I came across Tim O’Reilly’s post entitled Open Source and Cloud Computing today, and I was pretty happy to see that his thoughts reinforced what I was saying a couple of months ago about how I thought isolated, corporate-owned islands in the ‘cloud’ were not a beneficial model for the Internet long-term, despite the short-term convenience in today’s society.
I was also very interested to see from his links in that article that some in the open source community are already forming plans to address it. It’s early days yet, but I look forward to a day when we can have all the convenience of sites like Facebook provide without having to cede control of our data to a centralised corporate entity searching desperately for a way to dissect that data & our browsing behaviour for revenue opportunities.
It’s funny because when talking about this issue to a friend recently, I made the comparison between sites like Facebook now, and the ‘gated communities’ of AOL / Compuserve in the past, before the Internet took off. They too used their sealed community to generate revenue, but when people finally had the option to become free of that and get the same functionality, users deserted in their droves to the liberated environment of the Internet. Tim used the same analogy in his article, so maybe I’m not crazy after all.
August 4th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
No answer for facebook yet, but the generalised solution is obviously in systems which can be ‘federated’, with open source implementations.
Compare MSN Messenger (or whatever stupid name they’re calling it this will) or AIM, with XMPP. Likewise Twitter with Identi.ca.
To put that into a Facebook context, you would be looking at an open source implementation of a Facebook-type platform that anyone could host, and with the ability for multiple instances of that to interoperate to form a larger system.
Not sure why you care though, you hate the whole idea of Facebook don’t you?
August 4th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Yes, exactly my point.
Part of me hates the time-wasting element of Facebook, particularly all the bloody stupid ‘applications’ that people pepper their profiles with. I want to puke when I see someone send a ‘gift’ – it’s cras and ridiculous. But, getting rid of all that guff I can see the useful core functionality there (non-techs sharing stuff easily & privately) – I just think the centralised Facebook model is entirely the wrong vehicle for it, albeit the only practical one ATM. I think it’s a total dead end and the antithesis of what the Internet stands for, and I can’t wait for it to be superceded, something this is entirely inevitable IMO.
With that in mind, the thing that irritates me most is that people like Zuckerberg take a ton of investment money on the back of just being a popularist portal, on the assumption that one day it will turn into a vast money making machine. That his whole business proposition revolves around ever-fickle Internet fashion, and yet people still chuck money at him, like the bubble will never burst. The fact that he comes across as a bit of an arrogant douche with very little of interest to say doesn’t help of course.
It’s just a matter of time for the Internet to return to a libertarian, open model in this subject area too. If Facebook’s investors can’t see it, great – I’ll be the one with the popcorn watching the ship go down with a big grin on my face.
August 5th, 2008 at 5:19 am
What scares me is that people have been saying the same thing about operating systems and Microsoft for the past 20 years.
All it takes is some competitor buyouts (eg. how is it in the customer’s interest for Yahoo to sell out to MS?), legal bullshit (patents, etc), and a dash of not-perfectly-legal skullduggery, and one company can make an entire industry grind to a near standstill. Hopefully Facebook, at least, won’t be smart (or lucky) enough to pull that kind of thing off.
(Facebook is useful for one thing, though: It brings up the fact that more form fields need an “it’s complicated” option.)
August 5th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
“It’s just a matter of time for the Internet to return to a libertarian, open model in this subject area too.”
There is nothing to go back to.
Things only got better since the mid 90s.
It is the same internet , you still can do everything you were able to do 10 years ago.
It is only a matter of someone with enough skills and vision coming up with an open source equivalent of Facebook … they would have to compete with guys like Zuckerberg but that has nothing to do with liberty or open source or the Internet … it is the age old question who can build a better mousetrap.
Believe me , people won’t give a damn if your site is more open, libertarian or is run by a sadistic maniac – you just need to be build a better mousetrap and they will come.
August 5th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
@Frenetic: the difference is a desktop has a completely different set of usage patterns that make it more feasible as a closed system, because it’s entirely local. So long as it can talk to other things, you don’t care, especially as you control it. Now, try asking people to put the entire contents of their desktops in the cloud, and even further try asking them to give it to a free host who needs to mine it for ad revenue. Ain’t going to happen. This is the brick wall that the current cloud model will eventually hit, millions of people are not going to want to centralise all their data with one corporate entity. They’re ok with fickle stuff on Facebook et al for now, but that’s not a long-term solution to connected data systems of the future.
@warmi: I totally disagree. If people didn’t see the benefits of freedom & openness in the Internet then we’d still all be using AOL / Compuserve. And of course people did use these services until something better came along – and it wasn’t a ‘new’ Compuserve model. I say the days of the isolated cloud model are numbered, it’s just too new for regular people to have gotten fed up with it yet. Just because the technology behind the internet has gotten better every year, doesn’t mean gated, centralised, corporate controlled communities like Facebook are actually a good idea – they just happen to be the early adopters which need to adopt certain business models to attract investment, models which aren’t actually in the best interest of their users. I see them as a good experiment but ultimately an evolutionary dead end; 5 years from now I bet we’ll have backed up and addressed the core ‘need’ in a way which more naturally reflects an open & distributed system like the Internet.
The future is going to be about putting a lot more about ourselves on the Internet. We’re going to want to partition it into friend stuff, professional stuff, personal stuff, private stuff, and get to it anywhere, securely, without anyone prying at it. It’s going to be complex, so it all needs to work consistently. Moreso, we need the ability to control it ourselves, or at best relatively local service providers that we trust to manage it. Centralised services like Facebook will never scale to this level, and even if they could, we could never trust a central corporation to hold all the data for everyone in the world. The idea of a single centralised island just for personal stuff, controlled by a company in the US is going to seem quaint and old-fashioned in a few years.