Syndication Dragging Us Down... (a Rant)

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Syndication Dragging Us Down... (a Rant)
Tom Hoffman comments on the slow adoption of syndication. "We aren't seeing what we thought we'd be seeing: individual sites exchanging data in a wide variety of ways. We're seeing big sites that pass the data around internally very effectively and also offer their own API's, but not so much common, open standards." No, we're seeing silos. We have always known there would be silos, and always argued against them. I know, you don't have to believe me - and many don't (I just got a snark in my email for not supporting a centralized video conferencing solution). But silos are winning, right now, because most of the peer-to-peer stuff was made illegal or blocked by providers. There was a period of time when it would have seemed a lot more reasonable to bet the farm on Compuserve or GEnie or Prodigy, not against some low-tech peer to peer stuff like Fido-Net or ARPA. That was then. ARPA became the internet, and the silos became history. More...