Ted Dziuba On Open Social (Diseases)

OpenSocial, OpenID, and Google Gears: Three technologies for history's dustbin

If there's one thing all engineers love to do, it's create APIs. It's so awesome because you can draw on a white board and feel like you put in a good day's work, despite having solved no real, actual problems. Web 2.0 engineers, in addition to their intrinsic love of APIs, have a real hard-on for anything having to do with a social network. For example, developing a Facebook application lets them call their shitty little PHP program an "application" running on a "platform," like a real, live computer programmer does. Make-believe time is so much fun, even for adults.

This situation gets really dangerous when you start to involve people from San Francisco. Every person who lives in San Francisco has the intention of starting a nonprofit organization of some sort. Therefore, if you collect a bunch of Web 2.0 engineers in San Francisco, the inevitable outcome is the OpenSocial Foundation: a nonprofit organization that only exists to support an API for programming social network applications.

As a result of this upbringing, programming with the OpenSocial API feels a bit like being bukkaked with tolerance and understanding.