Startup founder Chad Whitacre caused a fuss recently when he suggested that a reporter do an "open interview" that would be available to everyone -- but why is that approach seen as such a threat by some media outlets?…
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The Empire acquires the rebel alliance: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover
Mendeley, an open collaboration platform for scientific research, has promised that it won't become less open after being acquired by journal publisher Elsevier, but some prominent users aren't waiting around.…
Read MoreIn the platform wars, open is ultimately more valuable than closed, says Betaworks
In his annual letter to shareholders of the seed-stage incubator Betaworks, founder and CEO John Borthwick argues that while closed platforms can be valuable in the short term, open systems and services will ultimately prevail.…
Read MoreBeing open: The source of Twitter’s power, and its Achilles heel
Twitter's ongoing moves to control more of its network -- in order to monetize it -- is an attempt to turn back the clock and undo some of the openness it started out with. But will it also rob the service of what made it so powerful?…
Read MoreThink App.net is just a Twitter clone? Then you’re missing the point
Most critics of Dalton Caldwell's App.net project seem to see it as a replacement for Twitter, only with users paying for the service rather than advertisers. But what the service really wants to be is a central messaging bus and open ecosystem for the social web.…
Read MoreThere’s only one truly open platform: the web
This week marks the 21st anniversary of the world's first website, and as new social-web platforms like Twitter and Facebook spend more and more of their energy trying to control and monetize their networks, it's worth remembering some of the choices that the web's creator made.…
Read MoreFacebook and Twitter: Welcome to the new platform wars
The way Facebook and Twitter have been controlling and/or closing down their platforms to outsiders may have parallels to the way other technology leaders have behaved in the past, but both companies need to be careful that they don't ruin their platforms in the process.…
Read MoreTwitter Needs to Become More Open or Die
Twitter needs to become more decentralized and open, says the company's former chief engineer, or it will wither and die like other "walled garden" approaches to the web. Alex Payne says he recommended that Twitter become a more open platform, but senior executives decided against it.…
Read MoreOpen vs. Closed: Jimmy Wales on Being Open
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says that he believes the benefits of taking an open approach to content outweigh the disadvantages, and says that something as large and influential as Wikipedia has become could never have been built unless the process was open to anyone to contribute.…
Read MoreOpen vs. Closed: Why Open Standards Matter
Hot on the heels of the release of Opera 10.52 for Mac, I thought I'd chat to Bruce Lawson, a web evangelist at Opera, about the Open vs. Closed debate, and discover why open standards matter for web workers -- and the web as a whole.…
Read MoreOpen vs. Closed: What Does Open Really Mean?
The launch of Facebook's open graph protocol is fueling the debate over whether it is better to be open vs. closed. But the ultimate answer may be that it depends. Being open can benefit a company in some ways, while being closed is better in others.…
Read MoreOpen vs. Closed: Ubuntu Walks the Line
Any debate between open or closed systems has to touch on open-source software and the ways companies are attempting to build code as a community effort while profiting off of it in some way. I talked to Mark Shuttleworth about how Ubuntu walks that line.…
Read MoreOpen vs. Closed: In the Ongoing Battle Over Control, How Much Is Too Much?
Open vs. Closed. It's a story that has been at the heart of the technology industry for most of its modern history, and it exposes issues that are crucial to the industry's evolution, with giant companies on either side of the equation jockeying for position.…
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