史蒂文 :: Release 2.0

Update : I was maybe a little hypercritical of what Google are doing. Don't post after a long day and a screaming 3yr old! I do still wonder though whether a Google + Community driven effort would have been a better suit. I still don't see their competitors going for this, but if they let the community go wild with it, then it may have a chance of impacting outside of just Google.

I don't believe companies can now single handedly create successful web service protocols that are to operated in a openly distributed fashion. RSS and Atom were community driven and so no-one owned them - the result is that most major companies supported them ... after most of the community had decided to long beforehand (sure, i'll glady give Microsoft as a good example as they've done great in their support after a slow start).

But now Google has GData.

My general view is that company specific protocols will nowadays find it very hard. RSS works well because no-one owned it. I find it hard to imagine Google's competitors adopting it and more likely to create something else. It will work well for Google, but as their desire is to organize information globally, how they can do that with a closed protocol is beyond me.

They also have a "Google-specific authentication system" when there are already a load of emerging protocols out there too (not to mention 8000 ways of logging on to various services as it is).

If Microsoft had done this they would be hammered in the media.

War of the syndication formats? I think this may be the start of Collaborative v Company Driven web service protocols. Expect to see a backlash from the people creating data and schema and Google, trying to control it from the centre outwards.