Dazed and slightly confused notes on the future of web platforms

First, there's the Locker Project, motto: "I am the platform".

Even though it's by the creator of Jabber, it's not about streaming XML stanzas, thank you very much.

Locker uses JavaScript connectors, that know how to talk to a service to retrieve and sync your stuff (Flickr, Twitter, ...). Think Emacs modes for different services.

Locker seems to run on the server, using node.js, so until everyone of us has their FreedomBox plugged in, this will not really give us freedom.

What if we ran this in the browser, using client-local storage? And then, as Dave Winer would tell us, we push that stuff as RSS, err, Atom feeds, maybe connected using Atom Paging and Archiving, to a dumb cloud store, hopefully free as in freedom? (This is where Content-centric networking comes in, as a simple way to dedup, among other awesomeness.)

Doing the crawling of a user's feeds in the browser has the big benefit that we have cycles to burn and bandwidth to waste there. Scalable following is damn hard, which can be seen from the fact that it's one of the few algorithms that's not provided as a shrink-wrapped, commoditized package. Yet.

The second piece I find wildly interesting is homomorphic encryption. As far as I can tell, the promise of homomorphic encryption re cloud storage is that the cloud store can sort and search encrypted data. I.e., data it can't even look at can still be subjected to the Big Data treatment, aka Google's infinitely-scalable b-tree. (Links: Order-preserving Encryption, Cryptographic Constructions for Secure, Privacy-preserving Distributed Information Sharing.)

Exciting times!

Of course, if we want to do to microdata and the web what Emacs did to plain text and Unix, first we need a real Lisp in the browser. Thankfully, that's exactly what I'm working on at the moment. Stay tuned.

Balm for the soul

Dean Bubley:

Tablets - I've been somewhat surprised by the iPad's success, but I still don't see tablets as a major game-changing trend, beyond the "Apple Effect". I still think that the iPad is primarily a nice (and for some groups of people also very useful) gadget which complements their PC/Mac and smartphone usage. I don't see massmarket Android platforms fulfilling the same roles and I certainly don't see tablets heralding some sort of mythical "post-PC" era. I do seem them as becoming important for "social TV" use cases in the home, though. I expect to see a declining % of tablets with embedded/activated 3G radios going forward - the bulk will be WiFi-only. 2011 success rating: 5/10

Let me repeat:

I certainly don't see tablets heralding some sort of mythical "post-PC" era.

I really like these obnoxious new FSF banners

Abandoning del.icio.us?

I understand that people are upset, but I don't get the point of moving from one problematic provider to another equally problematic provider.

It's the whole concept that's rotten, not just particular bad apples.

And in the meantime, I lose easy access to your much-valued data.

Thus, for 2011, we should all work hard on two issues:

• Easier, but still hard: Decentralization: it shouldn't matter which problematic provider you're signed up to - I still want to browse your data in my problematic provider.
• Hard: Make this sh*t work: We should found a democratic trust that hosts our data on a free software stack, so that we can get rid of problematic providers altogether.
  

Our data is worth much more than gold!

The cloud's 9/11

I think the del.icio.us situation was a wake up call for a lot of people.

Keeping it short, here are my suggestions for the future:

• Let us pay: As they say if you don't pay for a product, you are the product.
  
• A company ain't enough: Classical capitalism isn't fit to provide the service we need. I'm thinking about some sort of netizen's trust.
  
• It takes an architecture: The whole stack has to be free software, and good one at that. Everything else won't cut it.

Our data is worth much more than gold!

Institutional innovators welcome!

I'm afraid of sociotards

Exhibit N:

See that cute girl or boy sitting over there? Imagine seeing what you have in common at a glance.

Exhibit N+1:

you will be able to "see" all your "friends" all the time and know which movie or TV show they're watching and watch it "with" them if you want

The Desktop is Back

Sony is back to OpenStep (!) with SNAP:

Sony’s Networked Application Platform is a project designed to leverage the open source community to build and evolve the next generation application framework for consumer electronic devices.

The developer program gives access to a developer community and resources like SDK, tools, documentation and other developers.

The foundation upon which this project is base comes from the GNUstep community, whose origin dates back to the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT Computer Inc (now Apple Computer Inc.). While Apple has continued to update their specification in the form of Cocoa and Mac OS X, the GNUstep branch of the tree has diverged considerably.

Wayland is talking about phasing out X11:

The problem with X is that... it's X. When you're an X server there's a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. For example, core fonts; this is the original font model that was how your got text on the screen for the many first years of X11. This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!) Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives. For many things we've been able to keep the X.org server modern by adding extension such as XRandR, XRender and COMPOSITE and to some extent phase out less useful extension. But we can't ever get rid of the core rendering API and much other complexity that is rarely used in a modern desktop. With Wayland we can move the X server and all it's legacy technology to a optional code path.

Jean-Louis Gassée:

Someday, the progress in HTML implementations and better, thicker pipes might move the boundary between local and Cloud applications. But for the time being, conventional desktop “productivity” apps such as word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs have an advantage over their Cloud competitors.

Anil Dash:

Cloudtop apps are delivered as native code on nearly every supported platform, from desktop computers to smart phones, with an interface that scales appropriately.

While the app may have a web interface, that's largely a convenience and is not usually the primary way in which you interact with the app.

Oh, and let's not forget RIM's acquisition of QNX.

OpenID is a nightmare:

We already have the ability to sign up with username/password - but we're going to make that the *only* way to register for our site from now on.

Apps On!

New Post-it notes by 3M for mobile dev:



(Although I find the image of hipster mobile developers scribbling on them while sipping their lattes deplorable.)

It's bad

They looked in my iPhone's address book.

... it's not like it could be anyone's "business model" to use that data. But now, as far as I know, some unknown startup in California has all my data.

This is bad and ugly on two levels: first, that a company would slurp your private data without asking; second, that your computer lets it do this.

there is hope

the use of location-based services is actually declining in America, from 5% of the online population in May to 4% last month

trotsky on HN:

If facebook can really deliver a rock solid web mail client, I think they will really be a company to watch in the rest of 1996 and 1997.

Dear Google

If you read this - please let me turn off that instant preview thingy.

When I look at a web page, I like to massage the text by clicking around a lot on the page. (It's a subconscious thing...) Now, this brings up preview images.

While we're at it: what's the star icon next to each result for?

Thanks,
Manuel

(via copyranter)

Windows Phone 7

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Microsoft did something interesting, and maybe even great, with the design of WP7:



I like this typographical approach, it seems great for small screens. And it's a welcome change from Apple's infantile eye candy.

Cloudtop Apps

Anil Dash is certainly onto something with Cloudtop Apps:

Cloudtop apps are delivered as native code on nearly every supported platform, from desktop computers to smart phones, with an interface that scales appropriately.

While the app may have a web interface, that's largely a convenience and is not usually the primary way in which you interact with the app.

Given the arcane techniques required to build interactive web apps, and the puny results, I can certainly see the appeal of writing a bunch of native apps instead.

Support costs should be lower, it's probably easier to charge for native apps than web apps, and heck, even development costs may actually be lower.

Umair Haque firing on all cylinders

101 Let's take a sec to clear up a few misconceptions about my perspective.

Five Reasons I Wouldn't Have Invested in Zynga Selling virtual goods is interesting, right? Wrong. It’s just about as interesting as selling physical “product” – an industrial age revenue stream in disguise

MyGengo and the Power of Markets, Networks, and Communities if you want to be disruptive, here’s the single strategy that will take you the furthest. Pick a zombified, moribund industry, and use a market, network, or community to disrupt it, by altering the structure and intensity of search, monitoring, and transaction costs.

21st Century Capitalism vs FoxMartWorld Like I sometimes say: want fries with that Ponzi zombieconomy?

I ♥ William Gibson

Now, in Zero History, Bigend’s world brushes up against another 21st century growth industry: the private military. And what’s all the fuss about? Pants.

Whole World Wide Web

Brewster Kahle, 2010:

It's amazing to think that the whole Web collection, which is about 2PB compressed and from 4PB to 5PB uncompressed, can live in a 20-foot-by-8-foot-by-8-foot shipping container, which, from our standpoint, is a computer.

Brin and Page, 1998:

If we assume that Moore's law holds for the future, we need only 10 more doublings, or 15 years to reach our goal of indexing everything everyone in the US has written for a year for a price that a small company could afford.

(Unfortunately, that's after 2012, so there's not much point.)

AAOL

Dirk Hohndel:

Yes, it took a while for the Internet to drive AOL into irrelevance. And similarly, it will take time for the mass of the customers to realize just how Apple is taking advantage of them. And there will continue to be some fanboyz.

When it all shakes out

Dave Winer writes:

LinkedIn is for business contacts. Facebook is for connecting with classmates and friends from days gone by. Twitter is for news. What is Foursquare for? And then what is Facebook's checkin service for? I mean, when it all shakes out. It can be hard to forsee.

I find it always interesting that intelligent people like Dave care so much about current incumbents/silos in the social networking game.

For me it's self-evident that sooner than later control of social connections will be where it belongs - with the people.

For me, all these evil silos are just an artefact of a still illiquid market.

It's called MapReduce

Not Map Reduce. Not Map/Reduce. Not map-reduce.

Is that so hard?

deep conceptual hierarchies

By evoking the need for deep conceptual hierarchies, the automatic computer confronts us with a radically new intellectual challenge that has no precedent in our history. — E.W. Dijkstra

The gay science of wikis

In The sad evolution of wikis, apenwarr voices some interesting points wrt wikis.

Regarding Wikipedia vs Ward's Wiki, and painting with the broadest of brushes, I'd say that Ward's Wiki is a wonderful practical joke or hypermedia art project, whereas Wikipedia is a project to create an encyclopedia that only incidentally uses Wiki technology – how many Wikipedia users know how to edit, let alone create, a page? 1%? 1‰? Put differently: Wikipedia has little place in a discussion of wikis in general, it's simply one successful application of Wiki technology.

I think wikis have one important feature: they put naming front and center; the rest (including "everybody can edit everything") is up for horse-trading. And that's where apenwarr's question is interesting:

How do you create a vibrant community, but allow for private topics and discussion, but allow for public topics and discussion, and allow me to work for more than one company at a time with multiple private discussions, and have my WikiWords always end up pointing where they're supposed to?

Having your WikiWords always end up pointing where they're supposed to is of course a general AI problem. But I think there's some scope for principled approaches to naming in Wiki tech. More later, have to hack.

Tim Bray recounts:

“You don’t get it. The central relationship between Oracle and its customers is a business relationship, between an Oracle business expert and a customer business leader. The issues that come up in their conversations are business issues.

“The concerns of developers are just not material at the level of that conversation; in fact, they’re apt to be dangerous distractions. ‘Developer mindshare’... what’s that, and why would Oracle care?”

Also: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the New Axis of Evil (Oracle)