Legal Research

Slate on the Open Web

By Steven Matthews

Slate has an excellent article up on the opening of micro-blogging standards.  The piece is titled To Live, Twitter Must Die, but the content isn’t nearly so sensational.

I really like the message here. There are dangers anytime we put too much faith in a single company, and expect them to police the balance between their own business interests surrounding a proprietary technology, and the greater access to that web technology. Especially when we grow to depend on it. This article references Twitter’s dominance with micro-blogging, but it could have easily been Google’s relationship to internet search.

I also think this is interesting because it’s a phenomenon of the past 10 years. The earlier foundation Internet technologies became decentralized – eg. email, or DNS, web hosting. The fact that there is ample competition in those sectors makes the web a more innovative place.

The next layer up, however, is where major businesses are being created. I wouldn’t give Google a free pass in this, despite the article’s reference to PubSubHubbub, and the image of openness that reference created (for me). Google has a similar stranglehold on web search, and Bing hasn’t made many big inroads.

That the article focuses on Twitter makes it marketable, but more important for me are the thoughts on keeping an open web. Dave Winer, who was cited regularly throughout the article, has an interesting related post up on Gatekeeping on his blog today.

Interesting times.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on August 14, 2009 (boomark / email).