I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here before, but Larry Halff (Ma.gnolia) and I have been recording a series of podcasts with a bunch of interesting folks on topics ranging from data portability to data interop and authorization patterns to API-driven web services.
The intended audience of this podcast is really us, since it came out of lunches that Larry and I were having at Out the Door in downtown San Francisco. We realized that, while a lot of what we were talking about might be interesting to a wider audience, more importantly, starting a podcast of our conversations would give us a great pretext to invite folks who are inspiring us with their work to come out for some daikon cakes and Vietnamese ice coffee (following in the steps of Peter Rukavina et al’s Live from the Formosa Tea House podcast of course).
This past week, Larry and I brought together Todd Ditchendorf of Fluid.app and Jon Crosby of Actiontastic and recently Kloudkit to discuss site-specific browsers and related trends in cloud computing.
Obviously the question looms large about the competition between the open web, Adobe’s AIR platform and Microsoft’s Silverlight framework. With both Adobe and Microsoft jockeying for supreme “open” status with their platforms, we need to start asking the question differently: it’s no longer about whether a platform is “open”, but who controls its features, its priorities, and to what degree it facilitates interoperability by supporting industry-wide non-proprietary standards. Of course there’s always going to be proprietary development leading the way ahead of open development, and that’s fine. The difference, however, is that efforts like Mozilla’s Prism, Todd’s Fluid.app and Jon’s Kloudkit give us completely open stacks for implementing a lot of compelling ideas and features using tools and technologies without having to pick a corporate partner. They also provide us with the flexibility to innovate independently and see which ideas stick, while also pushing and pulling on the future of browser technology directly.
In any case, you should probably just listen to this episode and let us know what you think.
If you want to subscribe to Citizen Garden, you can grab listen in iTunes, grab our feed or follow Citizen Garden on Twitter.
Factory Joe 
Citizen Garden is always a good listen – just can’t consume it as fast or easily as old-fashioned text 😉
Hi Chris, why do you lump in Microsoft’s upcoming cross-browser plugin with beyond-the-browser initiatives?
(If you can make something great, then please do, and we’ll all be better off.)
jd/adobe