• Op-Ed Columnist – The Protocol Society – NYTimes.com

  In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.

  tags: standards, economics, ip

• Open is in the eye of the beholder. (Scripting News)

  I’ve said all along, as I said with Netscape in 1994 — Twitter desperately needs competition to toughen them up and make them more responsive to market opportunities. To give them a sense of urgency they lack. But what they and we don’t need is Google and other big companies to stall the market in the name of being open. Their process is open only if you’re a BigCo, and shuts out exactly the people we want in there. The gutsy bright-eyed young entrepreneurial minds at rising stars like WordPress and Tumblr. They are ready for a standard now, not someday in the future, after a huge working group is finished with it. Not two years after that when everyone has forgotten the Open Microblogging Intitiative or whatever it ends up being called. They’re ready now, and so is the market.  

  tags: standards

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• Google Public Policy Blog: The meaning of open

  Networks have always depended on standards to flourish. When railroad tracks were first being laid across the U.S. in the early 19th century, there were seven different standards for track width. The network didn’t flourish and expand west until the different railway companies agreed upon a standard width of 4′ 8.5″. (In this case the standards war was an actual war: Southern railroads were forced to convert over 11,000 miles of track to the new standard after the Confederacy lost to the Union in the Civil War.)

  So there was some precedent in 1974 when Vint Cerf and his colleagues proposed using an open standard (which became TCP/IP) to connect the several computer networks that had emerged around the U.S. They didn’t know exactly how many networks were out there so the “Internet” — a term Vint coined — had to be open. Any network could connect using TCP/IP, and now, as a result of that decision, there are about 681 million hosts on the Internet.

  Today, we base our developer products on open standards because interoperability is a critical element of user choice. What does this mean for Google Product Managers and Engineers? Simple: whenever possible, use existing open standards. If you are venturing into an area where open standards don’t exist, create them. If existing standards aren’t as good as they should be, work to improve them and make those improvements as simple and well documented as you can. Our top priorities should always be users and the industry at large and not just the good of Google, and you should work with standards committees to make our changes part of the accepted specification.

  tags: standards

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• Hungary votes for open standards | The Open Road – CNET News

  The Open Standards Alliance proposed and lobbied for the change to Act LX of 2009 on electronic public services within Hungarian law. The goal? To “promote the spread of monopoly-free markets that foster the development of interchangeable and interoperable products,” thereby opening up the market to “broad competition.”

  tags: standards

• Open Messaging Here We Come: Tumblr Releases Twitter Client API – ReadWriteStart

  In response to today’s Tumblr announcement, RSS pioneer and blogger Dave Winer writes, “Conventional wisdom says that open standards are created by endless deliberations among experts and big tech companies, and those sometimes gain traction, but this is how it usually happens. Someone goes first. No one thinks of it as an open standard. Then someone clones it. All of a sudden people get ideas. Inspired, someone goes third. At this point it’s inevitable that there will be a fourth and fifth and so on.”

  tags: standards

• How open standards are created. (Scripting News)

  Marco at Tumblr says that he was inspired by the “seriously clever” use of the Twitter API by WordPress. Of course I was too. When they came out with it I wondered out loud if the Twitter API is now an open standard.  

  Well, less than a week later, Tumblr now has implemented the Twitter API, and as a result you can use any Twitter-compatible tool to post to and read from Tumblr. 

  tags: standards

• TomsTechBlog.com – Not Everything Needs To Be Standard

  Which brings me to my final point.  APIs aren’t file formats.  In a file format the whole point of it is to store and retrieve data so it makes sense to adhere to standards because not doing so would prevent the data from fulfilling it’s purpose (to be read).  But APIs aren’t like that.  Having a different API isn’t going to break anything.  So while developers should always look at the APIs of other companies for inspiration they shouldn’t treat successful APIs like Gospel

  tags: standards

• The Twitter API is Finished. Now What? – Anil Dash

  Twitter’s API has spawned over 50,000 applications that connect to it, taking the promise of fertile APIs we first saw with Flickr half a decade ago and bringing it to new heights. Now, the first meaningful efforts to support Twitter’s API on other services mark the maturation of the API as a de facto industry standard and herald the end of its period of rapid fundamental iteration.

  tags: standards

• Anil Dash is Wrong About Treehouse Clubs | Workbench

  I used to think that too, but after spending so many years involved with RSS, I have a better understanding of the costs that developers incur because of half-assed specs. During the 18 months in which the RSS Advisory Board drafted the RSS Best Practices Profile, we accumulated more information on how RSS has been implemented than anybody else on the planet. It’s never a good thing for a specification to be “potentially ambiguous.” If two developers disagree on what a spec means, their software will not interoperate. And once their software ships, they’ll be mad as hell if the specification is revised to make their interpretation the incorrect one.

  tags: standards

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• 3-D TV moves closer to reality — latimes.com

  The Blu-ray Disc Assn. announced it had reached agreement on the long-awaited standard that allows for full 1080p viewing of 3-D movies on TVs. Blu-ray disc players that use the standard will be delivering two images, each in full resolution, to create the effect.

  tags: standards

• WordPress and Tumblr show iPhone Tweetie and Twitterrific Not Just for Twitter Anymore | The iPhone Blog

  WordPress now lets you “Post and Read via Twitter API”, and they have a complete walkthrough posted on how to set it up.
  We’ve enabled posting to and reading of WordPress.com blogs via the Twitter API. Any app that allows you to set a custom API URL will work. This project came out of our Quebec meetup and was developed by Team 55 (Andy, Terry, and Raphael).

  tags: standards

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• EETimes.com – Demystifying the standards development process

  The process of creating a standard is only one piece of a larger life cycle that spans from prestandardization investigation and planning through post-publication activities, including testing, promotion, education and maintenance.

  tags: standards

• Q&A: Microsoft’s top lawyer on European case, future of antitrust

  tags: standards, antitrust

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• Twitter API « Support — WordPress.com

  We made our Twitter-compatible service to subscribe to blogs, whole blogs, and nothing but blogs. You can also publish updates to a blog by typing in your Twitter client. With these exciting features and themes like P2, WordPress.com is a great place for microblogging.

  tags: standards

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• Internet Society and World Wide Web Consortium Strengthen Relationship to Help Ensure Open Global Internet

  The Internet Society (ISOC) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today announced a donation from ISOC for the purpose of advancing the evolution of W3C as an organization that creates open Web standards. Citing strongly aligned views on the value of an open global Internet and support for the current Internet governance and management model, the Internet Society pledged to support W3C efforts to implement a more agile, inclusive, and flexible organizational structure.

  tags: standards

• A call for focus from the open standards community | Chris Saad – Paying Attention

  Over on the Open Web Foundation mailing list Eran Hammer-Lahav who, despite his gruff and disagreeable personality, I respect greatly for his work in the development of open standards, is effectively calling for a complete shakeup of the foundation and the efforts being poured into the ‘common ground’ of the standards efforts.

  Let me define the ‘Common Ground’ as I see it.

  tags: standards

• Open vs. open vs. open: a model for public collaboration « We’ll see | Matt Zimmerman

  In the course of my work in Canonical and Ubuntu, I hear from a lot of folks who want to start an open software project, or have started one and want to make it work better. Some of them represent companies, while others are working on a volunteer basis. It’s great to see so much interest in this area, and I’m excited to see so many projects wanting to become more open.

  tags: open, standards

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• Opening the Gates, and Unleashing Data! – MySpace Developer Team

  MySpace is a busy place. For example, our users share approximately 35 million public activities and updates per day. As a platform, we’re committed to open standards, and providing rich data, available to the world in real-time.  We’ve made many strides in exposing more data in the last couple months:

  We’ve included access to MySpace content using the latest version of the OpenSocial v0.9 standard.
  Our team developed the MySpace JSL (JavaScript Library), a lightweight library that provides the ability to write to the MySpace Stream from a web application, and retrieve social data using OpenSocial.
  In a series of API stream enhancements, we’ve exposed the ability to read and write comments. We also included semantic concepts from the activitystreams standard (among other changes). All additions are in OpenSocial-compliant extensions.
  Last week we beta launched OpenSocial 0.9 OSML and Data Pipelining, a powerful template system for defining reusable content as “custom tags” and a simple tag-based syntax for accessing data.

  tags: standards

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• Open for Business – Designing Social Interfaces – InsideRIA

  Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.

  tags: standards

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• IEBlog : An Early Look At IE9 for Developers

  Early Look At IE9 for Developers
  We’re just about a month after the Windows 7 launch, and wanted to show an early look at some of the work underway on Internet Explorer 9. 

  At the PDC today, in addition to demonstrating some of the progress on performance and interoperable standards, we showed how IE and Windows will make the power of PC hardware available to web developers in the browser. Specifically, we demonstrated hardware-accelerated rendering of all graphics and text in web pages, something that other browsers don’t do today. Web site developers will see performance gains and other benefits without having to re-write their sites.

  tags: ie, standards

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