MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0

Anil Dash:

The Facebooks and Twitters of the world killed the Web 2.0 dream of open data and interoperable technologies for lots of people, and users lost out. All kinds of stupid situations became routine, like not being able to see an embedded Instagram photo on a Twitter timeline

It’s ironic that an instagram photo in a twitter timeline is banned, but slurping up all intellectual property ever created and repurposing for your own profit is fine.

But I digress.

This challenge of just supporting the standard thing is harder than it seems. A while back, when we launched a semantic caching product for popular AI platforms, one of the hardest things to convince our super genius developers to do was to just... use the regular ChatGPT API. "But we can make it better!" they'll say. Developers always say that. But better is worse. Anything that's different is worse. Stop being smarter and more clever, and stop cleaning up that horrible spec that is riddled with inconsistencies, and just ship the same shit as everybody else. You know what was a garbage spec that was missing all kinds of stuff? HTML! And yet here we are, on the wonderful world wide web. The whole internet sits atop a bunch of terrible specs

The beautiful, ugly child that is the web!

It was never meant to be proprietary. It was never meant to be controlled by a handful of dudes at a tiny number of giant companies. It was always meant to be programmable through janky specs that everybody hurriedly adopted just for the sheer joy of something fun to hack on. That was true long before the web had any version numbers at all.