alt Hacker NewsThis is Web 2.0. You're in the process of rediscovering mashups. Before it was SOAP and REST/HTTP and now it's...well, it's still kind of REST/HTTP because MCP is JSON-RPC. There was this brief, beautiful period where every "learn to code" book ended with a couple of chapters of how to make your app do google searches and throw the results into a word graph or something before all the big tech companies locked that sort of access down.
Weirdly, I'm a little optimistic that it might work this time. AI is hot, which means that suddenly we don't care about IP anymore, and if AIs are the ones that are mostly using this protocol, providers will perhaps be in less of a rush to block everybody from doing cool things.
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They don't care about using your IP rights, I doubt it also works the other way around.
Did you mean this is Web 3.0? (semantic web)
Where the goal was to have a site's data as machine readable so that could be mashed up into something new? Instead of making it easier to gather the big sites locked the bulk of their data down so it never gained widespread adoption
Web 2.0 is what we mostly have now -- social, user generated content and interaction
Web 2.0 was also hot.
You’re totally right, and that’s why I think this era will fail.
Web 2.0 failed because eventually people realized to make money they needed to serve ads, and to do that they needed to own the UI. Making it easy to exfiltrate data meant switching cost was low, too. Can’t have that when you’re trying to squeeze value out of users. Look at the evolution of the twitter API over the 2.0 era. That was entirely motivated by Twitter’s desperate need to make money through ads.
Only way we avoid that future is if we figure out new business models, but I doubt that will happen. Ads are too lucrative and people too resistant to pay for things.