Google has finally delivered a long-time missing feature from email – prioritizing the inbox. But Google can only go so far because all it has to learn from is email communication. For example, I would want prioritization on my Twitter feed and RSS reader as well – bu Google cannot access/control those. If my communication could be prioritized based on almost everything I do – prioritization would be better and applied to more then just email.
A great usage scenario is describes in this product idea – I want to send an email without the distraction of incoming information. The same could be said for any communication service – I want to send a twitter update without witnessing the incoming live-stream.
Definitely a noteworthy context that ontekusuto can cover as described by Fred Wilson:
I want a web service that I can enter all of our family’s friends and other relationships into.
Mark and I have continued our Diaspora-inspired conversation ( myself – mark ) via email. The conversation now seems to be centered around whether or not the web needs to be centralized or decentralized. I would like to try to take apart and reframe the question.
The Internet is a meeting place between people and software applications. Currently the software applications that meet people on the internet are controlled and dominated by big tech companies. So essentially the internet has become a meeting place between people and big tech companies.
This meeting is currently in a paradigm in which the centers are the big tech companies. It is a paradigm of social nature – people are subverted to social institutions. Personal identity is split and controlled (divide & conquer?) by corporate entities. This isn’t all bad: The big tech companies in their efforts to capitalize have innovated and demonstrated to us the potential of what can be done on the internet. This isn’t all good: it has a hidden but very high price tag.
So now it’s time to change that paradigm and reorganize it around a better moral order. To do this the relationship between society and individual thought needs to be reversed. The weight needs to shift from the big tech companies to individuals. In this new paradigm individual thought is the basic building block of the web. Software applications are subverted to individual thought and expression.
We can think of this is a recentralization of the web. Only this time there will be so many centers – it will not feel centralized at all.
So how can we do this? The biggest and most innovative software company in the world is “open-source” and it is “of the people … by the people … for the people”. Why hasn’t it happened yet? Because open-source is just now starting to mature so that it can make people-friendly software products.
Where will this leave the big tech companies? Struggling, hopefully to get better – to find a new place in this new “recentralized” order of the web. The irony of it is that this is probably how big tech companies got started. At some point (I am guessing it has to do with business aspirations, the injection of funding and the exposure to shareholder interests) their priorities shifted and their creativity stagnated.
Take for example Google’s search – despite all the resources available to Google and their reputation for fostering employee creativity, their core capability – “search” really hasn’t changed/improved much in a long time. They’ve done wonders at improving their capability to squeeze money out of advertisers. They’ve even added drag-and-drop image attachment to Gmail – Wow! (much pun intended). But search has been pretty much the same for a long time. Sure, a recentralization of the web is going to demolish some of their working assumptions on exploiting privacy for advertising gains – but I wouldn’t be surprised if they would also end up inventing and providing some amazing new search technologies (and hopefully business models) around the new paradigms.
… And just for comparison – take WordPress. No two WordPress installations look the same. WordPress itself is constantly changing and it’s plugin ecosystem extends it’s reach way beyond any one person’s imagination.
This deserved a separate post. Thank you again to the guys at Diaspora.
“Mark Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record, he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed ‘friday night’, that is ‘everybody needs to get laid’, and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality… this is bad … we are technologists, we should fix it”
BUT here is where I believe academics, technologists and academic theory fails:
“We need to re-architect services in the net.
We need to redistribute services back toward the edge.
We need to devirtualize the servers where your life is stored.
We need to restore some autonomy to you as the owner of a server.”
Technologists HAVE to realize that most of the people in the world HAVE NO IDEA what you are talking about, and that you HAVE NO IDEA what people WANT – which is why something that is “so simple to do” hasn’t happened yet, and why other degenerate services like Facebook and Google are thriving.
“We haven’t given ourselves the direction in which to go… the direction in which to go is towards freedom using free software to make social justice.”
To carry that around with you, you have to do it in such a way that the ‘everybody who needs to get laid on friday night’ can understand too. There is a huge technological & intellectual & moral gap to bridge in order to make a social impact. Technological skills are not enough to cross that bridge. They haven’t been and there’s no reason to expect that to change.
This morning I intended to write a post inspired by an interaction on Mark’s post. When I sat down at the computer I saw this Twitter update from Fred Wilson – which led to an inspiring new project called Diaspora – which also affected my writing. Thank you to Mark, Fred and the guys at Diaspora – for the feeling of connectedness and ensuing hope.
Personal freedom is the greatest achievement and the greatest enemy of society. Society creates limitations which define a struggle for personal freedom. Society also creates an opportunity for individuals to challenge and struggle against those limitations. One possible resolution of these conflicting forces is personal freedom. One inevitable consequence of personal freedom is an attack on the social limitations against which it has fought (hopefully a discriminated attack that doesn’t destory the social fabric upon which it is built).
The current state of the Internet is an echo of this dynamic evolution. On the one hand it promises great personal freedoms, on the other hand it is dominated by companies which are dominated by and are agents of society – which seek to inhibit those freedoms. These companies are essentially enslaving the idea of “personal freedom” for their own ends. These companies have generally won-over the social/public aspect of the internet. They have done so to the point that they are able to threaten the inherent, potential personal freedoms of the Internet. They have done this so elusively that some people & non-profit organizations have dedicated themselves to creating an awareness of the threat.
The greatest challenger to coporate dominance and the greatest protector of internet freedom is open-source software – a social system dominated by developers. The social-system aspect of open-source software is like any other social system – it has its strengths and weaknesses. It’s core quality – the freedom to create – is both it’s greatest strength and it’s greatest weakness.
The strength is demonstrated in things like: (1) the fact that most of the software that drives the internet is open-source; (2) the availability of viable personal computing operating systems such as Ubuntu; (3) the global prevalence of open-source projects such as Mozilla’s Firefox; (4) the emergence of personal online presence applications such as WordPress.
The weakness is demonstrated in the amazing scale of the open-source domain and the relative uselesness of most of it’s end-user products. Most successful & high impact open-source projects are technological – that is technological products used by technological people. I have a feeling that amongst end-user products (products that have intuitive user interfaces) – less then 1% of open-source projects are usable. And of those, most are tolerable products not good ones. This means that most of the effort (99%!) that is put into open-source end-user products is wasted energy. That is a terrible loss.
The ecosystem of WordPress Plugins is both an example of this waste and thankfully an indication of how it can be improved. The Plugin repository supposedly has something on a scale of 10,000 plugins. My generous working assumption is that of those – about 10% are useful plugins (many of which still suffer from poor user experience and poor usability!) which make WordPress such a great and diverse platform. This means that the WordPress ecosystem performs 10 times better then the overall open-source ecosystem (of end-user products). Why?
I believe there is a lot to learn and emulate from the WordPress model. It’s a great model because (1) it is rooted in values which cherish personal freedom; (2) it is not engineered or planned – so it remains dynamic; (3) it has been given the freedom to evolve within these underlyign values. I have encountered numerous open-source projects that, I believe, could have explosive impact and widespread use if they would surrender their independence to a WordPress-like ecosystem. Ultimately, I believe that ANY open-source end-user product that wants to succeed has to either first become a core ecology of it’s own or join one that already exists.
Dave again brings up Dropox – which I agree is a great service. I also agree there should be an open-source alternative to it… BUT I believe that what is needed is not an open-source technology – since that would only be available for technically-proficient end-users.
What we need is another Dropbox open-source PRODUCT – something anyone can use. But that’s exactly what Dropbox is!! So why do we need another one? We don’t!
But if there was an open-source Dropbox plugin for WordPress (for example) – that would be amazing!
Open-source really needs to mature beyond “technologies” and “projects” – if it is going to make a difference – it has to mature into mature products. I don’t think programmers can do this on their own – this is why open-source needs designers!
Fred Wilson provides insight into his email habits and wishes … and again Fred provides another great example for what I call contexts… this time the context is “priorioty email contacts” … this is such a simple thing to implement … and a killer feature for a new and alternative messaging system.
WallPress – A WordPress Alternative to Facebook?
Andreea, my life partner, uses Facebook. It has played an undeniable role in her developing an outreach and real-life, professional social network here in Romania. It is used to support her WordPress powered website. Yet I continue to be disturbed by the fact this is happening on Facebook. Every word she types into their systems empowers them and dis-empowers her. The main application in her Facebook experience is the main page where information from all of her connections streams in. I’ve been watching her use this and I believe that it is possible to create an alternative for this experience using WordPress.
I believe this is important. I believe other attempts have failed. I believe WordPress has a responsibility to take on this challenge.
From this point on this post will be more technical.
Infrastructure
I believe that there are three key elements, already in existence, that need to come together to create a WallPress:
User Experience
I feel it is important to remember (especially amongst developers who I hope will come across this post) that this entire post is written with a “non-blogger” user in mind. The current WordPress administration is way too complicated for these users. They do not see themselves as content publishers – they simply want to say what’s on their mind to their social circles.
Note: I believe that, if a bridge is built, that many people who are currently “non-bloggers” may mature into bloggers. Many already have … but they are confined by the state-of-mind imposed by Facebook. Moving onto a WordPress driven platform will inevitably provoke them into blogging-consciousness.
If you strip off the user-experience from the Facebook wall – what you have is an RSS aggregator of posts and comments. However its the user experience that makes it attractive and accessible to many people who are not inclined to take on a more demanding technical learning curve. WordPress’ administration (content management) user interface is far off this mark.
This is what makes WordPress Themes a core element in creating a Facebook alternative. A Theme could be developed to offer an alternate, simple and clean route for publishing.
Integration
What follows is a description of the operation of a working account.
Enhancements
I believe that the Theme part of this project can and should evolve to supply other interactions – such as friends (and friend requests), photo galleries, a contact form, etc. Though all of these interactions are inherently possible in WordPress, they need to be designed an implemented so that streamlined functionality can be achieved from within the theme itself without having to access the admin.
Bootstrapping
It will be challenging to get this started – to get people off Facebook and onto WallPress. My thoughts on this are: