The open web (part 3/3)
The ghost of Christmas future
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The contrast of the past web with the present shocks me (see part 1).
I attribute this disappointment to the feeling that most large Internet players are on an extractive strategy (see part 2).
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The product I wish existed is the open web. I wish all of the silos we now have would explode into different competing companies. Think the email ecosystem, only better.
The web of today is full of silos. All of the major players are silos. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, you name it. Silos. Closed. Self-centered. Value grabbing. Network effect maximizers from the point of view of the holding company.
I need a target to explain myself. I’ll pick Facebook, but it could be any other silo.
Is there any functional requirement for a social network that mandates a central authority? Could a social network exist without a company gating access?
I believe there is no such requirement. What is Facebook at its core? Three things:
- An identity provider: account sergiosgc is Sérgio Carvalho
- A graph store of relationships between identities: sergiosgc is friends with foo, has worked with bar and has blocked baz.
- An asynchronous communication mechanism between identities: sergiosgc broadcasts that he is reading Game of Thrones book five and he finds the book way too large and way too boring (and most characters are now dead).
Why, oh why do we need Facebook — the company?
The Internet has solved the identity part aeons ago. Since the dawn of times (internet-wise), an identity is username@provider.example.com. We just need authentication mechanisms that are simple (Mozilla Persona, née browserid looks nice, btw).
The graph store of relationships requires no centralization. If an identity is unique, just store edges on both identity providers (or on social network providers).
The asynchronous communication mechanism needs nothing more than beefed up email. SMTP + MIME + standard mime types for typical social network communication. We don’t have these standard mime types, but it is a minor task compared to the road already covered.
What is there to gain? Oh, you can’t imagine! Really, you can’t. You can’t imagine because competition tends to create stuff that is surprising. I can’t imagine either, otherwise I’d go grab some VC funding, invent and implement it and buy myself a yacht.
I do know it’d be a lot more inspiring than today’s web.
The product I wish existed is the product that already exists. Only better, fundamentally better.
