The Register slams OpenSocial, OpenID and Google Gears - "destined for the dustbin"
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
OpenID- pipe dream. Clickpass is the only shot of making it work.
OpenSocial- Anyone actually make real live open social apps? Anyone making a real business or gain with them? At least facebook apps were able to do that for a good while.
Gears- Not sure why this is lobbed in there, except for the fact it isn't too widely implemented.
OpenSocial and Android both plays the heel to the the bigger and better counterparts. But like all things in life, it's much better to have decent alternative than none at all. They may not ever achieve dominant positioning but they don't have to, no one will outright give up on them.
OpenID is just weird but god bless those folks that keep wanting to get a crack with this.
Gears + Android might be an interesting play for Google as well. http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/03/power-up-you...
GOOG is in an enviable position in that they experienced extreme rapid growth, amassed legions of brilliant people, and had a high margins to have billions in cash. I'm not in a rush to bet against this juggernaut and their singularity plans.
This is the fault of google, but what can clickpass do? Google gives, google takes.
That's not to say his arguments don't have merit, just take it with a grain of salt because he's getting an article on The Register /because/ of of the highly-critical-invective-filled-pretty-funny-to-read style. See also: Zeropunctuation reviews of video games.
"Therefore, if you collect a bunch of Web 2.0 engineers in San Francisco, the inevitable outcome is the OpenSocial Foundation: a nonprofit organization that only exists to support an API for programming social network applications."
Is hilarious. +1
If he's asking why we should care about OpenSocial, OpenID, and Google Gears, he's a little too late; I don't care, not enough to find any interest in his post beyond a fascination with it's complete separation from anything relevant or substantial. Perhaps he'd like to complain about Google Web Toolkit next? I suppose he may have already. In any case, good job riding the Google hype to get hits on content so completely pointless!
Congratulations to Aaron Holesgrove for his comment also. His amusement at watching a company, whose search and ad SOFTWARE has so utterly blown away the competition and dominated the market, do something as bizarre as act like the software company they've ALWAYS been, is a fantastic blend of lack of comprehension and emotional reaction to hype.
This response was a mandatory attempt to reclaim the time lost here with a rant of my own, only tailored to the specific absurdities at hand."
Seriously! Who keeps posting these silly little blog entries that don't say anything? They are listed as though they contain valid content, and then are so short and pointless that it's impossible to abort reading them before they are over (and the stupidity is experienced).
If these somehow keep making it to the front page, I'm certainly going to leave this site out of my routine entirely.
"Unfortunately, excitement died off quickly as people remembered that they don't really give a shit about social networks."
Really? So, those 100 million or so for facebook myspace and orkut don't count?
People don't give a fuck about anything social outside of Facebook. Not most people.
This is just plain wrong. Although maybe some of the issue comes when you compare things to search+ads. When compared against those, perhaps things look 'dud'. But taken alone they are successes.
MySpace has how many users again? Even if a tiny percentage of them interacts with OpenSocial, I would hardly call it a dud.
Also:
"There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING."
That is a lot of users that someone can reach with an OpenSocial app. If this is failure, I want some.
Talk about one's perspective being waaaaay off.
Gmail, Reader, Maps, Chrome, Groups, News, Orkut - all of these products have clearly been duds when you consider how profitable Google's search + ads business has been.
Then again by that same yardstick you could say that 99.99% of online businesses are complete duds, even though there are a lot of them out there that are quite profitable.
Look at Orkut, when compared to a Myspace or a Facebook it is an absolute dud, however with some perspective it is among the largest social networks in some of the world's fastest growing economies (Brazil, India) - not a bad position to be in whatsoever.
> No, a revolution means that somebody gets beheaded.
Well, then if that's the case, Google's search was definitely not a revolution. Sure it was an innovative product, but I still see Yahoo running around with a search team and with a still sizeable chunk of the search business (~25% isn't anything to scoff at whatsoever)
How many people have it installed? How many sites have it enabled? What apps/sites exist & are popular that wouldn't be useful/popular without gears? What apps/sites exist that are replacing installed apps thanks to gears? For an example to count it needs to include more people outside the top 5% of internet users.
Personally I wouldn't call it a dud yet. It's mostly for readers, online office apps & calendar. These are used mostly by the top 5% anyway, so it'd be hard to take a stab outside that segment with Gears. Mail is the online app that has penetrated, but those that need off-line mail generally have a client installed already. It'll take time to move them since 'you don't need to install a client' isn't an incentive if you already have one. But this is a pretty big change they're trying to pull off. A lot of people are going to have trouble even finding gmail without a Google search.
Like I said, I wouldn't call it a dud. I wouldn't call it a success either. Like the post says, Chrome might bring it all together.
At most, it's been marginally more complicated than a normal ID, but it saves me the trouble of creating yet another new account at every little site that seems like it might be interesting to check out for a few minutes.
OpenID is hard and pointless. It deserves to die.
Are you aware that most people using computers don't know how to copy and paste? OpenID requires copy and paste, and that kills it on arrival.
I'm technically very saavy, but open id is something I really don't want to use. It sounds complicated, it's difficult to use, it seems risky, and most importantly, it does not offer me any advantages.
It's a silly idea pushed by technologists who are out of touch with what the average person is doing with his computer.
1. For classic OpenID with subdomains, you end up typing simonw.myopenid.com instead of just simonw
2. For OpenID 2, you click the "Sign in with Yahoo!" button (assuming the site you are signing in to is targeting the mainstream and has decided to show a big shiny button instead of / in addition to the scary OpenID input field)
Option 2 is the one you should get excited about if you're interested in "most people using computers". You don't even have to call it OpenID.
So if we have this "Sign-in with yahoo" button, soon everywhere will have 3-4 sign in methods, likely to be Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and maybe Facebook. So we basically hand over everyone on the internet to these 4 gigantic cooporations? What do you think they will use all those user accounts for? Safeguard them?
If a mum uses the internet to visit her sewing website, this person should not be forced to hand over their personal information to huge companies, who live off advertising!
OpenID is a boon for big companies, and a nightmare for the openness and freedom of the web. Your login information for all sites should be personal - it should be on your physical keychain, and not owned by Yahoo or Microsoft or anyone else.
One of the future developments I'm most excited about with respect to OpenID is the ability to run your OpenID server on your mobile phone. Phones can already run web servers, and with IPv6 they'll be able to have public facing direct internet addresses. Voila, your online identity lives in your pocket.
WHY did open Id have to use a URL? What is wrong with me typing maximusklein@gmail.com into my 'openid' field, and then it authenticates at gmail.com using the unique identifier maximusklein?
What's the big difference? One is complicated as hell conceptually, and the other is very easy to understand.
People keep saying over and over again that open ID is too hard for average users, but I just don't see any evidence that this is the case.
Users don't see URLs as URLs, they see them as pages, like on a newspaper. So OpenID is based on a concept that alien to users.
I don't think most users see this account/password thing as one of their major Internet challenges.