What’s most atrocious to me about VP8 is that open-source has trumped clarity, implementability, and standardization. VP8 apparently only exists as a code-base, not as a technical standard that could, at least in theory, be re-implemented by a third party.
Cultured Code’s Jürgen Schweizer looks at various ways they could have implemented syncing for Things. To my knowledge, Apple has never said why Sync Services is not available to third-party developers on iOS (via either MobileMe or USB). Lots of developers are either reinventing the wheel or waiting to see what Apple does.
Regardless of whether or not you think the online advertising business is a bubble (which I do right now, but I’m a voice in the wilderness), we should face the fact that we are seriously exposed when we place our businesses and online lives in the hands of companies that make most of their money from advertising, and that aren’t diversifying into other businesses that aren’t based on guesswork.
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Self-hosting is the future we’ll have after commercial hosting services like Flickr start to fail. Fortunately, self-hosting is what the Web was meant to support in the first place, and the architecture is still there. We’ll have our own Flickrs and Zoomrs and Picassas, either on servers at home (ISP restrictions permitting) or in a server rack at the likes of RackSpace. But somebody needs to develop the software
The problem is that Flickr is not WordPress, where you can just move your data to a different provider.
