[Sigia-l] SIG-IA group on Facebook - do or die?

[Ziya Oz]

Patrick Grizzard:

> Although the  intent is to begin by aggregating contacts, it seems reasonable
> that  it could expand to enable portability of ratings, reviews, and other
> preference data.

Yes, I've thought about this. It comes down to essentially two paths:
federated (where you aggregate/arbitrate various walled gardens) or
standards-base (where, perhaps slowly, all/most sites replace their
proprietary formats with agreed-upon standards).

The project you cited prefers the former approach. There are inherent
dangers in that the incentives to not form walled gardens to begin with are
practically removed. If everything works smoothly and scales up, this
shouldn't be much of a problem. But federation generally gets more
complicated as the edges get more varied. And there's constant business
incentive to differentiate and that gets down to the format level sooner or
later. 

While many services can become successful based on public standards as
witnessed on the web, others become extremely successful via wall gardens
(Microsoft: Win32) or semi-wall gardens (Apple: AAC/FairPlay).

So, on the whole, how commercial companies will act in this instance remains
to be seen. I don't necessarily see the federated approach as a shoo-in.

--
Ziya

"Every problem comes from a solution."