Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol

andjosh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 135 posts

Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol

#91

Post by O____________O »

sosborn wrote: post #36
amelius wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an idea: there should be a maximum number N of employees a company can have. This enforces companies to think about the greater good, because if you're in a company that is split because of size, you might end up in a different company. Also, a maximum on the number of employees stimulates the "modularity" of the market: large conglomerates with internal markets will not be possible anymore. I'm not sure of al…

How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?

He indicated that the law would limit a company to N employees. The stated goal was to benefit the greater good, but the metric was simply a number.

Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol

#92

Post by vertex-four »

txu wrote: post #51
kcole16 wrote: post #11

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.

The only concern raised about the new Flipboard in the post is "accessibility" being "eschewed", but afik text in canvas tag aren't encoded proprietarily. If screen readers don't work well with canvas tag then the fix should be making more screen reader friendly than criticizing its adoption.

It's not just the text. It's links and the overall structure of the document - the screen reader has no context for this. How does the screen reader know that what's on the canvas is a menu, and that you can tab to it and select menu items with the relevant keys?

Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol

#93

Post by anthony_barker »

Retric wrote: post #40
randomsearch wrote: post #9

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…

As much as the tech world loves to hate Apple, walled gardens are a huge part of why their stuff 'just works'. Suppose you want an app to play videos. If your app uses a custom format no problem. If you support an open standard, the file might not, it might require more processing power than you have, it's probably for a different screen resolution, it... In the end tech people are willing to trade stuff breaking occ…

Or a VCR that plays BETAMAX? (maybe a better analogy)

Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol

#94

Post by pdonis »

amelius wrote: post #17
mangecoeur wrote: post #6

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…

Here's an idea: there should be a maximum number N of employees a company can have. This enforces companies to think about the greater good, because if you're in a company that is split because of size, you might end up in a different company. Also, a maximum on the number of employees stimulates the "modularity" of the market: large conglomerates with internal markets will not be possible anymore. I'm not sure of al…

Does the term "economies of scale" mean anything to you?

Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol

#95

Post by freshyill »

> When Twitter was gathering steam back in 2009-10, it did so because tweeting was done via SMS and not over a proprietary interface.

I don't believe this for a second. In 2009-2010, there were already a huge number of smartphones and Twitter clients out there. In fact, that time was probably better for third-party Twitter clients than today. Smartphone growth exploded in 2009-2010, so the idea that "everyone was getting a featurephone" is complete bullshit.

Has anybody here ever even used Twitter via SMS? Desktop and mobile apps made Twitter. SMS was a niche thing at the very beginning.

I wouldn't even bother raising the issue if he weren't trying to premise his bigger point on it.

So that gets to his bigger point, which I'm not so sure about. Yeah, I can reply to Jira tickets from my email. But it's a huge pain. The replies end up with a whole bunch of email crap jammed into them, and it makes it harder to follow conversations. I usually edit other people's email responses to remove that stuff. So yes, it can be done. And maybe it's just Jira, but in this case at least, it's a much degraded experience.

Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol

#96

Post by pdonis »

O____________O wrote: post #91
sosborn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?

He indicated that the law would limit a company to N employees. The stated goal was to benefit the greater good, but the metric was simply a number.

And how do you decide what N is?

Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol

#97

Post by pdonis »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #26
TeMPOraL wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think it's fair to describe that as greed. The fact that a business can't monetise a service it provides is a bad thing; if Twitter for example provided access to everything over an RSS feed, the first thing you'd see would be applications that simply stripped or refused to display advertising etc. I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide.

> I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide.

To charge your users, no, of course not.

To charge advertisers and make your users products instead of customers, that's where the problem is.

(And part of the problem is that users have become so conditioned to getting services like Twitter and Facebook and Google for free that the idea of having to pay for those services would shock them.)

Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol

#98

Post by spyc3r »

vcarl wrote: post #83
jowiar wrote: post #76

I don't like the shot at Flipboard here. HTML was designed for marking up (hypertext) documents. It's a perfectly fine language for marking up documents. It's a terrible kludge for defining application user interfaces, as anyone who has ever built such an application can attest. What we're seeing now is a shift to JSON-over-HTTP from HTML-over-HTTP as the protocol of choice for connecting the internet, along with a w…

Not to mention that they open sourced their interface for rendering React on canvas, which is opens the door for more (smaller) companies to do the same. What they did is phenomenally friendly to the open source community.

Also Flipboard is no less accessible then it already was as a native application. The problems with making an app rendered in canvas can be solved (largely because they open sourced their work).
Post reply on HN