Open Protocols vs Walled Gardens

it's a shame this service based on a proprietary protocol gained critical mass before a interoperable open standard could have taken its place.

Choice means interoperability, not picking between walled gardens.

That's intentional. There's no reason you couldn't have apps be more interoperable through open standards, but vendors want to keep you locked in their ecosystem.

Tech giants consider interoperability as a bug, not a feature. They want you locked into their ecosystems.

Proprietary APIs can't be a replacement to an open industry standard.

No, it shouldn't be another walled garden. Go with an actual standardized protocol.

Open protocols with open source clients are the way to achieve this, but oh wait ads.

There is no business in it. If anything there is a powerful incentive against anything that permits interoperation. The big guys all want to build closed vertically integrated silos, and probably more than half if all startups are trying to do the same or position themselves for an acquisition by building entirely within someone else's silo.Open source is the only way this could be fixed, and unfortunately that is mostly the kingdom of developers who already think this is a solved proble

This is the beauty of an open protocol. No matter how much market share one client gets, if it screw up everyone just move to the next.Imagine if everyone were using gshare and the company decided everyone had to use gshare+ and all the data was dependent on their servers/network. Good luck trying to keep an older version or trying an alternative after one company dominated the majority of the market.

Lack of open protocol implies that client choices will be essentially limited to what the service provider offers. This is bad user experience.