Werd I/O

Web 2.0 was only the beginning.

Ten years ago, the read/write web was picking up steam. Services like Blogger, Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming and the nascent Facebook were doing something amazing: building publishing platforms that anyone could contribute to. You could share resources, build professional networks, publish to the world and gain audiences without any development expertise: you could just write, hit "post", and you were done. Publishing had never been as easy in the entire history of the world.

There is some consensus that these platforms were the seed for massive cultural change. We're still feeling the effects. Learning happens when people with different contexts, knowledge and assumptions encounter each other, and this is happening more than it ever has before.

But the social web was a proof of concept.

We needed a space to experiment. There's an old maxim that says perfect is the enemy of the good: it's nearly impossible to create a perfect platform straight out of the gate. You need to figure out what works and what doesn't work, and iterate. That's why developers like to release early and release often. That first release probably isn't great, but the sooner you get your software in front of users, the sooner you can learn from how they use it, and change appropriately.

So it goes with Facebook, Twitter, and the other services that have come and gone over the years. We've learned a lot about social behavior. We understand how to create a great user experience that people find comfortable to use; we understand how to make it easy to share and to publish. Those things didn't come easily, but we have them, and the learning was made easier by creating simpler architectures: centralized systems where user activity could be observed.

It's time for the next step.

Open follows closed.

We know that we need to open our platforms, and that mass surveillance by governments around the world is a problem. It's even fair to say that it's a problem that's been enabled by creating these centralized proofs of concept. Luckily, the next evolution of the web is taking place.

The idea is simple: instead of everyone giving all their information to a site like Facebook, they keep it themselves, but still get to communicate easily using all of the great user experience discoveries we've made. You can still share selfies, make friends, listen to music together and share links, but now you do it in a space that's really yours, and that you get to have more control over.

The result isn't just more privacy. It's better experiences.

You can control how you appear on the web. Not just your profile photo and a background image, but the complete look and feel. You can use designs from people around the world, and mix and match them to create something that's completely unique. If you're a developer (and you don't have to be), you can create something new from the ground up, and share it with the world as well.

(And, hey, we've got more developers than ever before, thanks to great publishers like O'Reilly Media, sharing high-quality tutorials and technical content in an accessible way.)

It's not just about look and feel, though. Developers can create new kinds of content, and new apps, and let anyone else on the web use them. You won't need a Facebook account or a Google account; you'll be able to use them because you're on the web and that's what the web does. Nobody will control the new web, and that's going to allow for unprecedented creativity, and new markets for tools and content. It's going to be beautiful.

Not just that, though. Knowledge is fundamental to democracy. The web is going to continue to be a platform that ushers in new freedoms all around the world. That's already been happening to some extent, but when you connect the ease of use of the "web 2.0" movement with the decentralized, interconnected nature of the web, you empower people at a level never before seen.

I'm grateful for the people who have pioneered web publishing, and who continue to build amazing new experiences. It's fun to see that creativity start to funnel into the indie web, and it's a privilege to be working on some of those tools myself.

It's been a great ten years to write software. I think the next decade on the web is going to be very bright indeed.

If you're interested in these ideas, Indie Web Camp is being held at the end of this month in multiple locations. You should also sign up to learn more about Known, the indie publishing platform I co-founded. We're launching later this summer, and it's going to be great.

By the way, that picture above is the debut of something called the "Open Stack" in Digg's offices in 2008. It included lots of truly open technologies, including ActivityStreams, which is still used today.

Jim Stogdill's piece Welcome back, Weblandians is wonderful:

In the late 1960s, Vint Cerf and his colleagues thought they were building a packet-switched network. With (I’m sure) more meta-awareness than Watt, they brought the ethos of the counter culture to their work. They were suspicious of the top-down technocracy of the Vietnam War era, and they imbued their protocols with the principles of emergence in the hope that the network they built would maintain a bias toward decentralization and a force for democratization.

Yet, here we are. Instead of that smooth decentralized landscape, the web has concentrated and congealed into exabyte lumps of Google, Facebook, Amazon — and now we know, the NSA. Utah is set to become the gravity well of the web.

I love how ethics and values shaped the Internet as we know it today. Despite being made of packets, switches, servers and protocols, it's a predominantly human technology.

The piece is an edited version of his Solid conference keynote from last week:

Today, my epicenter is the San Francisco Bay Area, but it wasn't always so: in 1997 I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, to do my bachelors degree in Computer Science. In the end, I lived there twice: from 1997-2004, and again for a year in 2010. The first time, I started Elgg, the open source social networking platform. The second time, I worked for latakoo and was the first Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab.

I miss The Forest Cafe, which, to me, is a symbol of Edinburgh's artistic cultural anarchy. I love that about the city: clubs and art shows occupy every nook and cranny. Of course, the big kahuna is the Edinburgh Festivals: twelve official festivals (and more unofficial ones) that double the size of the city and turn it into a melting pot of arts and creativity. The excellent social safety net doesn't hurt: healthcare is basically free, and Scottish students can go to Scottish universities without paying a penny. The marvelous Scottish Book Trusts mails childrens books to every new family, promoting an interest in reading. You can experiment without worrying about what's going to happen to you if you get ill. My circle in Scotland very much fit my values: compassionately left-wing, embracing of diverse sexualities and gender identities, secular, and questioning of cultural norms. Exactly how I would prefer the world to be.

On the other hand, money is tight there. It's just the way it is. You can make a good living, and costs are low (particularly when you factor in health insurance, or the fact that you don't need to own a car). But if you want to form a startup, as I did, you're going to have a harder time.

A sample of things we were told when we tried to get Elgg off the ground:

"It won't work."

"What about your pension?"

"That sounds like it's for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms." [Their words, not mine, I promise.]

I lost count of the number of times people who had started successful businesses told us to move to Silicon Valley. While culturally there was a lot of ambition, business ambition was looked upon less kindly. Scotland - like England - is very heavily influenced by the banking sector, and technology businesses were not a part of that mix. Despite having the opportunity to move to Silicon Valley, I chose to move to Oxford instead. "Why," I thought, stubbornly, "should tech startups have to be in California?" More on this in a bit.

I returned in 2010, shortly after I left Elgg. The environment had dramatically improved, as evidenced by the existence of the Geek in Residence position at the Edinburgh Festivals. When I did my computer science degree, our labs were literally in the basement next to the boiler room. The School of Informatics indicates a renewed focus on technology. Meanwhile, events like TechMeetup provide a focal point for the incredibly-talented local tech scene. The Edinburgh Hack Lab ticks the hackerspace box.

One of the clearest signs that Edinburgh is connecting its unique cultural scene with its technologists is Inspace, which is the Scottish counterpart to the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. The space actually sits inside the University's Informatics building, and is the most amazing playground I've ever seen for artistic technologists, led by Mark Daniels, a passionate, smart curator.

Since I left Edinburgh for the second time, TechCube has opened to provide a space for tech startups. I've heard great things.

There's no less creativity in San Francisco. In fact, it being a much larger area, there's a lot more - but it's different. Whereas the safety net (and other cultural reasons) meant there could be unencumbered creative exploration, here even the art is entrepreneurial. Arts organizations are largely funded not by the government, but by patrons: this changes the dynamic entirely. Whereas in Scotland galleries and museums are free to walk into, here you must pay. Culture has a paywall.

At least sometimes. I've been consistently delighted by Oakland, which has the kind of anarchic, widely-embracing spirit I love. Consider Oakland Nights Live, a live theater variety performance / on-stage talk show: the first time I attended, it was in a backyard, and I walked in to see a man in a viking helmet playing a see-saw like a musical instrument with a saw. Another episode was held on BART, which saw passengers become de facto audience members. These days it's at the Sudo Room, the kind of artistic / technical space that we have in spades here. I also regularly go to music events at the Firehouse Arts Collective, which owns an experimental space on the border between Oakland and Berkeley.

Nonetheless, in San Francisco, most of the art I've seen has had a commercial element. The flipside of that is that most commercial business has an artistic element. While the financial district certainly exists, a lot of the startups and tech businesses can also be thought of as art projects, and many of the great ones have been created by people with an artistic, anarchic bent (even if this is ebbing away with ever-rising costs).

There are intense, worsening social problems here, which have been written about at length elsewhere. I find them jarring. It's hard to walk through a BART station filled with homeless people and not feel some kind of intense emotion (for me, sadness and anger). People seem to have become hard to it, though, or worse, blame the homeless people for being homeless. That's foreign to me, and I find it disgusting. These people need help. (It must also be said that they are getting help, and San Francisco remains a very progressive city, by American standards. I don't understand the American resistance to socialized services, but it's less pronounced here than in most places.)

While it's important to recognize the drawbacks, let's be real. The food is incredible, the city is beautiful, and although I have a lot of ambition to travel and live in different places around the world, I would also be happy if I stayed here for the rest of my life. Just the light is incredible: in Scotland the sun rises at 8:45am and sets at 3:50pm in January. Here it's steadily bright all year long. The people are friendly and helpful. It never freezes, but never gets too hot.

It's also the best possible place to start any kind of technology business. That stubborn resistance to starting a company in Silicon Valley? Ridiculous. Don't repeat my mistake. Just about everyone is here, which means - in combination with the general friendliness - that it's easy to meet just about anyone for a coffee. And people will be interested in what you're doing, and try to connect you with people who can help. There's no cynicism towards ambition, and no desire to put you down. The culture is collaborative and open-minded.

Sometimes, I find this open-mindedness challenging: I'm used to a more secular culture, but the US is much more friendly to religion. In other parts of the country that often translates into conservative bigotry, but not here. It's just friendly. Correspondingly, I'm often challenged by my bias against religion; something I want to acknowledge, and be less of a jerk about. Anil Dash wrote a great piece about this.

I'm glad for my years in Scotland, which gave me a perspective I'm proud of. I sometimes struggle with the more individualistic culture here (and the absurdly hoppy beer). Tef's guide to San Francisco for Londoners is completely accurate. But at the same time, I'm so glad that this is where I landed. The tech industry has some well-publicized problems, but this is a place where you feel like you can make a difference, change the culture, and create a better future. While I feel like a fish out of water a lot of the time, I also feel like I belong.

While there are lots of anecdotal stories about the #indieweb, lately I've found myself wanting to back them up with hard, quantifiable data. For some people, the underlying principles of ownership, control and reach resonate and make sense; others need further persuasion that the movement is gaining momentum.

I think this kind of evidence-gathering is a good exercise. And of course, it has a selfish purpose too: backing up the need for Known.

The ideological case

Dan Gillmor made the broader case most clearly over on Slate:

We're in danger of losing what's made the Internet the most important medium in history: a decentralized platform where the people at the edges of the networks—that would be you and me—don't need permission to communicate, create, and innovate.

Privacy

Nonetheless, the statistics suggest that the most readily-apparent value of the #indieweb revolves around privacy. Last September, the PewResearch Internet Project found that:

[..] growing numbers of internet users (50%) say they are worried about the amount of personal information about them that is online - a figure that has jumped from 33% who expressed such worry in 2009.

People would like control over their information, saying in many cases it is very important to them that only they or the people they authorize should be given access to such things as the content of their emails, the people to whom they are sending emails, the place where they are when they are online, and the content of the files they download.

Meanwhile, Forrester Research suggests that the cloud isn't eating all software:

According to research outfit Forrester, businesses are moving to public cloud services in big numbers. By 2020, the firm says, cloud computing will account for about 15 percent of the IT market, which spans all the hardware and software and services that companies use to run their operations. But many analysts and other industry watchers believe that certain companies — especially those bound by government regulations, including financial and healthcare companies — will keep certain applications running in their own data centers. “It’s not about having everything running externally or everything running internally,” says David Cearley, a vice president at Gartner Research. “It’s about both.”

Privacy continues to be a driver for ownership, helped by the fact that 2013 was the worst-ever year for data breaches:

Working on data from the Open Security Foundation and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the OTA estimated that over 740 million online records were exposed in 2013, the worst year for data breaches in history.

Placing personal data in a central location creates a giant honeypot for such breaches.

Commerce

Not owning the site you use to communicate with your customers can hurt your ability to actually reach them. AdAge reported that the number of users seeing Facebook posts from brand pages they'd engaged with was dropping:

Research conducted by Group M Next (a unit devoted to sourcing new technologies) into pages operated by 25 brands finds that the share of Facebook users seeing organic posts from a brand they "like" was down 38% in the five weeks after Sept. 20, from 15.56% (consistent with the average 16% Facebook has often reported) to 9.62%.

This trend has continued. AdWeek reported that Facebook referrals to sites like Upworthy, the New York Times and Business Insider had dropped by up to 50% since November 2013. AdAge noted that Facebook in the past had "particularly objected to the inference that [..] changes had been made to spur marketers to spend more on ads to make up for lost reach":

But now Facebook is making the case for marketers to do just that. In the document, titled "Generating business results on Facebook," the paragraph in which the impending drop-off in organic reach is revealed concludes with an ad pitch; marketers are told they should consider paid distribution "to maximize delivery of your message in news feed."

Valleywag alleged some very drastic numbers associated with this strategy:

A source professionally familiar with Facebook's marketing strategy, who requested to remain anonymous, tells Valleywag that the social network is "in the process of" slashing "organic page reach" down to 1 or 2 percent.

In other words, now they've convinced everyone to sign up to their network, Facebook is charging people to get their messages through - something that would be free if this communication happened over a decentralized web.

Growth

Each of these trends is growing. More people are thinking about owning their own platform overall; people are more concerned about privacy online than ever before; the social networks we've all been taken for granted have been taking more liberties with the form, reach and content of our communications.

More data is needed, and I'll be posting regularly with new facts and statistics. If anyone has anything you'd like to add, or if you'd like to get in touch for any other reason, feel free to email me: ben@withknown.com