“Openness” – A new face of the web
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There is an interesting transition happening in the world wide web and I had plans of recording my understanding and views in a blog for a long time and finally it is happening now.
The web had always been a place where people interact with it through web pages/web sites. The data was not structured and hence an application talking to it was really difficult. Search engines started interacting with these pages for their own reasons, yet the structural view of the data was not there. Web services and/or microformats started solving this problem. If you are not new to web services, you already know the importance of an application interacting with a webapp.
Big players in the game
Web services was a theory for sometime and quickly the value of it was realised and the big players started getting into the game. The whole new era of “openness” began then. Yahoo (developer.yahoo.com), Google (code.google.com), AOL (dev.aol.com), Amazon (aws.amazon.com), EBay (developer.ebay.com) started exposing a lot of useful web services. Microsoft has a strong developer community, but they are yet to have a good foot print in web services. For sometime, web services did not get the attention from business perspective and then Amazon/Ebay started proving that this approach could make a lot of money too. The game started becoming intensive then.
Openness meant more than just web services
Openness did not just mean web services and this was realized very quickly. Easy to integrate widgets, which are some HTML code and in some cases javascript, started making a lot of difference to the web. People started using these pre-built, highly customizable widgets more easily than web services. For an example, see the mybloglog widget “Recent readers” in this page. I spent less than 5 minutes to put it here.
The facebook platform made a huge impact. It brought in new dimensions to openness namely “Opening in” and “Opening out”. “Opening in” is what facebook does, you provision third party applications/content to be visible as a part of your application. “Opening out” is giving the rich set of data you have through webservices or widgets.
Authentication is a big problem
The initial web services offered include search, maps etc. These were general services and the only problem was the authentication of the application accessing it. Later, companies like Yahoo decided to provide user specific data like mail, photos(flickr) as web services. This would definitely need the user to authenticate himself and then to authenticate the application to use the data on his behalf. Yahoo used BBAuth as the protocol for such authentication. Google used AuthSub for similar authentication needs and companies like Amazon, ebay started having their own protocols.
To avoid reinventing the wheel, OAuth and OpenID came to the rescue. OpenID has been existing for sometime now. It solves the problem of Single sign-on and it is intended to solve only that problem (it marginally extends to share some user specific data like profile info through extensions). OAuth solves the problem BBAuth, AuthSub etc were solving. In fact, OAuth just picks the best out of the existing auth mechanisms and standardizes them.
“Social” and “Openness”
Social networks and related websites like facebook, myspace, youtube have created a great buzz and now we are well connected to our community (or atleast lets hope so). How did they enter the openness game? As discussed earlier, facebook entered in with “Opening in” strategy.
The retalliation by other social networks was the new standard “OpenSocial”. Google initiated the standard and has got a good support from other social networks like hi5, myspace etc. The concept was “OpenSocial” is “develop once, deploy in multiple places”. OpenSocial has now become an independent foundation backed by Google, Yahoo, Myspace.
Mashups and startup culture
Openness has facilitated mashups, which in my understanding is a cool application built by using available open services. Visit http://gallery.yahoo.com to see the mashups using Y! services (And I was one of the developers working on this product). Google, facebook, myspace have their own gallery of mashups. Openness strategy as discussed is getting a wide adoption and has opened a huge opportunity for startups. We see a lot of startups using amazon s3 services for data storage. A lot of startups have their applications in facebook and have been very successful.
And the end
Openness is catching up in mobile world as well. “Yahoo! Go 3.0″, “Android” are some efforts worth mentioning. I am not diving deep into the mobile world here. What next? Look around for more news about openness. A recent techcrunch article was found about possibility of google big table web service (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/04/source-google-to-launch-bigtable-as-web-service/). You have all the pieces open and ready to reuse including infrastructure, communications, cool services and there are more to come. Go ahead! Add value to the web (or even desktop) and of course, add value to yourself 
.
Update: Yahoo! has announced its openness strategy, read the blog here. It has received a great traction and I am proud to be a part of this exciting effort.
