Dave Winer : Soon it will be time for the next cycle
Update : Actually the "data-portability" initiatives from Google and Facebook (mentioned in the Dave piece) are the natural unfolding of "user-is-the-platform" thinking.
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3 comments:
I'm at Facebook, and I still don't really get it. So maybe a mental block, but I'm having problems groking Facebook Connect. Friend Connect on the other hand seems pretty neat. I'm not rushing to put Friend Connect widgets or gadgets at my blog, but can easily imagine sites where I would want to use them.
Is Winer right that the current stack is too complicated? My knowledge of computer science approaches zero. So I wonder if he means these twin "Connects" are too complicated preventing sites from adopting them. Or whether he means they're too complicated and the result is they'll break everything they touch?
To answer your question "Is Winer right that the current stack is too complicated?" the answer is kind of ... well ... some of it, sort of ... probably ... I guess.
The basic web-stack is OK. But people are trying to push it to do a lot more than it was originally intended for. The original simplicity meant that the web grew beautifully and quickly and became pretty reliably universal.
Then people wanted to use it for other stuff. So you had to bolt on ideas like "tougher security" or "rich user interfaces" or "server-based applications" or "local caching of the application for when you're offline" or "shared user id management" or "hosted application clouds" etc. etc.
What happens with these "extras" is that
a) you get multiple, different solutions to the same problems (Ajax vs. Flash vs. Silverlight; Rails vs. Django vs. PHP; jQuery vs. prototype etc.) and all the work of learning them and discovering which is best to use for your application.
b) some of the behavior these extras makes sense in the context of the web, but isn't as easy as the way you'd do things if you had a completely free hand to start again.
I think the relation between the completely new thing, and the old thing, is sort of complicated. For example, after the PC revolution of the 80s, the next big thing was the web in the 90s which arguably is still in the process of killing Microsoft and the philosophy it represents (software as "product").
Yet that 80s philosophy (independent software companies) was core to the success of the PC. IBM wouldn't have given us the world Microsoft created.
Similarly, without a mass Windows PC market, there would never have been a graphical browser / web revolution either.
The next wave will not look like a throwing away of the existing web platform. (Or even the web 2.0 platform) It will look more like a shift of focus to one or two exciting, eagerly explored areas. While everyone just takes the infrastructure provided by Google and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft for granted.
Thanks for your great answer Phil.
OT I spent some time surfing paper and bookbinding sites yesterday. Then when I went to TPM blog the ads there were for art supply houses. Some of what's coming if this "Connect" stuff takes off is going to seem uncanny by today's standards. But we get used to things pretty quickly. I thought ads with my emails an appalling idea, but hardly notice them at my Gmail ;-)
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