Holy Shit - What Have Programmers been Doing for the past 6 Months??

Today I was annoyed again by the recurring sign of my own decay: comma-delimited database fields.

Now I know that parsing lists was my favorite thing to do for a few years, which I've left behind in favor of building a lightweight and cheap library of code to do what to my limited view were the most fundamental of programming functions. All this was premised on a super-old-school VB-SQL paradigm, so when I see non-relational conventions like the comma-delimited data fields it annoys me greatly that I didn't take what I was doing more seriously and actually learn something.

Today I wrote a SQL-ish query full of conditional statements to create an ugly matrix of values using an ID field and one of these lists. It worked well on the first try. It was easy to write albeit repetitive, but all around so ugly I felt I must have descended into a place so bad I had no choice but to kick my brain's ass into some kind of action.

Out of laziness and ignorance I'd blamed the rise of shoving lists into database fields on xml, so my first thought was to add a couple functions to my dormant code library to handle tagged text, figuring it a logical first step toward xml. Now I realize I'm glossing over a lot of things, but I can admit that the friends of xml are ajax, ajax's friend javascript, and their old friend html. I've always claimed to know html a little bit, at least as far as being able to write a page that would run on every browser since 1992. But we never got around to exchanging friend requests, possibly because social networking has only been a software paradigm for a short while, and html and I have been out of touch for a longer while now.

When I got home to look at my e-mail one of the bulk feeds I routinely delete but sometimes read had a thing about opensocial, so I checked that out. Listening a while it seemed a step beyond even AJAX. I'd noticed that IT Conversations and like other places had made social networking a topic for a few months now, and I knew about social apps and waited out Web 2.0, but only today did I realize what was going on: why Facebook is so full of bullshit apps that all seem to be ways of realizing infantile interactions "I (insert verb) you," "I (insert verb) him/her," "So-and-so (insert verb)ed him-0r-her." Apps are today what photos were before, when the rise of flickr and countless other web 2.0 photo sharing apps revolutionized online communication.

The next big thing is clear: people will publish and exchange stupid little apps the way they had once published and exchanged stupid photos of their babies, dogs, vacation scenery, and predictable whatnot. And those apps will all do about the same thing: "I (insert verb) you."

"I (verb="poke") you." "I (verb="bite") you." "I (verb="tag") you." "I, through my virtual monkey avatar, throw monkey shit at you." This is the brave new world of the next several months. If I know about it, maybe it's already done. "You (verb="stick-a-fork-in") me."

v1=fDeathSpiral()

So anyway, the basics of OpenSocial are Identity (i.e. me), Friends, and Activities, which are generic interactions between Friends (including me). Simplifying everything this way will let OpenSocial be adopted by every social networking capital farm. And complex interactions can be deployed from such a framework as the need arises. "I (verb="castigate") you to (my friends + your friends)."

And the promise of it (if any) is that lightweight object-based apps will float around the web, serverless, linking friend to friend through botlike avatars, and allowing all interactions to proceed through a simple A X's B syntax. And thus the web will transform itself from mere infrastructure, easily mistaken for a bunch of tubes, to a digital analog of human reality.