In the beginning, the world was offline. The past was just what we could remember. Conversations faded. Introductions to others slipped into the realm of unnamed faces and disconnected anecdotes. Jokes were heard and forgotten. Photos bleached out and negative film turned to dust. News clippings crumbled. Documents misplaced were unfindable. Address books lost were irreplaceable. What happened in Las Vegas really did stay in Las Vegas.
Then there was the Internet and all that began to change. The World-Wide Web came to be, and we all became potential publishers. With few exceptions in the larger-business realm, the first websites were no more than billboards. Then they were brochures. Then in the late '90s blogging began. In the '00s, walled-off chatrooms siloed off within services like AOL and Compuserve were replaced by more open communities ... and then social networks. (Walled-off social networks like Facebook opened up into full-blown social networks.) Before we knew it, we were emailing, chatting, shopping, researching, bookmarking, socializing, podcasting, showing videos, sharing, advising, asking, boasting, laughing, crying, raging, raving online.
And as far as we knew, what happened online stayed online ... where we could find it. (And if not, there was always the Wayback Machine.)
In recent weeks, that widespread confidence — complacency? — has been shaken. Maybe it started when it was announced that Facebook was buying Friendfeed.
Robert Scoble himself made noises about quitting Friendfeed. But what to do with all the content he had shared, all the connections he had made there?
I responded thusly:
If you don't control it, is it really yours?
When we talk about where the "web" is going, we're asking the wrong question. It's not just about the web, it's about our connections with the people and information in our lives. The rapidly evolving web is but one part of that. We also have to consider things like the ongoing exponential increase in computer power, evolving applications and new apps that leverage that power and the power of the web in new ways, changing social mores, increasing expectations about access, privacy and control of information — not to mention the shifting economic tides and business agendas pursuing what investors are finding the most appealing financially.
The last part is where we find ourselves being led through affordance into new behaviors. Our connections are what marketers are after, because presumably our attention in that context is more valuable to advertisers. And of course there's always the data mining.
We do it gladly because we enjoy the benefits. And because we love experiencing new things that don't seem to be immediately threatening. The payoffs can be enriching, transformative. Thus: Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Gmail, LinkedIn, Google docs, and so on.
So the Facebook/Friendfeed deal got people's attention. Did they really want to leave their conversations, their connections, in the hands of the fickle, unpredictable hands of Facebook?
Then tr.im, the url shortening service, announced that they were shutting down. What would happen to all those link references people had created in tr.im to tweet, plurk, etc.?
Then Twitter was under a DDOS attack and that service was unavailable. The complete inaccessibility period was just a few hours, but the attack continued on and on, disrupting the service sporadically for days on. Many of us saw the strangeness of seeing SMS-generated tweets post days later. Confusing.
For Shelley Powers, designer, developer and photographer, this was all just part of a bigger picture:
I have never liked centralized systems, though I understand their appeal and worth. It always seems, though, that just when you start to depend on the centralized service something happens to it.
Yahoo is now out of the search engine business, and with its new business partnership with Microsoft, its side applications like delicious are now vulnerable. I've managed to replace delicious with Scuttle, though I no longer have the social aspect of delicious. However, my Scuttle implementation does an excellent job with bookmarks, which is what I needed.
Then NewsGator sent an email around this last week telling all of us that our NewsGator feed aggregator is being replaced by Google Reader. I don't like Google Reader. More importantly, I really don't want to give Google yet more information about me. So, I replaced my NewsGator/NetNewsWire installation with a Gregarius implementation. It took me some time to get used to the new user interface, and I've had to password protect the installation, but I'm not dependent on a centralized feed aggregator, which can, and did, go away.
Twitter, though. I was not a big Twitter fan at first, but I can see the benefits of the application, especially if you want to point out an article or something else to folks, and have it quickly, virally spread, in a nice swine flu-like manner. It's fun to have a giggle with folks, too. But the darn thing is centralized, and not only centralized, vulnerable and centralized, which gives one pause.
Shelley has blogged about this kind of thing before. Back in 2007, she likened web services to hotels, where she would always find the emergency exit.
My check for the exit bleeds over into my use of web services. No matter how clever a service, I never use it if it doesn't have an exit strategy....
...I won't use a hosted web service like Typepad or weblogs.com. It's too easy for them to decide that you're 'violating' terms of service, and next thing you know, all your weblog entries are gone. I saw this with wordpress.com in the recent events that caused so much discussion: in fact, I would strongly recommend against using wordpress.com because of this–the service is too easily influenced by public opinion.
I don't use either my Yahoo or Gmail mail accounts. Regardless of whether I can get a copy of my email locally, if I decide to not use either account I have no way of 'redirecting' email addresses from either of these to the email address I want to use. (Or if there is a way, I'm not aware of it.) Getting a copy of my data is not an exit strategy–it's an export strategy. An exit strategy is one where you can blow off the service and not suffer long-term consequences. A 'bad' email address is definitely a long-term consequence.
Instead, I have a domain, burningbird.net, which I use for everything. I will always maintain this domain. My email address listed in the sidebar, will always be good.
That was 2007 and here we are again.
I hope you don't remember what I said
Maybe there's more to social networking services than questions of reliability, control, security, privacy.... Hilary Talbot wonders if the web should be, maybe, more forgettable:
In commentary about the the real time web there seems to be a natural underlying feeling that the closer the real time web gets to replicating real life communication the better....
...What we broadcast online is also subject to our normal subconscious forgetting: we forget a lot of what we put online over time, and we can assume our readers forget what we have done too, if its not particularly important. We can also be activate [sic] in forgetting, in the sense that the web is fluid and we can revise, update and delete, as long as we have control over our own data....
...In real time flow services we can delete or hide individual updates (but only to a certain extent), whole accounts, or choose to make our accounts private. However, we don’t yet have the open unwalled services that would give us the same control over remembering and forgetting conversations that we can have with static web pages and blogs.
Her point is that there are things we want to fade away into history, just like they do in our non-virtual lives — that making something forgotten, per se, can be just as important as making it enduring. But we don't have the option. It's difficult to export or exit most services, if it's possible at all.
And if you can't do these things because in the end they're controlled by company that may or may not see things your way, are the connections and content you've built on web services really, truly yours?
Decentralization challenges
Ultimately what needs to happen is that our networks have to become decentralized — interconnected not with dependencies but with redundancies. In other words, our social networks need to become more like the Internet: if there's a blockage or failure, go around it.
One answer is RDFa — or Resource Description Framework — which is a framework to structure metadata of website content to make it machine readable. Why would we need that? Because then the relationships behind the page content, relationships whose definitions are buried down in firewalled databases, can be read and interpreted by outside services.
However, the future of RDFa is in doubt now, due to what by all accounts sounds like organizational dysfunction within the HTML5 working group. Jeni Tennison has an excellent rundown, where she concludes:
Really I’m just trying to draw attention to the fact that the HTML5 community has very reasonable concerns about things much more fundamental than using prefix bindings. After redrafting this concluding section many times, the things that I want to say are:
- so wouldn’t things be better if we put as much effort into understanding each other as persuading each other (hah, what an idealist!)
- so we will make more progress in discussions if we focus on the underlying arguments
- so we need to talk in a balanced way about the advantages and disadvantages of RDF
or, in a more realistic frame of mind:
- so it’s just not going to happen for HTML5
- so why not just stop arguing and use the spare time and energy doing?
- so why not demonstrate RDF’s power in real-world applications?
To which, Shelley sings the refrain,
I understand where Jeni is coming from, when she writes about finding a common ground. Finding common ground, though, pre-supposes that all participants come to the party on equal footing. That both sides will need to listen, to compromise, to give a little, to get a little. This doesn't exist with the HTML5 effort.
Where the RDFa in XHTML specification was a group effort, Microdata is the product of one person's imagination. One single person. However, that one single person has complete authorship control over the HTML 5 document, and so what he wants is what gets added: not what reflects common usage, not what reflects the W3C guidelines, and certainly not what exists in the world, today.
While this uneven footing exists, I can't see how we can find common ground. So then we look at Jeni's next set of suggestions, which basically boil down to: because of the HTML WG charter, nothing is going to happen with HTML5, so perhaps we should stop beating our heads against the wall, and focus, instead, on just using RDFa, and to hell with HTML5 and microdata.
Bang! Bang!
The irony: The decentralization decision is centralized in one person.
Open is open. Closed is unavailable. Hotel California is unacceptable.
This is one reason why I work in open source. Open source can be an answer to a lot of this.
Including counting votes, which in the past decade-plus has been increasingly dominated by a handful of companies who refuse to divulge how their machines tally votes.
But it's not just open source that can answer. Open standards can also help. If I can export all of my content and relationships from your service, then your service has more value to me. I'm interested in intersections, not cul-de-sacs.
I won't deposit money in a bank that won't give it back. I won't move into a rental that will keep my furniture when I move out. I won't stay in a hotel that keeps my luggage.
Same with the services I rent online. They have to be open somehow. Because, I believe, if we can't control our own information, our own connections, our own content, then it ends up not really being ours after all.
'Relax,' said the night man,
'We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!'
Hotel California by Eagles
And that wasn't supposed to be part of the deal.
This post is cross-posted on BlogHer.
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