Werd I/O

Dick Hardt has written a nice overview of Twitter Digits over on Medium:

The email and password prompt popular for the last 20+ years of the web does not work for the emerging markets when their first computer is a mobile phone. The “digital” identifier they have and use to identify themselves to others is likely a phone number, and they are unlikely to have (or don’t know) an email address.

I buy this. It's worth reading the whole article; he does point out, I think rightly, that using phone numbers for many kinds of transactions is problematic.

For me, the most salient point is that everyone on the Internet cannot be guaranteed to have an email address. For those users, a telephone number - the most common digital identifier from the pre-Internet tech world - makes a lot of sense.

It's worth thinking about the things someone without an email address can't do. Not only can't they sign up for a vast array of services, but they also can't participate in the building blocks of the web. In the indieweb community, we often talk about every user having their own domain. I do think that's important, but if you don't have an email address, you can't register a domain name. (This is before we consider the money involved.)

The domain name infrastructure lags behind the user experience of the rest of the Internet by quite some way, but it also lags behind the realities of who is on the Internet, how they're online, and why they're here. If we're going to advocate that everyone has a personal domain, we need to figure out ways for everyone to have a personal domain.

How can we make that first step easier and more accessible? Answering this opens the doors for a more equal web.

Over on the Intercom.io blog, Paul Adams discusses the "end of apps as we know them":

How we experience content via connected devices – laptops, phones, tablets, wearables – is undergoing a dramatic change. The idea of an app as an independent destination is becoming less important, and the idea of an app as a publishing tool, with related notifications that contain content and actions, is becoming more important. This will change what we design, and change our product strategy.

Specifically, he discusses cards: containers that include content and actions on that content. The latest iterations of the iOS and Android notification centers introduce this as a dominant paradigm. What used to be a list of text notices has turned into a stream of widgets, each with their own contextual information and set of inline actions.

This makes a ton of sense for apps on a mobile device, which are typically software agents that retrieve information for you in the background, and serve it to you in a lightweight way. Your email app gets your email, your calendar tells you about meetings you have coming up and new invitations, and so on.

But it's also an interesting thing to think about in the context of web content. Kevin Marks has been talking about cards for a while, and they start to become very interesting indeed when you begin to subscribe to content from disparate sources (rather than, eg, homogenous user accounts on a single site like Facebook or Twitter).

In a fully-decentralized system, which is what the web really is, each node can be running its own software with its own capabilities. Each user profile and content source can be running its own platform, and can make different content types and actions possible.

We've been trained to think about interactions on social content as being one of the following:

• Reply
• Reshare
• Like
• RSVP
• Tag
  

This is because, almost without exception, we participate in social silos and monocultures where everybody is using the same platform. When everyone uses the same software to power their content, everyone has access to the same content types, and everyone can use the same interactions.

If everybody you interact with is using a different platform, however, there's suddenly the potential for everyone to have access to different content types with different actions associated with them.

• I can click on a bread recipe and say that I've made it.
• I can play a game and save a high score.
• I can respond to a Yo with another Yo.

In this context, your subscriptions begin to look like app notification cards. Each piece of content on your friends list has a common container, but it might contain completely different content - and completely different buttons to interact with it. The source of the content becomes responsible for the form, content and logic of your subscription. And the line between a subscription and a notification blurs into nonexistence.

For this to really work, we need a common framework for authentication between the source and the reader, that's flexible enough to support custom actions. For apps, the device operating system provides much of this framework. For the web, something less hardware-centered is required. I believe that many of the indieweb technologies can provide this support. (It's also interesting to think about Chrome's notification experience in this context.)

Just as apps are becoming integrated into the fabric of the mobile experience, social content can become more integrated into the web. Imagine a single page containing all of the content you want to subscribe to, in all its disparate forms, ready for you to interact with it in a contextually appropriate way. Because it's the web, you can remix it: some might consume it as a stream, while others might consume it as a wall of cards, and others still might build animations or lightweight dashboards. Think of them as social snippets, ready to be combined into an active feed that can be configured for your needs.

Just as apps are learning from the web, the web can learn from the way apps are becoming elements in a much more seamless experience.

The BBC is publishing a list of articles removed under the EU's "right to be forgotten" law:

The BBC will begin - in the "next few weeks" - publishing the list of removed URLs it has been notified about by Google.

Mr Jordan said the BBC had so far been notified of 46 links to articles that had been removed.

I'm with Jeff Jarvis, who argued in May that the right to be forgotten is a hopelessly misguided law:

The court has undertaken to control knowledge — to erase what is already known — which in concept is offensive to an open and modern society and in history is a device used by tyrannies; one would have hoped that European jurists of all people would have recognized the danger of that precedent.

The court has undermined the very structure of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention, the link — the underpinning of the web itself — by making now Google (and next perhaps any of us) liable just for linking to information. Will newspapers be forced to erase what they link to or quote? Will libraries be forced to take metaphoric cards out of their catalogs?

This is one of those laws that starts with good intentions but is obviously prone to widespread abuse with serious implications. It doesn't help that each company's implementation may be different, but the underlying principle is flawed. If information is incorrect, libelous or otherwise harmful, the law typically provides other routes to remove it. A court can now essentially adjudicate that published content is out of date and should not be referred to.

There's a still deeper issue, which is that search is our gateway to the Internet, and whereas we now have a healthy market of competing web browsers, most of us rely on a single provider to find our information. If content is erased from Google, it often might as well cease to exist entirely. Many web users even ignore URLs, using Google search to reach every single resource on the web.

Social discovery mitigates this to some extent: you can reach this unlinked BBC post because I've posted a link, and I in turn saw it via my social networks. Google also has a little competition via Bing and the brilliant DuckDuckGo.

But even if we use alternatives, the problem remains that we are reliant on a very small number of organizations, who are vulnerable to links to resources being pulled.

The upshot is this: we are in need for new, more distributed methods of finding information, that are resilient to points of failure, whether they're imposed by states or corporations. While there are peer to peer alternatives like YaCy, which are certainly interesting, there is still no simple, beautiful alternative to the status quo.

In the meantime, we need to hold our governments, and the services we rely on, to a higher standard. The BBC's choice to publish a list of retracted links is a good one, in conjunction with efforts like the Legally Restricted HTTP error code. Freedom to publish is a privilege that must be protected; let's all do the same.