The importance of being Vendor-Neutral

[Werner Keil]

Hi guys,

I don't know, if you heard about these new Streaming services fighting against each other:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/spotify-vs-pandora-vs-grooveshark/ 

And the interesting new aspect Facebook has added to it by blocking out Grooveshark from OAuth access via its own Identity Provider.

I haven't looked into the details, whether they prefer one of the other 2 vendors or it is a legal thing (considering, Napster founder Sean Parker was once Facebook President and still holds Billions in shares, that would be surprising;-) nor is it that important.

The important message from this is, that a vendor-neutral approach like a JSR or Agorava is crucial and can help both end users and services to avoid such lock-ins due to any strategic, political or just technical reason that may cause such a problem.

If you are standard-compliant, and reasonably interoperable, you win in Social Media!

There may be other aspects less favourable about Oracle's lawsuit against Google, but trying to avoid a proprietary lock-in by any vendor, be it IBM, Google, Facebook, Twitter or whoever is certainly worth fighting against.

Regards,

Werner

[Werner Keil]

This was announced a little while ago:

http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-just-acquired-this-startup-that-builds-a-news-digest-from-social-media-2012-1 

While some of these deals may have cooled Twitter's enthusiasm for vendor neutral approaches like JSR 357 just before the EC voted on the JSR, the fact, that a few services out there exist, make some that are not biased by vendors very vital. And allow users to either gather information from various channels or switch from one to another social provider more easily without losing everything on their timeline or having to enter such things multiple times.

[Werner Keil]

Another argument and examples from a US Government site:

http://www.apievangelist.com/2012/06/29/the-api-economy-welcomes-its-early-trade-wars/ 

You sure know, that beside what's commonly called "Social Media", Java Social and frameworks like Agorava are most importantly API connectors to various sources of important information. Another reason why some that are involved in these Trade Wars in various ways didn't like it to become a standard yet.

[Werner Keil]

Sadly this becomes imminent by the day or even hour:

http://bi.cbronline.com/news/twitter-shuts-down-its-tweet-integration-on-linkedin-020712?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GobeyoBusinessIntelligence+%28Gobeyo+Business+Intelligence+News%29 

It explains also, why Twitter turned lazy (a more drastic way to call it would be back-stabbing;-) when it came to vote on the JSR. Given interest and response of the Community towards Agorava, it probably wasn't so bad after all, but even those players calling themselves "Open" and hosting many fancy projects like Google or Twitter often end up not so open after all. 

It's certainly up to users of Agorava or DaliCore to find a proper balance and meet requirements for using it. Features like "skinning" and a custom L&F in Agorava Socializer might help avoiding confusion between a user's site and providers like Twitter to some extent.

And having an Open API that connects to multiple services is of course beneficial and allows to completely abandon a service that should turn too restrictive to its users in favour of others that are more open;-)

[Werner Keil]

Nice DZone Article on Open APIs vs. increasingly walled gardens by several vendors and services:

http://java.dzone.com/articles/api-mutiny-web-30 

I'd say, Agorava was a perfect example of such Mutiny at least on the Framework side of things, demonstrating that we didn't let those who planned to silence an open, vendor-neutral initiative like JSR-357 succeed just because the JSR itself was stopped by those who prefer Walled Gardens.

Regards,

Werner