Mark Canter on open web standards
October 23rd, 2005Marc Cantor has written a good summary of current open standards projects (maybe calling them ‘movements’ might be a little more accurate) in an article titled Breaking the Web Wide Open!
His description echoes my experience, which has been that although “incumbents” (Cantor’s term) may be using new technology, they often mimic what they know. Cantor says:
For decades, “walled gardens” of proprietary standards and content have been the strategy of dominant players in mainframe computer software, wireless telecommunications services, and the World Wide Web—it was their successful lock-in strategy of keeping their customers theirs.
And:
While the incumbents use cheap open source software to run their back-ends systems, their business models largely depend on proprietary software and algorithms.
Cantor gives an excellent and concise summary of open web services technologies, and lists areas being developed:
Today’s Open APIs are complemented by standardized Schemas—the structure of the data itself and its associated meta-data. Take for example a podcasting feed. It consists of: a) the radio show itself, b) information on who is on the show, what the show is about and how long the show is (the meta-data) and also c) API calls to retrieve a show (a single feed item) and play it from a specified server.
The combination of Open APIs, standardized schemas for handling meta-data, and an industry which agrees on these standards are breaking the web wide open right now. So what new open standards should the web incumbents—and you—be watching? Keep an eye on the following developments:
Identity
Attention
Open Media
Microcontent Publishing
Open Social Networks
Tags
Pinging
Routing
Open Communications
Device Management and Control
Cantor then discusses each of these in depth. Quite interesting.