that you can't make (as much) money using standard means of consumption. Why would a company charge for access via a standard protocol when there is much more money to be made by walling up the garden and blasting advertisements at the inhabitants. And sadly making money is the purpose of 99% of the companies out there.
- coldcode 12y ago
  So how do standards come about? Someone does something new. Which means it isn't a standard yet. Otherwise we would still be using 1980's technology "standards".
  - zanny 12y ago
    There are very discrete routes to standardization through the IETF, ISO, ANSI, etc - you submit proposals, get them vetted, etc. Two examples would be HLS and DASH. HLS is a draft standard of the IETF proposed by Apple, but Apple has never pursued standardization beyond that. This effectively means Apple maintains complete control of HLS and can change it however they want while still passing it off as a pseudo-standard. DASH was made by MPEG-LA, mainly to continue forcing their patent ridden nightmare video codec down everyones throats, but they got through full ISO standardization. The third wheel there would be Flash - not a standard at all, a proprietary streaming protocol that is only usable by Adobe. They have no intent to standardize, and no intent to open the tech up ever. That is the kind of vendor lock in the OP talks about. All three were "something new", but each one did something different. And when you are making a product, you could take explicit steps to document your protocols and architecture, or you could keep it all proprietary and user hostile and try to maintain maximal control of everything. Another good example is messaging. XMPP is another IETF standard, Telegram is a proprietary server with an open protocol, while Skype, iChat, Hangouts, and Whatsapp are wholly proprietary. You can implement XMPP servers or clients, and clients and servers can interoperate (assuming the server lets you, Facebook uses XMPP but their server isn't a full implementation, so you cannot add non-facebook friends in the service, for example). Telegram lets you implement clients however you want, but the protocol is designed to only work with their messaging servers, so you would have to fork the protocol to have server independence from Telegram. The others are all black box protocols nobody else can interoperate with and have no documentation.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
No, just don't be greedy and don't try to capture all the value you're creating. Using open protocols, you can let your users build stuff that you could have never imagined yourself, and guess what - that only means more users for you.
- spiralpolitik 12y ago
  You realize any CEO that didn't capture all value that the company created would probably be sued into the ground by the shareholders for not maximizing the return on their investment ?
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    In other words, you'd be fired by idiots who don't give a damn about anything than their wallets. That's the problem with shareholders. As someone explained on HN recently, "share holding" periods are often stupidly low. Shareholders are in no way interested in long-term good of the company. So if as a CEO you end up in a situation where shareholders are forcing you to do things that are bad long-term, there were likely some stupid decisions made that gave them so much power over you. But anyway, you can't have cake and eat it too. If you care only about maximizing shareholder value, then don't lie to customers that you care about providing them value.

xyby 12y ago

From the Flipboard page: > You cannot build a 60fps scrolling list view with DOM. I simply do not believe that. I have no problems scrolling around the internet. And the examples they give (flipboard.com/@flipboard) give me no clue about what their problem with the DOM is. I find it really hard to imagine you couldn't do that in the DOM. I wonder what is going on over there.

engendered 12y ago
Their use model is specifically on mobile devices, and it is certainly true that many sites run absolutely abysmally on smartphones/tablets. While these devices are powerful, they're still weak compared to most of our desktop machines. Flipboard spent an enormous amount of effort making a rendering to canvas platform, humorously to allow an "open" option aside from their app (which makes the complaint about it in the submission rather perplexing). I suspect they did a lot of analysis. And the DOM is notoriously slow, one of the reasons being that it is now a catch all/everything and the sink platform that has an enormous number of modifiers -- the flexibility that we hail is also what leads to engine slowdown. We need a new, simpler layout standard that simplifies all of the various sidepaths and diversions that got built into the standard.
- xyby 12y ago
  > I suspect they did a lot of analysis I heard the same "argument" when Facebook went from HTML to native. Personally, I never attribute to expertise what adequately can be explained by stupidity.
  - engendered 12y ago
    And they're still native. Most users find it a much better experience, and the general experience with the wrapped browser Facebook app was horrendous. I'm not quite sure what your point is. http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ After Facebook went native, LinkedIn did some "why we went with HTML5" thing...and then not long after they went native. You mentioned in another comment that you need to see a list that has troubles on your Nexus 4. I find it difficult to believe you use the web much on the device with such a claim -- I regularly use a Nexus 4, 5, 7 (2013), and I regularly encounter horrendous websites where the site is so grotesquely overloaded that scroll requests are acted on literally a second+ later. I love the web. I endlessly evangelize the web. But it has serious, profound problems that its biggest champions had to completely work around or avoid altogether.

mangecoeur 12y ago

Perhaps a bit naive - these companies that start by embracing open standards then pull back from them are just pulling a classic bait-and-switch, with a bit of freeriding off open-source efforts thrown in. They bootstrap their user base and arrive to market quickly by using tools built by others. Then once they grow and gain market and mind share, they can start closing themselves off, walling the garden. And it's just business - it's a logical step for a profit motivated organisation. You're value is in your users and your brand. So you take steps to lock in your users, prevent third parties from using your services with through open protocols (which dilutes your brand). Nearly all the current crop of (once-idealistic) companies are at it. It's really time to start learning from history that you can't depend on private, for-profit companies to act in the common good - because doing so spreads the value around, and a company wants it all for itself.

amelius 12y ago
Here's an idea: there should be a maximum number N of employees a company can have. This enforces companies to think about the greater good, because if you're in a company that is split because of size, you might end up in a different company. Also, a maximum on the number of employees stimulates the "modularity" of the market: large conglomerates with internal markets will not be possible anymore. I'm not sure of all the repercussions, but perhaps we can start with N at a large value, and slowly (over several decades) decrease it, and see what happens.
- sosborn 12y ago
  How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?
  - O____________O 12y ago
    He indicated that the law would limit a company to N employees. The stated goal was to benefit the greater good, but the metric was simply a number.

randomsearch 12y ago

I think the question is - better for who? Clearly for many businesses, walled gardens, avoiding "openness", works. That might be because they use it to create an artificial moat to protect their business (arguably LinkedIn here), or because it's the best way to serve their customers (Steve Jobs' argument, not saying I agree). For customers, if the best experience is gained through a native app, then a native app makes sense from the company's point of view. This is why native apps took off in the first place, right? Just because you or I believe in open standards and information sharing doesn't mean it's better from everyone's point of view.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Native apps and open standards are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there are ways to make the data exportable both on the app side and cloud side. The reason companies tend to go for their own protocols is mostly greed. "Because why should I support RSS if I can't monetize it?". That's basically exploiting the common good without giving anything back.
- matthewmacleod 12y ago
  I don't think it's fair to describe that as greed. The fact that a business can't monetise a service it provides is a bad thing; if Twitter for example provided access to everything over an RSS feed, the first thing you'd see would be applications that simply stripped or refused to display advertising etc. I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide.
  - bad_user 12y ago
    Huh, access to Twitter's API is one of the reasons that Twitter took off, then they started locking that down, adding restrictions meant to destroy alternative clients, because advertising. To me this is a breach of trust - i.e. the underdogs are all about openness, they're growing based on the goodwill of the early adopters, then once they get big, they forget about openness. Personally I couldn't give a damn about Twitter's need to monetize, they should have thought about that since the beginning, before promising things they couldn't deliver and growing based on the generated trust. Twitter is not alone in this, there are many other offenders, including Apple and Google. And they should really pay attention to what happened in the past, because once you piss off a significant portion of the industry, you can only go downhill from there. Companies like Microsoft can testify for that and oh look, they are the underdogs again.

dpark 12y ago

I feel like I'm missing something. We should use open standards like WhatsApp, who actually use a proprietary protocol that just seems familiar? We should avoid creating custom technologies like Flipboard, who actually embraced the open Canvas standard? Let's reminisce about SMS on Twitter in 2010 when smartphones were exploding and SMS was likely no longer the primary mode of interaction... This all makes no sense.

kcole16 12y ago

Flipboard addresses the accessibility issue in their article. While moving to canvas limits it for now, at least they are making an effort to incorporate it, which is more than can be said for most sites.

onion2k 12y ago
They're saying "Whooshy effects are more important than disabled people accessing our app. We'll let those people in when it doesn't impact our fancy UI." It could definitely be worse, because they could ignore accessibility completely, but that doesn't make their approach good.
- cwyers 12y ago
  > They're saying "Whooshy effects are more important than disabled people accessing our app." It's a world of trade-offs. There are contexts where accessibility is obvious more important than most other concerns -- the IRS's web site should obviously be as accessible as possible because everybody needs to pay their taxes. On the flip side of things, the point of Flipboard IS the UI. Flipboard is all about aggregating other people's content and providing a different user interface to it. What Flipboard is doing is it is taking limited resources and trying to allocate them, and they're choosing to focus on improving the user experience for the vast majority of their users. Is that the right choice? I dunno. But I don't think condescendingly referring to their focus on user experience as "whooshy effects" adds anything to the conversation.
txu 12y ago
The only concern raised about the new Flipboard in the post is "accessibility" being "eschewed", but afik text in canvas tag aren't encoded proprietarily. If screen readers don't work well with canvas tag then the fix should be making more screen reader friendly than criticizing its adoption.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  It's not just the text. It's links and the overall structure of the document - the screen reader has no context for this. How does the screen reader know that what's on the canvas is a menu, and that you can tab to it and select menu items with the relevant keys?

ottoflux 12y ago

True - and hopefully you'll keep that up with your new site/app once marketers, CFOs, and investors get involved, I think that's when things start growing walls and controls. As soon as someone mentions "monetization," hopefully it's only explored as charging your users a reasonable rate for a good service.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Pretty much any time someone mentions "monetization" they mean abandoning "reasonable rate for a good service" and "tricking users into paying more for subpar service" instead". The whole talk about "monetizing" and stuff reminds me of 'dsirijus comment[0], "Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam." [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941

matthewmacleod 12y ago

I totally appreciate the point, and I think there's a certain amount of validity to it. Open standards and interfaces make it better and easier to consume data – in theory. That said, there are complexities. Monetisation is the obvious one; if you have an app or service that relies on advertising—Twitter is the obvious example—then the first thing that you'll find is an app that strips your advertising out. It also seems quite reasonable that a company like Twitter is entitled to payment by people who want to use the data they aggregate. Sure, they're not the publisher, but they do provide the infrastructure. We could hypothesise about replacing that with an open, peer-to-peer infrastructure, but nobody has done so yet.

Someone1234 12y ago

SMS isn't an open protocol. So using it as an example of "what to do" is strange in and of itself. This article falls flat because the author never defines what they mean by "open." SMS is a walled garden, it is controlled by the cellular industry in case the author missed that. Costs you actual cash money to use too (!) which might be a detriment to many.

aapierce 12y ago

I dunno, Instagram did pretty well for itself, despite being an (iPhone exclusive!) app at first. For a while, they didn't even have a web interface for viewing images, much less posting them.

antidaily 12y ago

"When I built out..." Saw that coming.

BinaryIdiot 12y ago

This is far too naive. User Experience drives everything. If your open protocol is the best thing since sliced bread but it's too complicated for the audience who should be consuming it? It will die and an application with great user experience will take its place. While I love open protocols and will use them as much as possible, at the end of the day I'm still going to do whatever it is that provides my users with the best user experience.

liotier 12y ago
Lack of open protocol implies that client choices will be essentially limited to what the service provider offers. This is bad user experience.
- BinaryIdiot 12y ago
  > Lack of open protocol implies that client choices will be essentially limited to what the service provider offers. This is bad user experience. You're conflating the inability to develop for a protocol / platform for user experience. Having an open protocol can make a user experience better but it certainly doesn't have to.
  - liotier 12y ago
    I understand your point - the proprietary applications offered might be so vastly superior to any potential alternatives that would use an open protocol as to make the whole idea irrelevant. But that supposes that all user needs can be met that way, which in a resource-constrained world cannot be true: the proprietary application provider will inevitably have to prioritize some classes of users over others. Those users whose needs are not within the functional scope of the application are going to find their experience quite horrible. Only open protocols guarantee the potential for diversity that can cover provide all users with good experience - or with an experience at all...
    - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
      > But that supposes that all user needs can be met that way[...] No, it doesn't. Giving the user a good user experience does not mean it's the absolute best-end-all experience. > the proprietary application provider will inevitably have to prioritize some classes of users over others. Those users whose needs are not within the functional scope of the application are going to find their experience quite horrible. The problem you're outlining here completely applies to open source communities, standard bodies and companies (it has nothing to do with open versus proprietary protocols). Everyone has to prioritize things and certain priorities will not meet the needs of all users. I would also argue that users whose needs are not within the functional scope of an application...should look for an application that meets their needs as best as possible. Not everyone is going to have all of their needs met with anything.

walterbell 12y ago

The iOS 8 extension model could improve support for open standards. Some active iOS apps already support open standards: WebDAV: GoodReader, Notebooks (Alfons Schmid), OmniFocus, Textastic, TouchDraw, Transmit (includes extension) CalDAV: 2Do Other recommendations?

CmonDev 12y ago

"...Flipboard just announced their migration to full-canvas..." Ha-ha-ha, awesome! So it's open, but you are not practically allowed to fix inconsistencies due to compatibility (especially outside of turtle-speed committees) and you are also not allowed to do things own way? No, no. You have to use a document-oriented mark-up to create GUIs and for business logic you have to use/compile to a legacy language flawed from the day one which cannot be fixed! "Open"? Really?

jowiar 12y ago

I don't like the shot at Flipboard here. HTML was designed for marking up (hypertext) documents. It's a perfectly fine language for marking up documents. It's a terrible kludge for defining application user interfaces, as anyone who has ever built such an application can attest. What we're seeing now is a shift to JSON-over-HTTP from HTML-over-HTTP as the protocol of choice for connecting the internet, along with a whole pile of different tools for defining application user interfaces (partially because, up to now, no decent standard exists).

vcarl 12y ago
Not to mention that they open sourced their interface for rendering React on canvas, which is opens the door for more (smaller) companies to do the same. What they did is phenomenally friendly to the open source community.
- spyc3r 12y ago
  Also Flipboard is no less accessible then it already was as a native application. The problems with making an app rendered in canvas can be solved (largely because they open sourced their work).

fiatjaf 12y ago

This is crazy. Every open protocol starts with a proprietary app. Also, the examples cited make no sense.

cbd1984 12y ago
> Every open protocol starts with a proprietary app. Historically not true.

untog 12y ago

Your app might be better than an open protocol if the open protocol doesn't do what you want it to. RSS is great, until you want to add a feature that RSS doesn't include. And let's face it, if you tie your business to standards ratified by standards bodies you're going to need funding for the next ten years or however long it takes them to ratify something.

api 12y ago

People don't pay for open protocols.

mkagenius 12y ago
The aim should be to use protocols as a tool rather than direct source of revenue.
- api 12y ago
  That's not what I mean. What I mean is that given two products -- one with an open protocol and one with closed -- very, very few customers will exercise a buying preference for the former.

rogerbraun 12y ago

But how do you disrupt the industry, then?

mkagenius 12y ago
In my opinion, disrupting an industry is more of "what you do" thing than how you do it.

freshyill 12y ago

> When Twitter was gathering steam back in 2009-10, it did so because tweeting was done via SMS and not over a proprietary interface. I don't believe this for a second. In 2009-2010, there were already a huge number of smartphones and Twitter clients out there. In fact, that time was probably better for third-party Twitter clients than today. Smartphone growth exploded in 2009-2010, so the idea that "everyone was getting a featurephone" is complete bullshit. Has anybody here ever even used Twitter via SMS? Desktop and mobile apps made Twitter. SMS was a niche thing at the very beginning. I wouldn't even bother raising the issue if he weren't trying to premise his bigger point on it. So that gets to his bigger point, which I'm not so sure about. Yeah, I can reply to Jira tickets from my email. But it's a huge pain. The replies end up with a whole bunch of email crap jammed into them, and it makes it harder to follow conversations. I usually edit other people's email responses to remove that stuff. So yes, it can be done. And maybe it's just Jira, but in this case at least, it's a much degraded experience.

illicium 12y ago
Don't forget about Twitter's API and liberal usage policy that made the plethora of clients and mashups possible -- I think this accelerated their growth more than anything. Their API is not so "free" now -- you need to register your app, always authenticate, and there's no public firehose access any more.
- ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
  This is a far better point. Twitter happened along in that magical time of AJAX when everyone was willing to share their data because we all talked about how everything should be free and open. Then the social media companies realized that this was a gigantic mistake, and started to seal everything up. How could they be expected to make their billions when their services were so open that they were essentially becoming abstracted protocols for third party apps? The opportunity to sell advertising and personal data is far greater when what you have is closed. I understand why they did it; I just hate that they did. It always felt like a massive bait and switch and I'm betting that Facebook and Twitter aren't going to be the last ones that do this.
- 12y ago

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago

First: "Open protocols power the web...RSS, SMS, plaintext-email, HTML5 - these are the easiest, fastest ways to get users into your system." Then: "Flipboard just announced their migration to full-canvas" Unless we have different understandings of what HTML5 is, I think you just invalidated your own point.