The Angry Drunk

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

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