What I don't like about OpenSocial

Thursday, November 1, 2007 by Dave Winer.

It was designed by Google engineers and jammed down everyone else's throat. In a market they didn't lead and don't have a credible presence in. 

How many poison pills will there be in their protocol when the rest of us see it? And how likely is it that MySpace will have their needs addressed, and how likely that the smaller companies will be told to fuck off.  

And what if you're not a company at all? Any chance of Google caring what you might think? Clearly not at all. 

Yet they're proclaiming it as some kind of open thing. Open? You're kidding. It's a joke, right? 

I've watched Google go from the hero of the web to hiring people from Microsoft to becoming the realization of Microsoft's dream, freed from anti-trust concerns, able to dictate to everyone else how it will be. I don't go for it, and I don't think anyone else should either.  

If this goes like all major proclamations of the past, in a week or two it will be relegated to minor news articles about minor stuff that no one understands, not the techies, not the marketers, not the financiers. There will be a whole new lexicon of meaningless buzz-phrases. The users will never see a new feature as a result, or get any new power, there will be no gadgets that use it, nothing announced at CES will do anything with it (although there may be a few keynotes about it). 

Google, the hero of our past is just another wreck of the Silicon Valley dream gone sour. 

Sorry it had to turn out this way. Maybe someday the valley will get get out of its loop, but it's worse every time around. This is so much like the nightmares of the past.