61–70 of 305 posts
Key quote (for me) from the interview: "A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network." source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...
I had a similar realisation. What's the product in a social network? It's you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.
As a matter of fact, this is what Sir Berners Lee is working on right now at MIT. https://solid.mit.edu/ The issue is not storing the data, just like "email" doesn't store data. It's just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service. Ex: Don't like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don't lose the ability to interact with peop…
Key quote (for me) from the interview: "A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network." source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...
Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.
The difficulty with decentralising is that these are the biggest challenge to centralised systems like Facebook; they're problems which are very nice to have ("oh no, we have a billion users!").
The biggest challenge for decentralised systems is getting momentum behind an agreed-upon protocol.
Email was born when there were few people who needed to agree, and their major concern was being able to send/receive messages. As the Internet expanded, the momentum behind email ensured that it could ride that wave as well.
These days the Internet, and hence the number of people who need to agree on the protocols, is huge. Think about, for example, HTTP2; how many organisations and individuals were involved in its definition and publication? How many more have been involved in implementing it for various browsers, servers, crawlers, libraries, etc? How many more have been installing updates, editing config files, etc. to use it?
Another change is the concerns of the stakeholders; if all we cared about were sending/receiving messages, then we could use something like telnet, HTTP, email, etc. Instead, the concerns are more fuzzy (e.g. "presence", "likes", etc.) and more political (silos vs federation vs p2p, expectations of privacy, encryption, archiving, searchability, etc.). Reaching agreement on such things is very difficult, as everyone wants different things.
The results either:
- Have buy-in from too-few people (e.g. diaspora, pump.io, gnusocial)
- Are so general as to be inappropriate for most particular tasks (e.g. RDF; an interesting example considering that RSS is a stripped-down subset of RDF, and is/was widely adopted; also compare to ATOM, which took that subset, threw away the ties to RDF, and became more interoperable!)
- Only offer tiny featuresets (e.g. the various microformats)
Holly crap! Congratulations woman!!!
I don't understand the minus points here. Did I piss a bunch of people off? I genuinely loved OPs comment here (gave it an upvote). So instead of saying "woman" here If I just "assumed" he is a man and said congratulations "man" or "bro" would I get plus points?
This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people's lives. EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.
I believe the most useful invention of the 19th century was possibly the cotton gin :)
This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people's lives. EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.
I think you meant 20th (or 21st) century.
Key quote (for me) from the interview: "A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network." source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...
I had a similar realisation. What's the product in a social network? It's you.
It's not purposefully evil or inherently wrong, just an inevitable consequence of the business models involved in free-to-use social networks.
I'm trying to explore whether a paid social network could be a workable model with https://postbelt.com
Please check it out :-)