Category Archives: Internet

Business Games Internet

OnLive – an idea that deserves to work (eventually)

March 24, 2009 – 12:53 pm

In the past, I’ve made no bones here about the fact that I consider proprietary console platforms to be a sub-optimal content delivery platform for games. I understand why they’ve got to this stage (desire to seed the market with advanced, standardised tech at less than cost price, requiring lock-in to recoup later), but that doesn’t make them a desirable end-game. Closed systems are by nature market distorting, and can hamper innovation, because when only a chosen group of ‘authorised’ developers have access to deploy on it, you’re not maximising the amount of content innovation available. XNA and the CommunityGames Channel go some way to addressing that, so kudos to MS for trying, but the fact that it mandates a certain technology means that it’s something of a dichotomy – it’s great that it’s open, but it’s significantly hampered by the fact that what you develop will only work in that environment (or on Windows), when in practice a lot more people want to be able to reuse their technology across many platforms, like mobiles, the Mac etc. Also the tools and libraries for XNA might be good and expanding, but they still represent a tiny subset of the breadth and maturity you get access to when using C/C++ so I’d still consider it less desirable as a target platform. Of course, the reason for this restriction is security, which again goes back to the closed platform argument.

Personally, I most love devices where anyone can create on them, using whatever tools they like. All other media follows this pattern – films, books, music can all be created by anyone with the will to do so and will ‘play’ on a standard device in any home; the limitations associated with games are a throwback to a historical position which gets eroded every generation (look at the exclusive / cross-platform ratio this gen compared to previous iterations), and which will eventually disappear. The PC remains king of the hill in my book – but of course commercially it’s a bit tricky. The two main issues are piracy and hardware compatibility – price is sometimes listed here too, but that’s blown out of proportion; the kind of people that say you need to spend £1500 on a gaming PC are talking out of their arse, you can build a good gaming PC that will outclass the main consoles for a third of that price these days,  it’ll never be as cheap as the console, but you can do a lot more with it.

OnLive tries to address these problems by running your games in a server farm (the ‘cloud’ if you will), and just having a relatively simple device at the customer end – which can be an existing PC or a small set-top box if you don’t have one. I think it’s a little early, since internet speeds are still a bit rubbish in many parts of the world (here, for example) and not up to the 5Mb/s required for HD delivery, but there’s definitely a good kernel of an idea here. Lag is of course an issue, most concerningly on the input side, but in practice the kind of information going back and forth is actually no more than what you have in a standard multiplayer game, and providing the video streaming can keep up, it might just work. I can’t see it working for very lag-sensitive games like music games, but for most other things if the QoS is acceptable it might be ok.

This deals with hardware requirements, because the set-top box is cheap, and piracy because the games are never actually on  your machine anyway. I could imagine games moving more significantly towards a rental / subscription system in this kind of scenario, except where the developers get paid more directly based on play time rather than just the initial box purchase like with current rental schemes – I consider that a good thing for developers, since those who make games which people play for months or even years deserve to be rewarded for that.

The one concern I have is that the service provider still controls the content that you can see. I could imagine that once the technology is mature, other service providers would compete and hopefully content delivery would be more open. However, in practice I can see that initially service providers would want to lock down the service, putting us essentially back in the one-provider situation again. So, even if the technical hurdles can be cleared, this might not lead to open gaming nirvana just yet. A requirement would be an open development package (something like SteamWorks), where anyone could develop content that would work on the platform even if they still had to gain authorisation to be hosted there (and I could imagine the barrier to entry here would be lower anyway).

So, despite the difficulties and unknowns it’s a step in the right direction I think. The closer games get to the state of availability and openness enjoyed by other media, the better we’ll all be for it. I actually think that the next generation of platforms may be a stepping stone in this direction – I would actually not be surprised if Microsoft was looking at this area for the 360′s successor, since they have always been fans of digital delivery. I could imagine that perhaps the next iteration, probably announced in 2010/11 might be a hybrid device, capable of disc play but with a much heavier emphasis on digital delivery, and I don’t think full downloads are necessarily the way that will go for full games, because of the high up-front wait time. I think it’s more likely to be either something like OnLive, or the progressive download technology used by GameTap (where just enough of the game is downloaded to start playing, with the rest downloaded as you play in the background).

Either way, I think the ‘traditional’ console business model is reaching the end of its run, and the next 10 years will see it transform completely from the way it is now. Those who think it won’t – remember that 10 years ago the Internet was still embryonic, Amazon was still small and Google didn’t exist – 10 years is a long time. Technology just doesn’t sell games as much as it used to (see the Wii), and in that environment it makes less sense to have to subsidise cheap cutting-edge (at the time) hardware in the living room and recoup through artificial restrictions – it becomes all about the content and how you sell as much of it as you can to customers; which means re-examining your content delivery approach, going broader and opening up to allow more people to deploy content (because how will  you find the next big thing otherwise?), taking away disincentives to buy (such as having to buy 3+ consoles to play everything), getting content to people quicker, and most importantly in the manner they want it. Forget what worked in the past, you won’t discover what will work best in the future by holding on to a model that was developed in the 80′s.

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Internet

Pink Fluffy Bunny Friday

November 25, 2008 – 1:03 pm

The only trouble with the whole international, interwoven, inter-everything internet is that it frequently throws me a cultural curve-ball (or, to localise it in the spirit of this post, an ‘off spin ball’). One such case is the inexplicable deluge of emails and news feeds I’m getting telling me about the run up to ‘Black Friday‘.

I don’t know about anywhere else, but here associating the colour black with a day usually suggests something pretty bad, so having the likes of Amazon mailing you about it, suggesting that in honour of this event they’re doing special offers, is initially bewildering. But allegedly this is not about financial crashes, wars or suppression of local populaces, it’s entirely a commercial thing, so that’s ok. Apparently it’s associated with people taking an extra day off after Thanksgiving, that US-specific holiday that seems a lot like a good excuse to have 2 Christmas dinners over winter.

Honestly though, couldn’t they have come up with a name that sounded a little less cataclysmic?

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Games Internet Political

User generated content and centralised control don’t mix

November 10, 2008 – 1:31 pm

User generated content is currently something of a media darling in the game industry. Of course, it’s actually nothing new – gamers on open platforms like PC and the home computers before it have been creating mods and new content for their games for a couple of decades now. What’s different now with the advent of yet another acronym to remember (UGC) is that the concept has finally come to the home consoles, those friendly ‘turn on and play’ devices.

On paper, it sounds great – finally, people using consumer-friendly boxes can be creative without having to hunt down FAQs on the internet and learn how to tame often esoteric toolsets (although many people, me included, find this part of the fun of course). All the tools you need are presented in the box, together with a way to distribute them to your friends and the wider internet. But, as ever, the downside is related to the fiefdoms of control the consoles always operate within.

Guitar Hero : World Tour and Little Big Planet are the two most recognised sources of console UGC right now, and both are subject to many media reports of users’ carefully crafted content being deleted by moderators, due to copyright concerns. Any cover of a commercial song, or even a game tune, is summarily removed from GH:WT (as was widely predicted), and now levels which are in homage of titles like Mario are getting removed from Little Big Planet too. It’s perfectly understandable of course; the companies running the servers on which the content sits cannot afford to be sued over it, so are taking the cautious route and pre-empting any problems. But it also shows that centrally controlling content is capable of stunting the otherwise grand promise of user generated content.

The Internet is as successful as it is because control is distributed. For better or worse, you can find publish pretty much anything, and that makes it what it is – a sea of dubious quality data from which search indexes, linking and recommendations turn into a usable, ever mutating wonderland. UGC has this potential in the gaming space, but it can never fully realise it while content is regulated at a central source. It’s similar to the way fanfic and fanart are always popular, but organised publishers of it get sued these days, so the place to really find it is on smaller, distributed fan sites, not central corporate ones. Console UGC is certainly good fun, and better than no UGC at all, but the fact that it may only be published in one place means Big Brother is always controlling what can and cannot be published, and that is the antithesis of the principle of personal creativity. Creativity wants to be free, not penned in by what a central source says it can and cannot express; if I want to create a LBP level where Link and Mario belch a cover version of Bohemian Rhapsody, I damn well should be able to. :) But, that won’t happen in the control-obsessed world of the console any time soon I’m sure.

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Business Internet Open Source

Locked into the cloud?

October 8, 2008 – 10:30 am

There was an interesting article last week on the Guardian site where Richard Stallman took a pop at the rising use of ‘cloud computing’ – where computing resources and applications are delivered on demand to your devices via the magic of the interweb.

Now, I don’t find myself particularly aligned with Mr Stallman a lot of the time, but he definitely has a very good point in this instance; although I do think the argument was too highly generalised (which probably came from the journalist rather than Stallman).

The key point is that relying on web-based services to perform your critical business or personal tasks is potentially just another source of vendor lock-in; right now as an emerging market these services are very attractively priced, highly competitive and making all the right noises when it comes to interoperability, but markets have a tendency to mature, change and consolidate over time, and if you set yourself up to be entirely reliant on a vendor, it doesn’t matter whether they’re an incumbent 20+ year old operating system vendor, or a more sexy, popularist online service provider, the dynamics are the same when the market consolidates and large, dominant players emerge. If you’re so dependent on a vendor that to switch is painful, they have you by the short and curlies and have a significant amount of scope to overcharge you, put upselling pressure on you, change the rules under your feet, and all the old tricks proprietary vendors have been using for decades.

There is definitely a valid argument here. Over the years I’ve consistently seen that the most important thing when it comes to IT strategy is control. Short-term costs, simplicity, immediacy, training costs etc are all important factors, but over the medium to long term they all pale in comparison to the importance of retaining as much control over your IT investments as possible. You’re going to have to retrain staff regularly anyway, the only constant is change so deluding yourself that you’re buying a ‘stable’ platform from a vendor is usually nonsense, opportunity costs related to restricted products are a factor – all these things mean ceding as little control over your own usage of software to your vendors as possible, because if they’re the ones in the driving seat, you’re in trouble. This is central to my attraction to open source; the fact that a lot of it is free (as in beer) is in the round the least important factor (although in the short term, it certainly sweetens the deal) – the most important thing is that you’re in control of the end result; you can innovate & invest on top of it and not be so concerned about a vendor yanking the rug out from under you, because you always have the capability to switch support vendors or go your own way if absolutely necessary. It’s also why even with my commercial products, I provide source code and the ability to create derived versions, because I recognise that giving a customer control over their own destiny is important.

However, saying that cloud computing is universally a new source of lock-in evil is an overgeneralisation. Yes, when you use applications in the cloud (the SaaS model), if those applications are not available from anyone else then you’re setting yourself up for another lock-in scenario, just on the web. Something like GMail isn’t necessarily so bad, because mail is standard enough that it can be pulled out and transferred to something else if you want (assuming Google don’t start making that difficult, which is always an option); but complex applications provisioned via the web can certainly be a problem if that capability cannot be easily replicated elsewhere.

As a counter example though, take Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). This differs in that it simply provides computing capability, not applications. So I can create a server image, running Linux and all my favourite open source server applications (which themselves allow me as much control as I wish), and turn it into a virtual instance which I can then run on Amazon’s cloud, which is convenient and scalable for me. Everything I’m running is still under my control, it’s just standard computing capability that I’m renting from Amazon because I don’t want to maintain a datacentre of my own. This aspect of the cloud is therefore entirely different; I’m not locked in at all – if I wanted I could transfer my server configurations somewhere else and they’d operate in exactly the same way. This is a kind of ‘good’ cloud computing, contrasted to the ‘potentially evil’ cloud computing of relying on cloud hosted but firmly shuttered applications. Sure, it requires more up-front investment by me too, but that’s paid back in spades due over the medium to long term, and as we’ve seen from the credit crunch, short term thinking has a tendency to eventually implode on itself.

Tim O’Reilly talked about this a little last year too, and I think this quote sums it up:

Outsized profits come from lock-in of one kind or another. Yes, there are companies that have no lock-in that gain outsized profits merely by means of scale, but they are few and far between. So the question I’ve been asking from the beginning of my thinking and advocacy about open source is this one: Where are the new sources of lock-in, once we’ve taken away the old ones based on proprietary APIs, binary software, and control over distribution channels? As those who’ve read my What is Web 2.0? piece or have heard my talks on the subject know, I believe that one of the new sources of lock-in is through large databases created via network effects, such that it’s hard for a new entrant to match the services of the incumbent, since the value of those services is proportional to the size of the existing network. This is not an unbreakable source of lock-in, but it is not the second coming of the Summer of Love either.

The moral is to always be wary of vendor lock-in, in any form. It may look harmless now, but as we have seen in recent weeks all industries and markets have ebbs and flows, and by being complacent in the good times you leave yourself entirely open to exploitation when things are less rosy. Vigilance and a long-term strategy of retaining as much control as possible will pay off in the end; don’t believe the glossy vendor fliers that say giving up that control is easy, fun, and free from any possible consequences. In most cases, retaining control of your own destiny is not that difficult, it just requires a slightly greater awareness of the business at large, a little extra effort which is easily justified in the medium term, and crucially, not getting sucked into the belief that any vendor is your friend. Keep that in mind and strategic decisions of this nature are much easier to make consistently, regardless of the trends that blow through from time to time.

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Internet Political Tech

Strange coincidences

July 30, 2008 – 10:40 am

I read today that ‘Pentagon uber-hacker’ (if you believe the US authorities, who presumably don’t want you to think that their security systems are akin to wet tissue paper) Gary McKinnon has lost his appeal in the Lords against his extradition to the USA. I think we can all feel sorry that a misguided but definitely non-malicious geek is going to get the book thrown at him.

Coincidentally, we also watched Sneakers last night, after I finally got around to buying it on DVD. It’s still one of my favourite films, even though occasionally it errs on being film-friendly rather than technically realistic (accoustic couplers in 1992?). The cast is fantastic, the script is great, and the appeal of a bunch of non-conformist, philanthropic hackers coming out on top is enduring.

What a shame life doesn’t imitate fiction a little more often.

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Internet Tech Web

Switching to Firefox 3

June 18, 2008 – 10:53 am

Now it’s out of beta, Firefox 3 has become my primary browser – it’s a nice speed upgrade and I like the little extras like the unobtrusive ‘remember password’ prompt, smart location bar and reduced memory usage. It’s a shame their servers went belly-up on the planned release day, but then they did paint a bullseye on their face.

There were a few hiccups- I have a few add-ons I generally feel I couldn’t live without and a couple of them didn’t want to work immediately.

  • Firebug won’t upgrade itself, you have to switch to the beta 1.1 version if you want it to work with FF3. Seems to work fine.
  • Google Browser Sync doesn’t work and Google have apparently dropped future development support for it – because they never released it as open source (why?) it’s essentially a dead product. Foxmarks is a nice quick alternative, although it does only synchronise bookmarks and not open tabs, cookies or passwords. It does have the advantage that you can sync it to your own server if you want though. Long term Mozilla Weave looks like it could be the best option, but it seems a little young right now.

Also oddly, I had no back / forward button block to begin with. I don’t know if that was linked to the fact that I’d been running the beta beforehand, but I had to customise the toolbar to add it back in.

Still, overall it definitely feels faster and slicker, so it’s a useful update to a major staple of my application toolset. I haven’t tried the native look and feel on OS X yet, I’ll be updating next time I’m on the Mac to see what it’s like.

Opera is still the fastest browser of course, but IMO they really missed the boat by holding on to the concept of being able to sell a browser for a little too long, and I’m not sure they’ll ever catch up in terms of the sheer breadth of available add-ons. I have Opera installed on my machine too (for testing) and although it’s good I always gravitate back to FF just because of all the useful add-ons & the more active community – the same applied to Safari on the Mac.

Whatever your preference, with all these options there’s really no excuse to still be using that buggy piece of trash called IE!

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Internet Personal

My first eBay scam

June 14, 2008 – 5:01 pm

I’m not a heavy user of eBay, in fact until about a year or two ago I’d never used it. Unlike some people who routinely buy tons of DVDs & games etc that they want to offload later, I tend to mostly buy stuff that I want to keep, and anything that I finally want to get rid of after a few years, I give to a charity shop. I did however find it useful to sell off my laptop last year, and I’ve since used it to sell a couple of bits of PC hardware I didn’t need anymore – they weren’t the kind of thing a charity shop would really find a use for, I can’t imagine a Granny picking one up there and thinking ‘oh yeah, I could really use a Mini-ITX board to run that media server I fancied building’.

However, I’m now getting rid of all my PS2 hardware, since its remaining raison d’etre was Guitar Hero which has now been ruthlessly usurped by Rock Band. Since it’s all only a year old and I’d quite like to offset some of the significant financial outlay for Rock Band, I naturally turned to eBay.

I figured I’d put a Buy It Now option on the PS2 hardware itself, and was pleased when someone took it up. However, I was less pleased afterwards to receive a forged PayPal payment confirmation email, sporting a delivery address in Nigeria. The email was quite a good forgery, they got the layout spot-on and they tried to hide their forged links behind Javascript-laden images, but really the effort was wasted since there were a couple of fatal flaws that even a total moron should have spotted:

  1. The address was in Nigeria. Internet scam capital of the world. Duh.
  2. They had inexplicably decided to add £100 to the amount (supposedly) paid for no good reason. Clearly the idea was to get people so excited that they would ignore the other issues, but I’ve always been taught that if something looks too good to be true, it usually is
  3. The excuse as to why this email was not backed up with eBay / PayPal transactions was frankly ludicrous: “the amount will not show up until you send us the shipping reference number”. Shyeah, right.

This was the first time this had happened to me, but even so I’m stunned that people are taken in by this sort of attempt. Obviously I cancelled the bid and re-listed, but from what I read, people really do fall for this kind of thing; high-end mobiles appear to be very popular in particular. How dumb do you have to be to mail a £300 phone to an address in Nigeria on the back of an email that says that the money will magically appear once the item is in the mail? Maybe greed turns off certain parts of some people’s brains – wave the prospect of way more money than the item is worth in front of someone and maybe they’ll put common sense on hold.

In the end it’s a minor annoyance this one time. I’m actually surprised I didn’t have the problem with my laptop, which was valued significantly higher than the PS2 – maybe it was the Buy It Now option that was the honeypot. At least feel included in the whole Nigerian scam Internet phenomenon now – sure I’ve had the 419 emails for years but those are so impersonal :)

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Internet Tech

The utility of spam, and YouTube’s velvet ropes

June 8, 2008 – 12:54 pm

A couple of random thoughts for a slow Sunday…

You know, despite being universally reviled, spam actually has a purpose – and that is to prove that my email is working. My spam defenses are pretty good and sift out the vast majority of junk, but I still get the odd unfiltered mail every day and in a way, it’s comforting. It’s like a little heartbeat telling me that my email is indeed still online, and I will therefore be getting any important mail on time. :) In the last 12 hours I didn’t get any, and I was actually a little suspicious, and proceeded to test my mail (which was still fine). Funny how you come to rely on such things.

Secondly, I had noticed that YouTube was starting to shut me out of a lot of videos in recent days. It seems they’ve signed partner agreements with a bunch of media companies, and as of now most of the ‘top hits’ for things like music videos I look up have a little red triangle in the top left, meaning ‘partner video’. Yesterday when I was looking these up on Windows / Firefox, without exception these videos came up with an error saying ‘this video is not available in your country’ or similar – so I had to locate unofficial videos for the post I made yesterday. Oddly today (and I’m on the Mac now) I seem to be able to get to these videos – I’m guessing they perform these filters by IP though so my platform shouldn’t make a difference; maybe they’ve changed it in the last 24 hours and allowed the UK to see these videos? Anyone know what’s going on? I see this as one of the inevitable downsides as sites like YouTube start to make money.

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Internet Local Tech

My ADSL speed creeps upward, almost at 2005 levels now

May 21, 2008 – 11:26 am

I’ve often bitched about my connection to the intertubes being pretty slow compared to what is generally expected in the current times. As average download speeds have increased, I’ve found myself going to sites that assume faster download speeds than I have, and thus having to pause & come back to videos when they’ve buffered more to avoid an irritating stop-start experience (note to flash players that only allow buffering of a little bit of a video – shame on you). I jumped on the broadband wagon in 2001 at a downstream speed of 512k/s, and until now, in the intervening 6 and a bit years, the speed has only increased once to 1M/s. That’s pretty piss-poor, but the reality is that we’re an island, and even though we’ve been getting increased capacity via fibre-optic cable links to Europe, our shores are clogged with offshore finance businesses and gambling websites from other juristictions (hosted here for regulatory reasons) who are quite willing to soak up all this extra bandwidth through dedicated circuits at incredibly inflated prices, so the average consumer has been mostly forgotten.

Well, we’ve been tossed a bone finally and my downstream speed has now increased to 2M/s (unlimited), which is certainly welcome, but incredibly late and still below par considering I pay £22 per month for it – in comparison in the UK O2 will do 16M/s (unlimited) for £15pm. A quick test at SpeedTest.net (off-peak) indeed reported a decent performance, slightly off the max reported by my router:

I’m not sure why it thinks my ISP is in Slough, but there you go. The important fact, something I’ve banged on about for some time to our intransigent infrastructure supplier (Cable & Wireless, now rebranded as ‘Sure’ locally, which ironically is my exact response whenever their PR dept claims they’re building a ‘world class telecoms system’), is that we’re still running at about half the average speed of the UK and Europe, which is still pitiful. Yeah, I know there’s the island aspect, but that cuts both ways – the cables never have far to go here, certainly compared to the UK/Europe averages which include distant rural areas – even my parents can get up to 6.5M/s where they live, and they’re in a tiny village in rural Cornwall.  Plus, there’s also a captive market locally sloshing with shedloads of money from rich finance houses and related high-value services, which can easily fund investment – if there’s one place you could build a modern telecommunications infrastructure, it’s somewhere like this. But, they either can’t, or they’re not interested in doing so (for consumers), given that they can make their sackfuls of money from business links, and consumer services are small beer. That’s also why it’s almost impossible to rent a server cost-effectively over here, they’re only interested in (gambling) companies that will rent several racks at a time, small customers are irrelevant to them. Luckily that market is global – I can host pretty much anywhere and get a deal 10x better than I can locally – but when it comes to my local internet connection, I’m stuck with what we have.

I’m holding out for one of the competitors to put up a few high-speed wireless transmitters covering the whole island (not that difficult), using the bandwidth from the extra optical cable they’ve brought ashore in recent weeks, and completely bypass the physical cabling system that ‘Sure’ controls – maybe that will finally shake them out of their torpor and make them appreciate the consumer market again. But, my cynical mind thinks it’s more likely they’ll also chase the business customers first anyway since it has a greater return. Hmm.

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Internet Political

Re-democratising the Internet

May 12, 2008 – 11:59 am

Web 2.0. It’s a horrible, marketing-speak term that deserves the unending derision it is generally given by techs the world over, but nevertheless it’s stuck. Depending on who you ask, Web 2.0 either means the technology that make current darlings like Facebook and GMail work (such as AJAX), or the underlying principles of the regular users of websites having a more direct community involvement in the shaping of content they view. I guess it’s actually both. People have heralded this progression as a new renaissance for the Internet – personally I just see it as a natural incremental progression of technology and not the sea change that it is often sold as, there were pockets of the Internet doing this stuff long before the term was coined, it’s just more mainstream now.

However, there’s a trend that I’ve seen arise from Web 2.0 which I find a little disconcerting, and that’s an increasing centralisation of control and increasing reliance by the Internet-surfing public on a small number of technology players. On the one hand, we have personally hosted blogs, forums, comments etc where content is truly democratic / meritocratic; no-one controls what I say or do on this blog but me, and I expose precisely what I want to and no more. On the other hand, you have corporate players who provide hosted services, and increasingly this is what’s becoming what most ‘normal’ people associate with Web 2.0 – sites like Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, GMail are all controlled by corporations who make their money by attracting eyeballs. The content may be user-generated, but control over that content once posted is very much centralised and divested from the point of origin – convenient for sure, but what exactly are we giving up by being so dependent on them?

Freedom of speech has been one of the core tenets of the Internet from its inception. However, corporations have vested interests and potential exposure to litigation, so any service they host must be regulated, which is at odds with this principle. The result is of course censorship, often harsh and unilateral (particularly if Viacom took a dislike to you) and it has plagued most of the big names at one time or another. It’s because there’s a fundamental conflict of interest here – the corporations hosting these services make their money by hosting user content, but some of that content can get them into trouble, or ruffle feathers that it is not in their business interests to ruffle. Sure, these centralised sites can pretend to be the voice of the people, but they’re really not – they’re just corporations who have figured out how to make money by being a conduit for people’s Internet behaviour. In the end, despite the rethoric they’re ultimately not there for the individuals, or to make the world a better place, they’re there to make money – and individuals and content that isn’t compatible with that model can and will be excluded.

There are other issues too, probably the most important one being privacy. Protection of personal data from corporate exploitation has always been a serious issue in the UK (let’s ignore for a second privacy from our own governments which has gone backwards in recent years) but increasingly people are giving away their personal information to companies hosted in regions which have little or no such protection. Sure, a site may have a privacy policy, and perhaps give you supposed control over who you’re exposing the information to, but if they’re negligent and allow your data to slip into the wrong hands, there’s really very little statutory recourse, meaning data protection can never truly be a top priority for these companies, not compared to shoehorning in new features to beat the competition or to find ways of generating revenue. With identity theft on the rise, it’s alarming that so many people are willing to risk entrusting their personal information to third parties in juristictions with flimsy protections, and to companies who can sometimes pay lip service to privacy.

My opinion on this is that these problems are inherent to using third parties to act as hosts for our information, or rather allowing those third parties to control how the information is stored and regulated (and if you think that interface on your Facebook profile is true control, think again – at the end of the day your data is sitting unencrypted in a datacenter somewhere and is far from secure). They’re never going to care as much about our information as we do – with millions of users and a business to run, how could they? Maybe you don’t care that much since you’re just using these sites for personal photos and simple information, but I think this is a slippery slope. Do you know where the dividing line is between facts you’d be happy to be accidentally exposed by a server breach, and those you would not? Perhaps it isn’t a line, maybe it’s more of a grey area, since it’s increasingly possible to take a bunch of disparate information and piece together a greater profile from that? And can you deny that more and more of your life is transitioning to the internet, and that at some point you might look at everything you’ve given to the likes of Facebook and wish you hadn’t? And, what if you find that you can’t delete it?

Web 2.0 and the current vision of what ‘the cloud’ should be tends to revolve around technology companies holding repositories of information which we all must feed in order to form these rich online information exchanges. However, I really don’t believe this is necessary. Yes, there is a need for ‘hubs’ in the Internet, focal points where people can discover each other and connections. However, there’s really no reason why all our potentially private data needs to be centralised, under someone elses control. Right now it’s the only way for most people, because rolling your own hosting requires more technical knowledge and resources than most people have at their disposal, and ‘connecting the dots’ can only currently be done on centralised sites. I think we should be working towards developing technologies that make it easier for individuals to be in charge of their own information, not to give it away to third parties, and to form and be in control of their own connections – directly, not just via some centralised site which provides a mere illusion of control.

Personally, I see the current situation as a step on the path, and that the eventual goal should be to ‘re-democratise’ the Internet, where users are once again in full control of their data, exposing and exchanging only what they want to, directly with their trusted contacts and not via an untrusted middle man. Every Internet user has an ISP, and that ISP generally provides them with additional services like a mailbox and some variable amount of web hosting. All these technologies are based on standardised protocols and well-known principles, and generally are delivered via open source software. They’re true commodities – and what’s surprising is that this base feature set has barely changed in over a decade, and yet the way people use the Internet has changed almost beyond recognition. Imagine this – what if, as part of your ISP service, you were provided not just with simple web hosting, but a local version of Facebook? One where all the data you post is held locally on the ISP’s server (with appropriate quotas, but hey, disks are cheap), and preferably encrypted. Let’s now say that you can syndicate / exchange elements of that information to third parties that you trust over standardised protocols – exchanged over a secure channel if desired and the source / destination verified using digital signatures or common authentication systems like OpenID. All those updates you usually post to a central site can easily be desemminated directly in an ad-hoc fashion to your friends in a push model, or in a pull model for new joiners. But, you may ask, even with the automated syndication / synchronisation, how do you find your friends in the first place without a central system? Well, via the search engines we’ve all used for years – you will obviously need a regular public profile web page for unvalidated users to land on, and automated search engine submission; there’s no reason why specialist networking providers like Facebook couldn’t still act as hubs for just the public information to allow this discovery to happen, without having to hold sensitive or personal data.

In a nutshell the advantages of this approach over current centralised services include:

  • Control of personal data remains in your own hands; you can choose what to give out, control encryption etc
  • No censorship
  • No need to maintain multiple profiles in many different systems
  • No dependence on third parties, they are a value-add, not an inherent requirement
  • Security based on open standards, transparency and trust are key

Much of the technology required to do this already exists, and has done for years, what’s needed is the vision and development effort to pull it all together and make it truly usable for the mass-market. If something like this is to fly, it has to be as easy to use as Facebook even though the underlying tech to make it happen is a lot more complex (as any decentralised system is). I think it’s an effort worth making though; personally I strongly believe that we’re setting ourselves up for a fall by entrusting too much of our data to third parties, and that in years to come, as people look to put more and more of their personal and business lives up on the Internet, eventually people will be crying out for a way to wrench control of their information back. Think of the web-of-trust systems we rely on for PGP communications, and now imagine that extended to a social network model, peer to peer, decentralised control, encrypted and validated via trusted signatures, not some self-appointed third-party web site.

The hard part is finding a business model to support it, because to do something this ambitious will undoubtedly require funding. Although I strongly believe that putting the power back in the hands of the people is the right thing to do, when you stack it up as a business pitch against the current approach of forcing users to give all their data to you, and to be totally reliant on you on an ongoing basis, it doesn’t stack up particularly well. Plus, everyone is already familiar with the ‘host user content, get eyeballs, profit!’ sequence so it’s a relatively easy sell. Perhaps the answer is not to chase the stratospheric growth targets of typical Web 2.0 companies, but to ramp something up quietly and organically, funding via lightweight (optional) hub search services and provisioning to ISPs and/or early adopters. Open source is totally inherent in the approach too, both to promote open adoption but also to instill trust – in order to fully trust a system like this, its inner workings have to be completely open for anyone to scrutinise.

Well, there we go, my vision for the future of exchange of personal information on the Internet. If any VCs are reading this, feel free to discuss it with me further :)

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