Lookery.com

Image by davemc500hats via FlickrDuring my three conference presentations last week, I continually got questions about Open Social. “Open” in its various forms is near and dear to the German heart. Their government has done more than than any other to support open-source usage in the public sphere.

I gave somewhat lukewarm replies, which satisfied neither the questioner nor me. My innate urge is to jump up and down screaming that ‘Open will win,” which I do believe, but it will not happen quickly. Open Social is growing more quickly than FB apps these days, is becoming a significant part of Lookery’s business, etc., but it’s not on a path to dominating social apps near-term as many would hope.

Hugh MacLeod to the rescue. Via Techmeme/O’Reilly, I came across a post of Hugh’s from a couple months back. I’d missed the two updates to his post. They were intended to answer a different question, but they are the best answers to the Open Social question.

[UPDATE:] My friend James Governor, who consults in this world, left the following comment below:

Totally agree Hugh. As I said on on my blog recently: “Customers always vote with their feet, and they tend vote for something somewhat proprietary – see Salesforce APEX and iPhone apps for example. Experience always comes before open. [Ed. note: emphasis mine] Even supposed open standards dorks these days are rushing headlong into the walled garden of gorgeousness we like to call Apple Computers.”

The players you mention will continue with The Great Game, but there is room for a new entrant (The Hun In The Sun).

[UPDATE:] JP Rangaswami comments over on his blog, advocating Open Source as the antidote to Cloud Monopolies:

I have always had this sense that there is no longer any room for artificial monopolies, that the market will provide a self-correcting mechanism. But I have always been wrong on this. We can argue about why this is so, but not about the fact. Microsoft, Google and Apple are facts.

Open standards, open platforms and open source are ways to prevent this happening. Ways to guarantee that history won’t repeat itself. But this needs coherent communal action, something that is hard to achieve in emergent environments.