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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#41
post #3

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.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#42
post #4
post #3

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.

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 people who do use Gmail.

Don't like Facebook? Go to Ello. But now you've lost your entire network.

The decentralized web will be built on data formats and protocols that allow you to take your data with you and force companies to compete with the quality of their service, not the size of their network.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#46
post #3

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-...

It may be good, after all we are talking about private information. Some degree of control and exposition are welcome.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#49

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.

Diffie and Hellman won it only last year, 40 years after their seminal paper was published! It is indeed a very tough award to get.
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