Fauxpenness

It’s the height of sum­mer and a sev­eral year old ser­vice has cap­tured the mind of main­stream media.

It has a rel­a­tively low but highly ded­i­cated audi­ence and is gar­ner­ing good press both in the blog­ging com­mu­nity and the main­stream media.

The ser­vice is suf­fer­ing from growth related issues which force it to be down at unex­pected times but users put up with it because of its sup­posed trans­for­ma­tional nature.

The ser­vice allows peo­ple to build things on top of it, offer­ing exter­nal par­ties a greater chance to gen­er­ate rev­enue than the com­pany pro­vid­ing the service.

And, estab­lish­ing fur­ther proof that ser­vice is going to be impor­tant in the future, a lot of main­stream stars are estab­lish­ing pres­ence quickly, only to slowly aban­don those points of pres­ence after a while.

But those stars are no dif­fer­ent from most of the service’s users, which tend to aban­don it only a month of two after try­ing it out.

What is that ser­vice called?

If you said Twit­ter, you are clearly read­ing this in 2009. But, only two years ago, the answer would have been Sec­ond Life (some­thing I learned first hand, hav­ing been part of the hype around it back then).

of course, I have no doubt that this post will prob­a­bly receive a high amount of flames because sup­port­ers will tell me how Twit­ter is dif­fer­ent. But is it?

The Coral Reef

I’ve always had an affin­ity for Dave Winer’s Coral Reef anal­ogy. How­ever, even the coral reef anal­ogy seems to even­tu­ally break down, leav­ing peo­ple like Winer to think of ways to move out (in a way, Winer fell into the same trap with Twit­ter as Scoble did with Friend­feed).

The issue here is that a lot of energy gets poured by devel­op­ers into sup­port­ing an ulti­mately closed sys­tem. While arti­fi­cial coral reefs exists, they are gen­er­ally part of the larger ocean and tend to be pushed into cre­ation by sink­ing boats or sub­way trains. But an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion is that the cre­ator of an arti­fi­cial reef is gen­er­ally present at the cre­ation but then lets the ecosys­tem take over and doesn’t try to con­trol anything.

In the tech field, the best anal­ogy for an arti­fi­cial coral reef would be open­ing sourc­ing an impor­tant source of code (for exam­ple, the apache web server) or mak­ing a set of pro­to­cols or ideas open to all (eg. HTML or RSS) with­out requir­ing that the imple­men­tor cede any con­trol to the party which made the code or idea avail­able. Today, you can fok the httpd server if you feel like it or you can adapt parts of HTML or RSS to your heart’s content.

Faux­pen­ness

But there’s a dif­fer­ent set of ecosys­tems out there that becomes more of a venus fly­trap of tech­nol­ogy. I would describe this as fauxpenness:

Faux­pen­ness: Call­ing a sys­tem or plat­form open while it is, when more closely scru­ti­nized, under the tight con­trol of its provider.

Faux­pen sys­tem (or faux­pen plat­form): a sys­tem or plat­form that claims to be open but, upon closer exam­i­na­tion, isn’t.

It’s the kind of approach that pre­tends to be open but pro­vides some level of lock-in.

In 2006–2007, we saw that hap­pen with Sec­ondLife, as many devel­op­ers (myself included) built soft­ware code that could run within the Sec­ondLife world but was ulti­mately stuck there because you could not run it out­side that world and/or run Sec­ondLife servers on your own machines.

in 2007–2008, we saw that hap­pen with the F8 Face­book plat­form, which locks your appli­ca­tions inside of Face­book and, while many devel­op­ers have pushed to force the com­pany to open up, tends to stay there. In 2007-today, we’re see­ing the same thing with Twit­ter, which allows you to build what­ever you want on top of it but doesn’t decen­tral­ize their approach, leav­ing devel­op­ers poten­tial slaves to the whims of the com­pany. The same is true of the iPhone, which pro­vides unusual access to the phone oper­at­ing sys­tem and allows to develop inter­est­ing soft­ware on top of it but still keep devel­op­ers away from being able to access basic things like cal­en­dar infor­ma­tion via an SDK.

The end­less cycle

Inter­est­ingly enough, it’s not an unusual phe­nom­e­non in the tech­nol­ogy world. It works like this:

It hap­pened with Sec­ondLife; it hap­pened with F8; it will hap­pen with Twit­ter and it will hap­pen with the iPhone at some point. It appears that the nat­ural course of locked API is to get to a point where the devel­op­ers get so annoyed that they decide to go look some­where else.

But there’s hope.

Break­ing Free of Fauxpenness

Because of the lock-in, it is pos­si­ble for com­pa­nies to break free of the cycle. In order to do so, two things need to happen:

• First, the com­pany needs to find a way to estab­lish a busi­ness model that does not require lock-in
• Then, the com­pany needs to start remov­ing the lock-in com­po­nents it offers.

I’m not say­ing that either of those step is an easy one. In fact, few com­pa­nies have suc­cess­fully man­aged them and, even when they do, the devel­oper com­mu­nity will keep ask­ing for more.

For exam­ple, Microsoft’s his­tory is one of estab­lish­ing ini­tial lock-ins, weed­ing out the com­pe­ti­tion and, when its lead is estab­lished enough, relax­ing the choke-hold it has on the devel­oper com­mu­nity and play­ing a lit­tle nicer until it tries to enter another mar­ket. That was the case with Win­dows; it was the case with Office; and it is the case with IE today.

IBM also took the same approach, ini­tially being a provider of pro­pri­etary sys­tems and slowly, over the last 15–20 years, mov­ing to become one of the largest sup­port­ers of the open source movement.

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