Living vSocial

Working in a bigger world

Part of "Web 2.0" -- DON'T SHOOT ME! -- is working within an ecology of applications. My stuff has to work with your stuff, otherwise what's the point? Unfortunately, the MySpace folks seem to forget this constantly.

Their arbitrary move to Flash 9, and the implications of how they've implemented that, is horrific. They're effectively cutting the knees off of many viral applications that their users love, and love to use. In reality, the problem of why the "flash worm" worked was their inability to build a secure system. Look, folks, when you pass your authentication token around in URLs, it becomes really, REALLY easy to bend your authentication system over like a drunk co-ed. Fix your real problem, don't chop yourself out of the ecology. This is yet another in a long string of what the hell's wrong with MySpace. Instead of fixing their problems, they've begun isolating themselves into their own applications and cutting off the very freedoms that their users exploited to make them such a breakaway success. You cannot, and will not, be the end-all be-all for your users. The fact that you weren't is what made you so amazing.

SixApart's VOX is doing something similar, albeit it's upfront and from the starting line with their approach. You can only insert content that you either have on your harddrive -- which is transcoded and/or resampled on their server -- or is on a rare, few, select "approved" API vendors. I cannot simply put content from a source of my choice in. AJAX, big fonts and cool transitions do NOT Web 2.0 make. C'mon folks, inter-op and user choice is what this revolution is about, not walled gardens and forced habits. These patterns are what lead to where we're at, and we're going to do them all over again?

posted by webba @ 10:44 AM