Terminology Matters

Everyone’s favorite cranky old jack­ass Dave Winer is all a’flutter about WordPress and Tumblr imple­ment­ing the Twitter API in a post titled How open stan­dards are cre­ated. The meat of his post is a bunch of typ­i­cal Winer bull­shit about how won­der­ful it is that WordPress and Tumblr have imple­mented the Twitter API (which is true) and how that fact may well make the Twitter API and open standard.

I’m going to ignore, for the time being, the patent absur­dity of Dave’s asser­tion. Last time I checked, for some­thing to be an “open stan­dard” it had to be both open, which The Twitter API hardly is; and a stan­dard, which I don’t think being used by your­self, and two blog host­ing com­pa­nies qual­i­fies as. It’s not really that that irks me about this piece.

What bugs me here is some­thing that Winer does inces­santly, and really chaps my ass. He com­pletely mis­uses and con­flates two dif­fer­ent tech­ni­cal terms. To quote:

If Facebook were to imple­ment the Twitter API that would be it. We’d have another FTP or HTTP or RSS.

No, Dave we wouldn’t. The Twitter API is just that, an Application Programming Interface. FTP, HTTP and RSS are com­mu­ni­ca­tions protocols.

I know that, to the layper­son this might seem like a triv­ial dis­tinc­tion, but it really isn’t. An API is just a descrip­tion of meth­ods that allow some­one to pro­gra­mat­i­cally inter­act with a piece of soft­ware. A com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­col is a spec­i­fi­ca­tion that describes how to trans­mit data over some medium. In fact, the Twitter API uses HTTP to trans­mit data.

As I wrote above this may seem triv­ial, and if it was just some ran­dom tech jour­nal­ist mak­ing the mis­take I wouldn’t even notice it. But Dave Winer isn’t some ran­dom tech jour­nal­ist. To quote from Dave’s own bio:

Dave Winer, 54, pio­neered the devel­op­ment of weblogs, syn­di­ca­tion (RSS), pod­cast­ing, out­lin­ing, and web con­tent man­age­ment software…he received a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin…

The man should bloody well know bet­ter, but this is just the lat­est exam­ple of Dave doing this kind of thing. Of course, the real rea­son why Dave does this is sim­ple. He has an over­whelm­ing obses­sion with tying every sin­gle devel­op­ment in web com­mu­ni­ca­tions back to RSS, his one claim to fame.