Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web (Marc Andreessen) | Hacker News Reader

Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web (Marc Andreessen)

blog.pmarca.com

I imagine the initial rush of apps will look inconsistent.

In a few months they'll hit upon the idea of making a standard set of CSS classes that apps can use to blend into the style of the host site. Hats off to google et al if I'm wrong and tomorrow's announcement already includes CSS guidelines.

This is exciting news.

The time has come to learn javascript.

Wasn't that time last year? Or before?

You mean 1997 ;).

No way! Javascript is the language of the future! Steve Yegge said so!

On a more serious note, take a look at version 4. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72899.

You sir, have just dated yourself.

Its optional typing looks pretty ordinary. Doesn't appear to be much type inference - so its really just up to people feeling "in the mood" to do it.

How does this guy have time to run a startup and write a novella for his blog every few days?

He's Super Marc!

Anyway... read his post on procrastination... he offers some excellent advice.

It's not just procrastination. It's marketing.

OpenSocial is great news!

It's also the first step towards semantic web!

Web is changing for sure

Every time you misuse "semantic web", Berners-Lee kills a kitten.

Semantic Web as Tim Berners-Lee visions it, is not going to happen overnight and assuming Google's reaction to the whole concept very recently due to the possible vulnerability of their search is surprsing that they do take this way after all.

Applications opening their data to others through a general api is the first step towards semantic web.

So where is the misuse exactly?

I didn't describe OpenSocial as the Semantic Web. W3C XForms were beaten thanks to the workaround of AJAX applications. which are not even supported in IE7.

Obviously the Web is not commercially mature to grasp Semantic Web in its whole.

Does each container expose the same interfaces? Since each social network is implemented slightly differently, I'm guessing we'll need to modify the app for each container we're adding it to.

Yeah, especially because the "standard" allows any social network to extend the API with their own proprietary ones. This could be the IE browser compatibility nightmare all over again.

Mr. Andreessen posted an update on this article which includes some examples, http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/10/open-social-scr.html

the following quote is from this article and I believe it should answer your question

"... You'll notice in those Ask A Ninja examples that the Flixster app is not as visually integrated as in the other examples. In a real production system, the Flixster app will pick up the styles of the parent page."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com