Welcome Apple, seriously

Yesterday's update of iTunes added Ping, a music-focused social network. When I tried it out early in the evening, it had Facebook Connect enabled, and both imported friends from Facebook, and notified me when new ones joined. Shortly afterwards, Mark Zuckerberg joined, and shortly after that the Facebook connection was missing.
This morning, neither company is talking on the record, though Kara Swisher reports that Steve Jobs complained about 'onerous terms' from Facebook.

This naturally reminds me of the problems we had with Google Friend Connect, where Facebook's accusation of a ToS violation was never backed up by an explanation of what would not violate the terms, leading to the "Data Roach Motel" accusations at Supernova. The underlying issue is whether you should give another company veto power over your application. Last time I wrote on this, it was Apple's veto I was warning about, though at the same time Apple was trying to avoid giving Adobe veto power over their platform again.

The thing is, we have been round this cycle before, and the answer is known too - the way to interoperate with another company without having to have a business agreement with them is to use open standards, not proprietary APIs.

Apple knows this - they have helped lead development of HTML5 and WebKit, along with many other standards in the past, including podcasting and MPEG4. Facebook knows this too, and they have been strong supporters of OAuth and Activity Streams, and even of Portable Contacts, when it's them doing the importing.

Clearly it good for us as users to be able to delegate our contact lists to an existing source - this weeks launch of conference sharing site Lanyrd shows that. It's also in our interests to be able to propagate the actions of playing, liking and purchasing music, videos and anything else between sites of our choosing, so that we can share with our friends, and so we can get more useful recommendations for the future (at minimum, not suggesting things we already have).

This was the core of the discussion at the VRM Workshop last week in Boston - that we should control over who sees what about us, and I think that with these common standards we can solve both problems - the individuals get to save having to re-enter their information everywhere, and control what flows to where, and the companies get the ability to interoperate without bizdev and single source lock-in. Activity Streams (and the associated standards they build on) are our best hope for this.

Steve Jobs and the Curate's Egg

The word 'curation' has become popular recently in the tech world to describe what I call mutual media - the way, by reading many things and passing on a few of them, that we mediate the world of information for each other. As m'colleague JP Rangaswami says, "Curators add to relevance by stripping away the irrelevant and the unneeded and the shoddy."

However, there is a move to co-opt this useful term into a new form of centralised control. Sarah Rotman of Forrester defines 'curated computing' as:

A mode of computing where choice is constrained to deliver less complex, more relevant experiences.

Given Forrester's background, expect this 'curated computing' idea to be used to justify IT departments preventing corporate users from using applications they choose any day now.

At the D Conference last week, Steve Jobs embraced this term, referring to a 'curated app store'.

This definition moves the idea of curation from democratic to hierarchical - our choice becomes take it or leave it. As Jobs said

Things are packages, of emphasis. Some things are emphasised in a product, some things are not done as well in a product, some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product.

This reminds me of the classic 'Curate's Egg' cartoon:
Bishop: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones";
Curate: "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!"

When choosing what features go into Apple Products, of course Jobs gets to decide this; it is indeed a great skill. However, when offering technology platforms for others to build businesses on, this is more problematic.

While talking about Flash on the iPad, Jobs said:

A more popular developer environment was HyperCard, we were OK to axe that[...] Hypercard was huge in it's day because it was accessible to anybody

Indeed it was - many people miss it; Dale Dougherty says he wants a HyperCard for the iPad. I don't think he does.

When Steve Jobs's Apple cancelled the HyperCard in QuickTime project, all the people who had built businesses on it could do was plead with Apple, to no avail.

As Jobs himself says, we have a platform to build on for the future - it is HTML5. It's an emerging standard that is not under the control of any one company, but is built on the Web as agreement. And even Steve Jobs can't stop it.

Jobs WWDC keynote in chapters

I finished watching the WWDC Macworld Keynote from last week - here's my chapter-list version of the stream so you can skip through it to the bits you find interesting:

My overall reaction similar to what I said based on textual reports. Jobs saying that web-based applications are as good as native ones on the iPhone is a big change for him, and a sign that development really has changed. What was clearly flawed in the iPhone directory app demo was the need to write all the integration links into the site - how about Safari/iPhone natively understanding hCard and integrating it with apps, like Operator does in Firefox?

Stacks seems not to really solve the too many documents problem well - see Tim Oren's discussion of literalism and magic (Tim worked on 'Piles', the less euphoniously named version of this idea at Apple, long ago).

The dynamic DNS support integrated in 'Back to my Mac' is great idea for those not yet committed to keeping their documents in the cloud. The tension between Jobs advocating a new OS with 300 features, versus a thin client on the iPhone to the same developers was pretty clear.

Jobs saying that Safari for Windows has built-in support for both Google and Yahoo Search was not something I saw anyone pick up on.

Oh, and one more thing... the new iChat features look great, but why is there still no demo or even mention of iChat on iPhone? The main thing I use my sidekick for is AIM chatting, and if iPhone can't do that and forces chat through the procrustean constraints of SMS it's a huge missed opportunity.

Even Steve Jobs can't ignore the web

When Jobs introduced the iPhone, it was clear that the platform they could not afford to ignore was web developers - however closed the platform was, having a crippled web browser was not an option. Jobs confirmed that today by saying that the SDK for iPhone applications was Web 2.0 Internet standardsWeb 2.0 + Ajax. Jobs also announced Safari 3 for Windows, so Webkit is now a platform that runs on all computers and a lot of phones.

This is another step in the Innovators Dilemma disruption of the PC computing platform by web-based applications, where learning lessons from the web, and reusing others work are important principles.