Wed, 27 Nov 2013
Proprietary Applications
Welcome to the Rant of the month series, today about the proprietary web applications: The Web is more and more becoming a set of isolated proprietary islands, instead of being the deeply interconnected, how to say it, web. Lots of information, and even my friends, are disappearing behind the proprietary systems.
For example, I would like to get news from @whatifnumbers, preferably via RSS, but apparently it is not possible. Twitter used to have a RSS export, but it has been recently disabled. I, of course, have no intention to use a Twitter account (I think I created one long time ago, but I never used it).
Another examples are Google+ and Facebook: how do you stay in touch with your friends who have an account on only one of these systems? (Or none of them, like myself?) I have managed to create a RSS feed of one of my friends' G+ account, but the feed of course contains only the public posts.
We are moving from the world where people develop applications which everybody can install and run themselves (blogging systems, mail servers, web galleries, etc.) to the world where there is only a single instance of an important application, with no possibility to run my own copy.