8 ms·

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

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.
  - rmc 12y ago
    > the first thing you'd see would be applications that simply stripped or refused to display advertising etc. There already are Twitter apps for phones that don't display advertising.
  - mtbcoder 12y ago
    In the past, Twitter did provide RSS feeds of your status updates.
    - alxndr 12y ago
      One of my favorite features of the RSS reader I use is that it can hook up to a Twitter list, effectively giving me back an RSS feed of tweets. (Previously I'd been scraping together Yahoo Pipes or Google App Engine based things people had made, each of which would work for about six months before something finicky would break 'em...)
  - pdonis 12y ago
    > I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide. To charge your users, no, of course not. To charge advertisers and make your users products instead of customers, that's where the problem is. (And part of the problem is that users have become so conditioned to getting services like Twitter and Facebook and Google for free that the idea of having to pay for those services would shock them.)
Retric 12y ago
As much as the tech world loves to hate Apple, walled gardens are a huge part of why their stuff 'just works'. Suppose you want an app to play videos. If your app uses a custom format no problem. If you support an open standard, the file might not, it might require more processing power than you have, it's probably for a different screen resolution, it... In the end tech people are willing to trade stuff breaking occasionally for flexibility, but most people flip out when stuff breaks. PS: I think you can break it down as do you want a VCR to show a movie to your friends, or a VCR that gives you an excuse to tinker.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I want a VCR that can play any VHS I have and that I can plug to any TV I can find - not something that plays only iCassettes on BananaCRT which is expensive and my friends don't have.
  - cwyers 12y ago
    Okay. That's what you want. Some people think that iCassettes have better picture quality and BananaCRTs have better ascetics and they find the overall user experience of iCassette players and BananaCRTs integrates together better than buying a VHS deck and a TV from different manufacturers and having to figure out how to hook up the standard but confusing connector all by yourself. Those people get to buy things too. And if the market is dominated by products that cater to their wants and not yours, maybe it's because your wants are in the minority.
  - Retric 12y ago
    Does it need to play video's from ArVid VHS tapes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid So, your happy with the VHS and don't need to play Beta tapes. PS: Sounds like your happy with a walled guarden and want something that just works. Did you get a Blueray player or a conbo that also handels HD-DVD's?
    - haubey 12y ago
      Slightly different, I think. VHS and Beta were competing formats, but you could play any VHS tape in any VHS player. That was the point the parent was making, I think.

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.
- rmc 12y ago
  > the first thing you'd see would be applications that simply stripped or refused to display advertising etc. There already are Twitter apps for phones that don't display advertising.
- mtbcoder 12y ago
  In the past, Twitter did provide RSS feeds of your status updates.
  - alxndr 12y ago
    One of my favorite features of the RSS reader I use is that it can hook up to a Twitter list, effectively giving me back an RSS feed of tweets. (Previously I'd been scraping together Yahoo Pipes or Google App Engine based things people had made, each of which would work for about six months before something finicky would break 'em...)
- pdonis 12y ago
  > I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide. To charge your users, no, of course not. To charge advertisers and make your users products instead of customers, that's where the problem is. (And part of the problem is that users have become so conditioned to getting services like Twitter and Facebook and Google for free that the idea of having to pay for those services would shock them.)

Retric 12y ago

As much as the tech world loves to hate Apple, walled gardens are a huge part of why their stuff 'just works'. Suppose you want an app to play videos. If your app uses a custom format no problem. If you support an open standard, the file might not, it might require more processing power than you have, it's probably for a different screen resolution, it... In the end tech people are willing to trade stuff breaking occasionally for flexibility, but most people flip out when stuff breaks. PS: I think you can break it down as do you want a VCR to show a movie to your friends, or a VCR that gives you an excuse to tinker.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
I want a VCR that can play any VHS I have and that I can plug to any TV I can find - not something that plays only iCassettes on BananaCRT which is expensive and my friends don't have.
- cwyers 12y ago
  Okay. That's what you want. Some people think that iCassettes have better picture quality and BananaCRTs have better ascetics and they find the overall user experience of iCassette players and BananaCRTs integrates together better than buying a VHS deck and a TV from different manufacturers and having to figure out how to hook up the standard but confusing connector all by yourself. Those people get to buy things too. And if the market is dominated by products that cater to their wants and not yours, maybe it's because your wants are in the minority.
- Retric 12y ago
  Does it need to play video's from ArVid VHS tapes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid So, your happy with the VHS and don't need to play Beta tapes. PS: Sounds like your happy with a walled guarden and want something that just works. Did you get a Blueray player or a conbo that also handels HD-DVD's?
  - haubey 12y ago
    Slightly different, I think. VHS and Beta were competing formats, but you could play any VHS tape in any VHS player. That was the point the parent was making, I think.