Pretty Convenience
31 July 2010
Trying to find a transcript of a video of Tim O’Reilly’s opening keynote at the 2007 Web 2.0 Expo Europe in Berlin isn’t as easy as it sounds. Which disproves the saying that Google doesn’t forget. If the Ubernerd is talking in front of over a thousand nerds and you can’t find it on the net merely three years later, there is seemingly a chance for privacy after all.
The quote I’ve been looking for had something to do with centralization. O’Reilly was telling the crowd how everything in the Web 2.0 biz is starting out as fragmented community of startups, but eventually there will be a tendency towards centralization. I’m not a 100%, if that’s right, but that’s how I remember it and if by any chance remembers it correctly and the right quote doesn’t make my point obsolete, please feel free to post it in the comments.
My views on centralization are very clear: I’m not a fan. In some cases I do understand the need for it, but in the end we should always work towards solution that aren’t making us dependable on one or few providers of a specific service / product.
Do you remember the time we started blogging? The ability to do so wasn’t accessible to everyone at the same time, but during a very short period of time, we came to realize that having the ability to publish content, freely, openly, without political or financial agendas and without censorship is a big step towards something good. We’re today less dependent on information from few sources then before and we’re able to prove the still very influential elites wrong, if they’re actually wrong. Some people even called that a revolution and although no real blood was shed, it’s in fact a abrupt and hefty step towards freedom of information. Most of the readers of this blog are enjoying the fruits of this revolution in one way or another.
I didn’t agree with O’Reilly back in 2007. It didn’t make any sense for me that the fragmentation that helped to produce so many fantastic ideas would actually turn back on its principles and go towards centralization. But O’Reilly being the Ubernerd and me still practically a rookie … well, you know, I’m wrong.
Today we seem to have more centralized products with great influence on the whole ecosystem then in 2007. Apple’s iTunes platform is just one part of the equation. Look what happened after Amazon announced the price drop for the Kindle. Everybody stopped breathing for a second and actually started ordering this thing. Sure, the price is hot and who really cares about the fact that you can’t take your books out of the Kindle store. After all, who would switch from it anyway, right? Remember how that worked out with Windows?
But it’s not only those two. I’ve only recently started buying applications for my Nexus One and during this process I found myself wandering about the fact that I’m actually buying software that I can’t give away or sell it after I’m finished with it. I’m used to buy games and give them to my friends, but not on the mobile platform, not even with Google’s ‘open’ Android.
The internet, the so called revolution … we gained a lot of freedom in the process, but somehow we seem to lose a bunch of it to those new gate keepers. We’ve maybe striped the power of people like Rupert Murdoch, but we are slowly and quietly giving it to different people. Mostly, because right now it’s so convenient and pretty.
I struggle with this myself in several ways.
For a while I ran a standalone, open-source bookmarking server on my webserver that let me transition from delicious.com to a decentralized solution. Unfortunately I lost all the “social” of delicious at the same time, and it proved not useful enough to continue. So I’m back at delicious.
I’ve experimented with several approaches with hosting and sharing public photos, but I always end up back at Flickr. While I can recreate much of the functionality of Flickr with my own webserver, I can’t replicate the social features, so I’m back at Flickr.
Most recently I’ve started to use Evernote as a repository for almost anything scanned – receipts, bills, reports, invoices, etc. Evernote is really just a remote disk wrapped up in a simple tagging/management client with some OCR candy applied. But, even though I have loads of disk storage myself, and could do everything I do in Evernote locally using something like Omnioutliner, I still use Evernote: I appreciate the ability to access Evernote from everywhere (browser, mobile browser, iPhone app, etc.), and I like not having to pay a second thought to a more robust local backup solution.
The first two, delicious and Flickr, cry out for a decentralized mechanism for social meta-data sharing. I’d like to be able to “favourite” a photo that’s stored locally on your webserver, and I’d like you to be able to do the same for my photos. Same thing with bookmarks.
For Evernote, it’s really more a matter of client software (which I could recreate, or which could be baked into apps like Omnioutliner — or maybe it is already?) and some non-laziness on my part to fill in the gaps with things like backup.
— Peter Rukavina · Aug 1, 12:22 AM · #
I think, we have to differentiate between web services in this case.
As you, I’m using Flickr and delicious. To be honest, I don’t have a big issue with the fact that they’re proprietary, because there is a way to stay in control of your own content. You can download your photos from Flickr any time or delete the account. Same goes for delicious. Of course it would be cool, if more web services would open source their code, but it took us (as in society) a while to appreciate the idea of open source native applications and I hope that we will get some day to a point where open source web services will be common.
Thing is, it’s sometimes hard to explain people why it’s “bad” to use even services like twitter, because people often see the API and argue that twitter is as open as it can be. A so open API is indeed a good thing, but it’s not enough.
Most of the proprietary web services we use have an API and that’s a good thing. But my issue is not with those services as much as with services like Kindle (I see it more as a platform then as the device) where no API and no control for the consumer is intended what so ever. It’s really more control over our content then any governmental regime with control issues would imagine that is possible and people seem not to mind. Mostly, because they’re not aware of it, I think, but even those who are aware of the situation seem okay with the problem, because of the convenience.
And with the rising success of such lock in mechanisms, we need to be wary of the consquences.
(As for Evernote: I have an account and even the software installed on my devices, but I rarely use it. I think, there is a way for Evernote to make the open source step without losing any revenue. Mozilla’s handling their Firefox Sync is a good example. The software is syncing your bookmarks, history, passwords, etc. between the different devices one uses. Mozilla is offering either a web services for that or the possibility to install the software on a self hosted webserver. Evernote could do exactly the same thing and if they’re really afraid of losing revenue, they could offer this feature only for paying customers. As for the app itself, I think they could profit from open sourcing it, because a lot of users would start optimizing it on their own time.)
— Igor · Aug 1, 08:35 AM · #