I couldnt have said it better. Get past the whining and hyperbole... but try and prove anything he said wrong.
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.
Let me tell you why clickpass fails. After seeing your comment about clickpass, I decided to go try it. So I went there and the initial frontpage pitch was really nice. So I clicked on my google account. It showed me my different google accounts. Nice. I clicked next, and then it asked me if it should be allowed to access contacts. Hella NO! Why should I give clickpass access to my google contacts. So I figured I'd still be able to login without that. Umm, no, it tells me the process failed.
This is the fault of google, but what can clickpass do? Google gives, google takes.
Gears will win out of the sheer will of force -- a.k.a Google's war chest. Considering that it's only been in development for about a year makes calling a pipe dream premature.
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.
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.
Your headline is wrong, it's "Ted Dziuba, that guy who swears a lot while making macho comments about technology, slams x, y, and z".
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.
Oh no. Some guy at The Register was able to point out 3 new technologies that haven't seen wide adoption. The world is ending. Google is a one hit wonder. San Fransisco is just a bunch of dumb hippies. OMG.
I'm sorry (I'd love to poop on this) but this little gem:
"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."
"Good to be able to rant rant, nicer to somehow get links to even the silliest of them. His complaint about the buzz behind web development this days renders your use of "Web 2.0 engineers" an absolute absurdity (talk about having drunk the "Kool-Aid" you're complaining about). As for APIs, all developers use tools they find accessible and productive. Those they don't, they don't use. A string of social networking sites have brought in massive amounts of profits; it would be silly for the market to ignore that. However a particular Google product/service fares is always irrelevant, when considered against the bigger picture of their continuing growth and success as a business.
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.
"Like every other product Google has released since search and ads, OpenSocial has been a dud."
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.
> "Like every other product Google has released since search and ads, OpenSocial has been a dud."
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)
Because it has failed (thus far) to make a substantial impact on the way people use web apps.
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.
Am I missing something with the whole "OpenID is hard" thing? As far as I've used it, OpenID has pretty much consisted of going through a fairly normal registration with the open ID provider, getting a login name url, and then just using that at sites that support openID.
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.
This is the thing: the "yet another new account" thing isn't a problem for real users. Real users use the same damn user/pass on every site. This is terrible for their security, but it just works.
Of the minority of users who have enough accounts on web applications to care, only a small fraction have accounts they care about that are ever likely to support OpenID.
I don't think most users see this account/password thing as one of their major Internet challenges.
In all seriousness, though, what's the part that's such a stumbling block here (at least for anyone who is already computer literate enough to go through a normal user account creation)? I really fail to see why "now create an account you can use at any OpenID site" is so much of a problem compared to "create an account for this site". In my experience, the account creation is nearly the same, and the login procedure is nearly the same, so I have a hard time seeing where a problem would occur.
I don't know because I never created an open id account. The reason I never created one is because when I want to sign up, I just want to select a user name and password, not try to locate an open id.
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.
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.
The sign-in with yahoo button is a lot more accessible, but on a personal level, I am strongly against it. The internet tends to coalesce around the most widely used method, leading to one site becoming disproportionately larger than all the others.
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.
But that's the beauty of OpenID - it allows you to keep your identity with the thing that you trust.
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.
I wish you guys would see sense. OpenID is a geeks dream; conceptually, it's very difficult for normal people to grasp.
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.
Because I know clearly what one is, but I am unsure what the other one is. To me, the URL is a webpage. And it's not clear to me how a webpage is going to log me into another webpage if I am a user.
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.
Don't underestimate the average computer user. Go around random internet cafes, public libraries, etc. Talk to the "average computer user" and you'll be surprised.
You don't overestimate the average computer user. A computer user does not think in the same way you do. A user may know what copy and paste does in Microsoft WORD, but they do not see this as anything but a feature of Word. They don't think it is something that is generally applicable to all text fields. That concept is naturally unintuitive, it's something that has to be learned or discovered.
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.
IBM has had a tool for building off-line web applications for many years.
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/domino/dols.ht...
It works OK, but never really caught on even among customers who already have Lotus Domino. Seems to be a solution in search of a problem. So I'm not surprised that Google Gears uptake has been slow.
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.