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The problem isn't siloing, that's a symptom. The problem is hosting. No matter which way we spin it, major services still need to pay for the physical hardware

The problem isn't siloing, that's a symptom. The problem is hosting. No matter which way we spin it, major services still need to pay for the physical hardware on which it runs. Given the size of Twitter and Facebook, this means thousands of machines that need power, space, cooling, and maintenance. None of that stuff is free. This, of course, invites business thinking and money, both of which want to further silo it's systems. The other major problem is the client-server nature of the web itself. I, as a user, must request information/page/JSON from somewhere where it's processed by the thin terminal of the browser. Backbone.js and such technologies are trying to beef up the browser, but until the entire paradigm changes we are only applying bandages to the problem. That invites scaling problems to solve and the possibilities of a single outage bringing down entire services. We all remember the AWS outage a month ago, but problems arose in the platform before. Anybody using Tumblr last year will remember the tongue-in-cheek Tumblbeasts when it would go down several times a day. I really do believe P2P technologies are the paradigm that will deliver the openness that the web promises, but it's also very hard to build. Concurrent multi-threaded programming hard. Security and veracity are a nightmare. Just analyzing how to propagate information is difficult. But it brings with it a built-in solution to scaling and reliability. Unlike central services, a P2P service experience gets better when more people are involved because it makes the network effect an actual strength. Bittorrent is the classic case. I believe mobile phones, with their native applications and built in network hardware, could be leveraged into an ad-hoc P2P/mesh network. I talk about some of this here: http://blog.jamesleonis.com/says/the-end-of-an-age/ http://blog.jamesleonis.com/says/the-end-of-an-age/

mcgwiz 14y ago
"lack of knowledge about how things work" and "The problem is hosting". Are you people insane?! An open information policy, regardless of it's supposed higher morality, reduces a social network's ability to compete, because a) it gives competitors an advantage in acquiring your users and retaining them, and b) the vast majority of users do not care about this. We have the current equilibrium in the social networking market because of many forces, including ease-of-use, social feature set, up-front monetary cost, and social group inertia, but information policy has empirically proven not to be one of these factors. It has, however, been an important factor in shaping the self-publishing/blog market. There are different solutions suited to different markets. And you cannot explain people's indifference to this issue by proclaiming (arrogantly) that they have a "lack of knowledge". People have other more pressing concerns in their lives. Making the rent this month. Dealing with a child who is not performing well in school. Internalizing stress from their job because they are not trained enough to get a better one. Even if the average person did know about information accessibility, privacy, and sale to 3rd parties, why would this issue rise to a level comparable the issues listed above? The fact that they can smile for half an hour when they get home from work by reading/looking at a personalized listing of information they find valuable, and do this for free, is all they need to know about the web. This is not for better or for worse. It's reality in all its complexity. If or when this free-but-centralized/closed system fails them, by directly affecting their pocketbook or by itself has becoming insolvent, is when they'll take notice. And if this does ever happen, it is probably decades away. Lastly, if you aim your service at just "the people that care about information access", don't overestimate your market size. You going after a much smaller pool. With social/communication services, we're not just talking about a pool of individuals, we're talking about a pool of friend/colleague/interest groups. In this case, the specific pool is basically all friend/colleague/interest groups which are comprised entirely of libertarian-minded nerds that actually want a communication service beyond email/mailing lists, github, and blogs/comment threads. Ferchrissake, this comment thread on Hacker News only generated 19 comments; what do we need a whole social networking service for?!

mcgwiz 14y ago

"lack of knowledge about how things work" and "The problem is hosting". Are you people insane?! An open information policy, regardless of it's supposed higher morality, reduces a social network's ability to compete, because a) it gives competitors an advantage in acquiring your users and retaining them, and b) the vast majority of users do not care about this. We have the current equilibrium in the social networking market because of many forces, including ease-of-use, social feature set, up-front monetary cost, and social group inertia, but information policy has empirically proven not to be one of these factors. It has, however, been an important factor in shaping the self-publishing/blog market. There are different solutions suited to different markets. And you cannot explain people's indifference to this issue by proclaiming (arrogantly) that they have a "lack of knowledge". People have other more pressing concerns in their lives. Making the rent this month. Dealing with a child who is not performing well in school. Internalizing stress from their job because they are not trained enough to get a better one. Even if the average person did know about information accessibility, privacy, and sale to 3rd parties, why would this issue rise to a level comparable the issues listed above? The fact that they can smile for half an hour when they get home from work by reading/looking at a personalized listing of information they find valuable, and do this for free, is all they need to know about the web. This is not for better or for worse. It's reality in all its complexity. If or when this free-but-centralized/closed system fails them, by directly affecting their pocketbook or by itself has becoming insolvent, is when they'll take notice. And if this does ever happen, it is probably decades away. Lastly, if you aim your service at just "the people that care about information access", don't overestimate your market size. You going after a much smaller pool. With social/communication services, we're not just talking about a pool of individuals, we're talking about a pool of friend/colleague/interest groups. In this case, the specific pool is basically all friend/colleague/interest groups which are comprised entirely of libertarian-minded nerds that actually want a communication service beyond email/mailing lists, github, and blogs/comment threads. Ferchrissake, this comment thread on Hacker News only generated 19 comments; what do we need a whole social networking service for?!