21–30 of 135 posts
Flipboard addresses the accessibility issue in their article. While moving to canvas limits it for now, at least they are making an effort to incorporate it, which is more than can be said for most sites.
I think the question is - better for who? Clearly for many businesses, walled gardens, avoiding "openness", works. That might be because they use it to create an artificial moat to protect their business (arguably LinkedIn here), or because it's the best way to serve their customers (Steve Jobs' argument, not saying I agree). For customers, if the best experience is gained through a native app, then a native app make…
Perhaps a bit naive - these companies that start by embracing open standards then pull back from them are just pulling a classic bait-and-switch, with a bit of freeriding off open-source efforts thrown in. They bootstrap their user base and arrive to market quickly by using tools built by others. Then once they grow and gain market and mind share, they can start closing themselves off, walling the garden. And it's ju…
That said, there are complexities. Monetisation is the obvious one; if you have an app or service that relies on advertising—Twitter is the obvious example—then the first thing that you'll find is an app that strips your advertising out.
It also seems quite reasonable that a company like Twitter is entitled to payment by people who want to use the data they aggregate. Sure, they're not the publisher, but they do provide the infrastructure. We could hypothesise about replacing that with an open, peer-to-peer infrastructure, but nobody has done so yet.
True - and hopefully you'll keep that up with your new site/app once marketers, CFOs, and investors get involved, I think that's when things start growing walls and controls. As soon as someone mentions "monetization," hopefully it's only explored as charging your users a reasonable rate for a good service.
The whole talk about "monetizing" and stuff reminds me of 'dsirijus comment[0], "Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam."
I think the question is - better for who? Clearly for many businesses, walled gardens, avoiding "openness", works. That might be because they use it to create an artificial moat to protect their business (arguably LinkedIn here), or because it's the best way to serve their customers (Steve Jobs' argument, not saying I agree). For customers, if the best experience is gained through a native app, then a native app make…
Native apps and open standards are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there are ways to make the data exportable both on the app side and cloud side. The reason companies tend to go for their own protocols is mostly greed. "Because why should I support RSS if I can't monetize it?". That's basically exploiting the common good without giving anything back.
I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide.
This article falls flat because the author never defines what they mean by "open." SMS is a walled garden, it is controlled by the cellular industry in case the author missed that. Costs you actual cash money to use too (!) which might be a detriment to many.
From the Flipboard page: > You cannot build a 60fps scrolling list view with DOM. I simply do not believe that. I have no problems scrolling around the internet. And the examples they give (flipboard.com/@flipboard) give me no clue about what their problem with the DOM is. I find it really hard to imagine you couldn't do that in the DOM. I wonder what is going on over there.
Their use model is specifically on mobile devices, and it is certainly true that many sites run absolutely abysmally on smartphones/tablets. While these devices are powerful, they're still weak compared to most of our desktop machines. Flipboard spent an enormous amount of effort making a rendering to canvas platform, humorously to allow an "open" option aside from their app (which makes the complaint about it in the…
I heard the same "argument" when Facebook went from HTML to native. Personally, I never attribute to expertise what adequately can be explained by stupidity.
So we should never create anything new, then?