Open source becoming less relevant
Dare Obasanjo explains why open source is losing relevancy, using a discussion on Twitter as an example. The real lock-in is not software, it’s social.
“The problem I see here is that Twitter isn’t like web servers or a blogging engine because Twitter is social software. Specifically, the value of Twitter to its users is less about its functionality and more about the fact that their friends use it. This is the same as it is for other kinds of social/communications software like Facebook or Windows Live Messenger. Features are what gets the initial users in the door but it’s the social network that keeps them there. This is a classic example of how social software is the new vendor lock-in.â€
25 April, 2007 om 12:15 pm
That the social aspect of software/services creates a vendor lock-in is old news, imho. In the Netherlands, MSN/Live Messenger is the only IM service and Hyves is the only personal social network. Enough said.
But we are only talking about services that provide connections between people, not the desktop or web applications that have a specific output. You can still use open source clients to connect to MSN, Twitter, etc. Furthermore, how could Twitter have been created without open source server software and open source web frameworks?
Similar to open and closed desktop software, I think we’ll see a struggle between open and closed social web services in the future years. Open services (which provide a web API, rss) will allow two-way traffic, and closed services only allowing one-way traffic (and even try to control that: http://press.photobucket.com/blog/2007/04/photobucket_vid.html ).