Photo by Uncle Bartelby
Adina Levin wrote earlier this month (Twitter, Facebook, and the unselfish API about the differences between Twitter and Facebook not in terms of how they treat their users but in terms of how they treat external developers.
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Quick excerpt from an interview with Jeffrey Zeldman which includes some discussion of the impact of Open Source, and particularly open source CMS’s, on the process of designing and building web applications:
Although I think it’s important to draw a distinction between simple, relatively cheap licensing (the Expression Engine model) and Free and Open Source software, I generally agree that
Now, we have really powerful comparatively easy to understand, open source content management systems
And that this shift- from needing a large scale custom development project or an expensive proprietary CMS to now being able to leverage open source platforms – represents a key point in the maturity of web development.
Community minus people = empty (Photo by marilynpratt)
It suggests than an “online community” is something you build like you build: a web site, or a portal. It suggests that the community is the site itself. (It’s a strange kind of synecdoche, in which the web platform where some community interaction takes place is taken to be the actual community itself).
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Via Sandro Grogans comes an interesting interview / discussion from http://initmarketing.tv/ about the use of the phrases “open source” and “free software” and the need to tailor the message to the audience.
Bruce Perens (co-founder of the Open Source Initiative) and Shane Coughlan (from FSF Europe):
Perens essentially calls the exclusion or downplaying of Richard Stallman a critical mistake made at the point of split between the “Open Source” and “Free Software” camps. They go on to discuss what the current challenges are in terms of helping people understand the core concepts of freedom underlying both approaches.
At risk of inciting a comments flame war, are “open source” and “free software” just two different names for the same thing, as Perens argues (even if you believe one name to be better than the other)?
I’ve been looking into the Facebook Comments Box, which launched in February.
Photo by suburbanslice
It’s a perfect example of what I’m seeing as a growing trend, in which various “social widgets” actually replace functionality which should be built into the platform hosting the site. Bundling together the ability to use your Facebook identity with the actual management of comments themselves looks like progress but I think it’s really a step backwards.
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