Build Community Features Using Existing Standards

I’ve been listening to the Stack Overflow podcasts lately. Stack Overflow is a community-driven site for developers being built by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. The issues they’re facing are common to any site or system which features users and community as a component. Here’s the message I would send to anyone in such a position: don’t reinvent the wheel - use existing (hopefully open) standards to implement your community and user management.

Building your own user and password management authentication system is wasted effort. The Stack Overflow guys are using OpenID, and you should too. Planning to have user icons or avatars? Why wouldn’t you want to use Gravatar and offload the icon management and bandwidth to their servers?

There is a lot of good progress being made on the Open Web; David Recordon and Marc Canter note that it’s time to start using what we have and building toward greater open interoperability. Avoid Not-Invented-Here syndrome; there’s no excuse to be building these components from scratch instead of supporting evolving standards. Leverage and be a part of the Open Web.