Identity and The Independent Web. Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we’ve come to call the web? I believe the answer is yes. I’m fascinated with how our society’s new norms and mores are developing – as well as the architectural patterns which emerge as we build what, at first blush, feels like a rather chaotic jumble of companies, platforms, services, devices and behaviors. Here’s one major architectural pattern I’ve noticed: the emergence of two distinct territories across the web landscape.
One I’ll call the “Dependent Web,” the other is its converse: The “Independent Web.” The Independent Web, for the most part, does not shift its content or services based on who you are. A Shift In How The Web Works? Facebook does the same, building a page each time you click, based on increasingly sophisticated data and algorithms. What’s My Independent Identity? Imagine if nearly all sites used such services. Can’t we do better? The Independent Web. John Battelle has put forth his vision for The Independent Web. John is thinking of this concept in the context of the world he lives in, publishing and advertising, which makes total sense. I too am very taken with the idea of The Independent Web, but I am thinking of it in the context of the world I live in, investing in and working with web and mobile web services.
My partner Albert Wenger posted a "letter to Larry" (my words not his) yesterday on his blog. One of his wishes for Larry's vision for Google is this: Supporting independent third party services instead of either trying to acquire them or competing head on with them. We have seen again and again that when a large company acquires a startup, they most often let it wither and die (myspace, delicious, etc). Now Google is possibly the exception to this rule. But acquiring innovating emerging web services is not the only thing that big companies do that can be detrimental to the web. The internet: The web's new walls. It’s Not Whether Google’s Threatened. It’s Asking Ourselves: What Commons Do We Wish For? If Facebook’s IPO filing does anything besides mint a lot of millionaires, it will be to shine a rather unsettling light on a fact most of us would rather not acknowledge: The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation.
And if we lose the web, well, we lose more than funny cat videos and occasionally brilliant blog posts. We lose a commons, an ecosystem, a “tangled bank” where serendipity, dirt, and iterative trial and error drive open innovation. Google’s been the focus of most of this analysis (hell, I called Facebook an “existential threat” to Google on Bloomberg yesterday), but I’d like to pull back for a second. This post has been brewing in me for a while, but I was moved to start writing after reading this piece in Time: Is Google In Danger of Being Shut Out of the Changing Internet?
The short answer is Hell Yes. 1. 2. He makes a good point. . - No gatekeepers. . - An ethos of the commons. . - Neutrality. 1. 2. 3. It’s too late for Dave Winer and John Battelle to save the common web. The date was January 3, 2008. Facebook had kicked me off for running a script to try to save the common web. See, I worked with Plaxo to run a simple script.
One that would have taken my contacts out of Facebook and put them back into the common web. The script did some very simple things: 1. Facebook’s answer was predictable. Oh, a few people supported me. They understood what was at stake: the future of the web. But many others said I deserved to be kicked off of Facebook. Did I get invited to speak at John Battelle’s conferences about how the common web was screwed? Did Dave Winer lead a SOPA-like protest? Mike Arrington and I had violent disagreements on the Gillmor Gang about my motives. Heck, these arguments continue to this day. The message was loud and clear: Facebook should be allowed to be a data roach motel: data can come in, but damn you Scoble if you want to take that data back out. Today their arguments are hitting my ears. Now do you get why I really don’t care anymore? Me? Is the Open Web Doomed? Open Your Eyes and Relax. We asked veteran technology writer and investor Esther Dyson, a longtime friend of Personal Democracy, for her thoughts on a current controversy: is the open web dying?
--The Editors I'm wading into an argument that I think may be overblown. With Facebook going public and Google threatened by apps and closed services such as FB, is the open web doomed? You might think so after reading the dueling blog posts of John Battelle, Robert Scoble and Dave Winer in the past few days. But things are a bit more complicated. Battelle starts by asking whether Google is doomed – and what that means for the open net as a whole. But whether the Web is dead or open or shut is not a question that will be settled once and for all, but rather a situation that will fluctuate in cycles (even if the Web takes on some other name). So what's the difference between paternalism and our duty to save people from tyrants or from companies whose privacy statements are incomprehensible?
As the world turns.... Do users really care whether the web is open or not? As Facebook draws close to the billion-user mark and a $100-billion market valuation, the giant social network’s dominance has reignited old fears about the decline and fall of the open web. John Battelle argues that we need a manifesto for the truly open Internet in order to rally the troops, but blogging veteran Robert Scoble says it is too late and he has already given up the fight. And longtime technology watcher and investor Esther Dyson says we need to remember that the Internet is prone to cycles of open vs. closed. In the end, the only thing that determines whether a closed model succeeds is the willingness of users to put up with its restrictions. For Facebook, that is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. Then along came Facebook, which took the ultimate “gated community” approach right from the outset by restricting access to university students.
If the garden is appealing, the walls don’t matter If you stop being useful, users will revolt So far, so good. The Web We Lost. It’s our duty — all of us — to fight for the open web. When you use an app, or a platform like a mobile phone, or a social network, or a web service — whether it’s from Google or Apple or Amazon or Facebook — do you think about the extent to which it is open or closed? Or do you just think about how it looks, or what it lets you do, or whether your friends are using it? Most of us probably fall into the latter category, but as veteran blogger Anil Dash and others have pointed out recently, there are some good reasons why we should care about the future of the open web, and be concerned about a trend towards more closed networks.
As natural as that trend might be from a commercial point of view, it is the antithesis of what made the internet so powerful. 1) Control over our online identities 2) Control over our personal data 3) Control over where our content appears If you don’t care whether it’s open, who will? But the garden is so beautiful, and the walls so distant Why should we care? Post "Good Google", Who Will Defend The Open Web? In a recent discussion on Hacker News, user andyl made the following comment: “Before Google+ came along, Google had many great products and embraced the OpenWeb.
Now Google has abandoned Open Standards like RSS and CalDAV, and I think Google is more interested in building their own walled garden.” My first thought was: “Bingo, you nailed it.” My second, third and subsequent thoughts were something like this: This is a *very* unfortunate development, as Google were uniquely positioned to be great defenders of the Open Web, and - for quite some time - seemed to *be* defenders of the Open Web. Sadly, there are not a lot of obvious candidates. It won't be Microsoft, you can bet on that.
Red Hat are a moderately powerful company, but they aren't *that* big and could wind up acquired by Oracle tomorrow for all we know. Mozilla have a lot of clout on the browser side, but arguably much less so than in years past, as their market share has slipped. Amazon? Facebook? LinkedIn? Sun? IBM? Wolfram?