Welcome Apple, seriously

Yesterday's update of iTunes added Ping, a music-focused social network. When I tried it out early in the evening, it had Facebook Connect enabled, and both imported friends from Facebook, and notified me when new ones joined. Shortly afterwards, Mark Zuckerberg joined, and shortly after that the Facebook connection was missing.
This morning, neither company is talking on the record, though Kara Swisher reports that Steve Jobs complained about 'onerous terms' from Facebook.

This naturally reminds me of the problems we had with Google Friend Connect, where Facebook's accusation of a ToS violation was never backed up by an explanation of what would not violate the terms, leading to the "Data Roach Motel" accusations at Supernova. The underlying issue is whether you should give another company veto power over your application. Last time I wrote on this, it was Apple's veto I was warning about, though at the same time Apple was trying to avoid giving Adobe veto power over their platform again.

The thing is, we have been round this cycle before, and the answer is known too - the way to interoperate with another company without having to have a business agreement with them is to use open standards, not proprietary APIs.

Apple knows this - they have helped lead development of HTML5 and WebKit, along with many other standards in the past, including podcasting and MPEG4. Facebook knows this too, and they have been strong supporters of OAuth and Activity Streams, and even of Portable Contacts, when it's them doing the importing.

Clearly it good for us as users to be able to delegate our contact lists to an existing source - this weeks launch of conference sharing site Lanyrd shows that. It's also in our interests to be able to propagate the actions of playing, liking and purchasing music, videos and anything else between sites of our choosing, so that we can share with our friends, and so we can get more useful recommendations for the future (at minimum, not suggesting things we already have).

This was the core of the discussion at the VRM Workshop last week in Boston - that we should control over who sees what about us, and I think that with these common standards we can solve both problems - the individuals get to save having to re-enter their information everywhere, and control what flows to where, and the companies get the ability to interoperate without bizdev and single source lock-in. Activity Streams (and the associated standards they build on) are our best hope for this.

Audio, Video, HTML5 and standards

The chaps at Mozilla, Christopher Blizzard and Robert O'Callahan reopened the HTML5 <audio> and <video> debate yesterday, with a spirited defence of their decision to support only the patent-unencumbered* Ogg format and Vorbis and Theora codecs in Firefox releases as part of their HTML5 support.

Now, I understand their motives here - back when I was at Apple, I spent a big chunk of time trying get permission to add support for Vorbis to QuickTime, but didn't manage to get it past Apple management's fears. However, all the browsers I use now claim to support HTML5 <audio> and <video>, so I thought I'd try it out. I made some simple test pages using mp3, .au and WAV files, to see how they were supported.

What I found was a bit disappointing - it seems that the way that the spec is written, you can support <audio> but no file formats or codecs at all (my Droid does this), and if you can't play the file you're not supposed to show the fallback HTML contents

This means that Firefox, Droid won't show the link to the audio file below:

though browsers that don't support <audio> at all will. Here's the markup:
<audio src="http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/dystopia.mp3" controls><a href="http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/dystopia.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"> Looking Up From Dystopia </a></audio>

However, if I use a direct link or an embedded <iframe>, Firefox will use available plugins to play the file (both Flash and QuickTime happily play mp3's). Thus using <audio> give me less compatibility with current browsers.

On phone browsers, odder things happen - iPhone gives a clickable button for the <audio>, but auto-loads an <iframe>; Droid ignroes iFrames, Palm Pre doesn't have <audio> but <iframe> behaves like the iPhone.

Smarter behaviour with declarative audio would be nice here.

*Submarine patent trolls keeping periscopes down may exist.

Open versus Closed - code and networks

I read two things this morning in praise of closed systems and fêting their future dominance, both by people who should know better. Bob Cringely praises Adobe's Flash, and predicts that AIR will take over the world because Flash can be made to run on cellphones. Clearly, this is wishful thinking on Adobe's part. There is a standard for creating user interfaces that has many orders of magnitude more developers than Flash, is installed on every computer and nearly every cellphone already, and is powerful enough that even Steve Jobs didn't dare to leave it off the iPhone, and that's HTML.

Cringely says:

Once you own the interface to every mobile device you can make those devices talk more easily to your networked applications than possibly to those from Apple, Microsoft, or Sun. As we move toward a fully mobile Internet, compliance with mobile APIs will be more important than what operating system is running on the server, which is why I believe Adobe is putting so much effort behind AIR and Flex.

"Owning" interfaces is not something that you can do when there is an existing interface that is simple, powerful and deployed on every device imaginable already. That would be HTTP - Cringely's piece starts by saying how HTML has made it beyond ubiquity to invisibility, but HTTP is so invisible he doesn't even notice that it's there (let alone TCP or UDP).

Marc Andreesson also has a good underlying point about the Valley's short attention span with regard to technologies, but he too ends up praising a closed application model, in this case Facebook's. They provide access to their users under sufferance, and clearly can't provide access to users of otehr social networking sites. For Marc to back a closed system like this when he has built his career on open ones is odd to me. Kottke puts this well:

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It's called the internet and it's more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.

Dave Winer agrees it is time to do this:

Eventually, soon I think, we'll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself.

The thing is , pace Andreesson, we have been working on building a consensus to express these connections in an open way for a few years now. We already have a way to express social networks and personal information online. We have hCard for expressing contact information and authorship, and we have XFN to express social connection. Twitter, Dave's experimental platform, already supports this. Lets continue to spread it further.