I wanted to write about Anil’s blog post. It talks about how the web was open and favoring fluid transmissions when today, the web is getting silo’d, heavily so.
And we all know where the inspiration comes from: Apple.
Companies like Twitter, Google, Facebook and most of the startup culture love this very special capitalism that just doesn’t compromise on anything.
I saw an article on how capitalism is breaking the web but that’s not true, you can have any kind of way of doing business. You can even make money with a totally free and open source system, or simply have a fee/year like Flickr and Pinboard.
The problem is greed. People can’t stop drooling at Apple’s margin and aura. So they start by becoming super cocky (Twitter and its developers’ relationship), edgy about design (redesigns of UI/UX all over the place) mute to users (Google not answering anything on its forums) and hostile to competitors (Google blocked Windows Phones to upload to YouTube, how lame is that).
And developers followed, lost in trying to follow over-changing APIs -when they exist- or trying to be the first to emerge as “the” one product/service that does it the best, first on the platform that boosted the vertical integration scheme as “the” thing to do: Apple’s.
How to change that?
Well, developers need to use what we learned from these very popular services to build excellent experience and apps, only without the dictatorship and silo part. For example, I really wish someone was building some clients for Dave Winer’s river of news thingy, it’s too complicated to set up for now to interest anyone, even me. But you developers, be the bridges that bring great ideas to users. Let the data flow. Always. It’s not only one of the internet basic, it’s been what made computers awesome even when sharing floppy disks. An amazing freedom, and absence of scarcity.
Developers need to make awesome native apps around open data. The browser is going down, let me have great native apps on every single platform, be platform agnostic. Stop trying to make me sign up and be part of a “community” if I just want to read news, simply make great apps. Stay simple, let me handle the social. Embrace what new platforms give you and build tools to empower users.
As for people, I should probably spend more time teaching around me how to use computers (90% don’t know the ctrl+f to search a page, a majority never heard of the “” you can use in a search engine). But at the same time, people are the worst. They never really want to get a better way to do things or exploit what their computers offer. Computer literacy is low and it’s the reason people flock to tablets and closed ecosystems, not understanding what they’re losing or about to lose.