Journal: News & Comment

Live notes: Marc Canter on open standards at Gnomedex

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It's not about being big or small, it's about being open or closed, says the very loud, very orange-shirted Marc Canter...

• How do we evolve standards, what is a standard?
• There's the "Arrington core," early adopters, then into the mainstream.
• We wouldn't be here today without RSS, for example.
• Let's try to do the same with other things.
• GYMAAF (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, AOL, Fox) need us.
• What should be standardized, what can remain private?
• Vendors need a way to differentiate.
• Derek: the starting point as a customer is to be able to move data in and out, to avoid being locked into one vendor.
• Standards often conflate nouns and verbs, when they're really different things.
• What about the newer concept of attention? What does it mean, and how do we deal with it?
• People with new ideas: are they evil or are they cool? Whether their ideals on standards match ours can be one measure.
• What should we do when we encounter closed formats?
• MySpace doesn't allow export, but people work around that?
• APIs need to be a two-way street.
• Compelling experiences to users that add experiences around the core publisher.
• People choose Amazon over Buy.com because they have a whole community around the crap they sell.
• Darren: how do you make end users care?
• Build something with open standards as the basis.
• Show how elegantly you can move stuff from another place to your place.
• So many of these web services that use humans need to recognize that their money comes from the time and attention of those people.
• It's a chess game: you need to look many moves ahead.
• Google saves money on white papers by letting all of us tell them what we think they're doing.
• Yahoo! and AOL are saying they want to be open.
• Apple is closed.
• Mirosoft swings wildly back and forth.
• The open standards bridge and connect all the small islands in between those dinosaurs.
• The bubble was about going public with one or two features.
• 37signals makes products that are a couple of features, which use APIs and standards to make archipelagos of functionality.

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