My friend xstof pointed me at ThinkBigManifesto. I started this blog with “Inspire others to Dream”. It could have been “Inspire others to Think Big”. And the advertising text of ThinkBigManifesto suggests: “Big thinking is open and generous, discerning and judicious, yet not judgmental. Big thinking is not excessive, nor is it about the pursuit of excess. Rather, it is moderate.”

Google is big. Google is about Thinking Big. But what would it take to become a Google-Killer ? “More transparency and less opaqueness, more open”, says Jeff Jarvis in his short video posting on www.bigthink.com about the Google Killer. Jeff Jarvis is quite known from his bestseller “What would Google do”.

But how open can you go ? Whereas in the past “standards” or “protocols” were focusing only on the connectivity (how to get data from A to B) and syntactic (and sometimes semantic) standards for data standards and “messages”, today we have open standards for all layers.

I recently found this very interesting deck by Micah Laaker from Yahoo! I have to confess that these Yahoo! folks seem to be on top of everything these days. Also have a look at Yahoo Pipes if you have the time. Especially if one starts thinking about being open in a cloud and/or SaaS type of private or public community.

Micah basically proposes an updated set of standards for many more layers than we used to think of (with courtesy of http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/04/baychi_open.html):

1. Open Source (PHP, Hadoop)
2. Open Infrastructure (Amazon EC2 & S3)
3. Open Architecture (Firefox, YQL Open Tables)
4. Open Standards (XML, JSON)
5. Open Ontology (Microformats, RDFa). See also my recent blog on Smart Data and the OpenCalais project.
6. Open Access (Twitter, Yahoo! BOSS)
7. Open Canvas (Facebook, Yahoo! Application Platform)
8. Open Content (Google Reader, My Yahoo!)
9. Open Mic (WordPress, YouTube)
10. Open Forum (Digg, Yahoo! Buzz)
11. Open Door (Get Satisfaction)
12. Open Borders (OPML)
13. Open Identity (OpenID, AttributeExchange); btw have you noticed that Facebook is one of the first true big players to adopt OpenID ? Not as an Identity issuer, but accepting OpenID’s issued by other big players such as Windows Live ID, Yahoo ID, Google ID

Slide #43 gives a good overview which standards bring most value to what audience (users/developers).

This presentation was delivered on 14 April at BayCHI http://www.baychi.org The meeting Report by student Gregory Cabrera ends with the appropriate questions:

• Does the system need to be open in order for users (and developers) to derive value?

• Is creativity an important feature in the design of a platform?

• What are the features of a successful, creative, open system platform?

• How creative would you like your users (or developers) to be?

• How would you inspire creativity in the development of a product or service?

Imagine a business to business cloud. What of these or other standards would make your offering truly open ? Feel free to comment or to come up with “open” suggestions.