The Open Web: A view on its current stage and why its evolution is important [FIRST DRAFT[

UNIVERSITY OF HUDDERSFIELD

School of Art, Design and Architecture Department of Art

THD1055

The Open Web: A view on its current stage and why its evolution is important.

A Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for BA (Hons) Multimedia Design By Javier Guerrero t0562241

The candidate confirms that the work submitted is their own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the

work of others.

3 December 2008

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Abstract

View on the current World Wide Web and how it will evolve into an Open Web

in the near future. Such studies found how the World Wide Web initial idea

was one of openness and people connecting freely. Since the bursting of the

Dot-com bubble in 2001 Internet users have increased in an incredible rate.

These users are responsible for the rebirth and current success of Social

Websites, more commonly referred as Web 2.0 sites. Currently Web 2.0

active users contribute and share content to infinite amounts of sites but not

get anything in return. More recently movements like the Dataportability

Project and “The New Open Stack” are trying to give more control over data to

the users. Projects like these try to emphasis to companies how they have

forgotten how important users are for their business models. The

characteristics of these movements and findings on an Open Web are

discussed.

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank everybody who has engaged in incredible discussions over the

ideas described in this paper, which includes tutors at the University of

Huddersfield, friends from El Salvador, readers of my blog and everyone else

I discussed my topic with. I also want to thank David Recordon for his useful

input down at the Future of Web Apps 2008. I specially want to thank Matt

Biddulph for his valuable and extensive interview.

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Table of Contents:

Illustrations 5

Introduction 6

Chapter one: Early days and building blocks of the Social Web 8

Chapter two: Opening up the Web 14

Chapter three: My “real” Cyberself 22

Conclusion 29

Reference 31

Bibliography 33

Appendix 34

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Illustrations

Figure 1: Tag Cloud

Flickr tag Cloud (2008) [online image available at:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ > [Accessed 2nd December 2008]

Figure 2: Web 2.0 World

Web 2.0 Directory, (2008) [online screen grab] Available at:

http://www.go2web20.net/ [Accessed 2nd December 2008]

Figure 3: Online Social Platforms

Guerrero,J. (2008) Personal Description on social platforms.

Figure 4: Current_ sign up

Current.com Sign up (2008) [online screen grab] Available at:

<http://current.com/login.htmhttp://current.com/login.htm >[accessed 2nd

December 2008]

Figure 5: Wikipedia

Wikipedia (2008) [online screen grab] available at: <

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia > [accessed 2nd December 2008]

Figure 6: Digg

Digg.com (2008) [online screen grab] available at: <http://www.digg.com >

[accessed 2nd December 2008

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Introduction

For the last four to five years I have spent the majority of my days online.

Always interested on new web technologies and the general future of the

medium. This year I had the opportunity to attend “The Future of Web Apps

London 2008”. Like the name states, it was an exposition on the real future of

the World Wide Web. The topic that grabbed my attention the most was one

that I had been researching a few months before. “The Open Web” is a red

hot topic between developers, and with good reason. I believe The Open Web

is an important movement that will change the Web as we know it, therefore

this paper is a view in the current Open Web progress and why they are

important for the general future of the web.

Since the bursting of the Dot-com bubble in 2001 the World Wide Web has

gone trough a wide variety of changes and technologies. In the last 20 years

Websites have come and gone. Some had incredible successes like Yahoo!

and Amazon that are still going strong. Others like Go.com, etoys.com and

webvan.com are long gone and forgotten. Today, the living successes are

social or Web 2.0 sites like Digg.com, Youtube, Facebook, Flickr and

thousands of others. Most, if not all, of these successes are powered by

ordinary people like you and me. Completely basing their service on user

generated content. From uploading pictures and videos, to commenting and

reviewing products online, Social websites just provide the medium and the

channel for users to distribute their data. Somewhere along the way,

companies have lost the focus that users are the most important aspect of

their business models. Currently the users are unprotected and do not have

control over everything they share online. Users have to agree to absolutely

rubbish terms and conditions to use services that would never exist if it was

not for them. Visionary developers and companies, who have finally realize

that users need to be protected, have started reviewing the early works of Sir

Tim Bernes-Lee and his term of Web of Data. They have started working in

collaborative projects like the Dataportability Project and Google’s OpenSocial

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with a common goal of creating an Open Web were users have control over

their information and companies provide a better service for everyone. Their

aim, is to build a World Wide Web just like Sir Tim Bernes-Lee once dreamt,

that somehow it has been forgotten by venture capitalist.

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Chapter one: Early days and building blocks of the

Social Web.

Many thought that the web was dead after the Dot-com burst in 2001.

Companies that were valued in millions of dollars in a matter of weeks worth

less than few hundred dollars. However that bursting was just a necessary

step on the evolution of a technology. Now, the Web is more active than ever

with millions of active users.

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For the last few of years the term Web 2.0 has been used in a lot of websites,

talks, television, radio shows, geek talks, and just about anywhere. The term

“Web 2.0” and Social Media has been used as a sort of “new” tendency of the

World Wide Web. However this term has been misleading since users have

used social media since the origins of the web; using chat rooms, and any

type of peer to peer communication. Tim O’Reilly stated on “What is Web 2.0”

that;

“The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shake outs typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at centre stage.” (O’Reilly, T. 2005)

Web 2.0 doesn’t have a true definition but it does have a set of principles and

practices. According to the explanation of Tim O’Reilly, web 2.0 offers

services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability. What this

means is that websites will contribute something to the online experience

rather than just being a commercial sites. Another key factor is the control

over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use

them. The web will not be moderated by a single person, the masses will

collectively control online information. Users will be trusted as co-developers

of content on sites. The web will harness collective intelligence. O’Reilly also

mentions that web 2.0 will leverage the long tail trough customer self-service.

Companies will have to see software above the level of a single device Just

like Google has kept developing for the global user base. Lastly, O’Reilly

mentions the lightweight user interfaces, developing models, and business

models that web 2.0 adopt that is completely different to the traditional

models. A richer user experience will be the outcome of all these features.

The new ideology behind the world wide web has resulted on the formation of

Cloud Computing which is, accessing technology services from the internet

rather than a personal computer or local server. It allows users to tap into the

power of large networked servers and to access data and applications from

anywhere. Email clients like Gmail are the perfect example of the cloud

computing working.

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The clouds content is organized by “Taxonomy” which provides a rigid

framework of organization (O’Reilly,Toc 2008) and “Folksonomy” which is an

informal organizational mechanism that categorizes content into user-created

“Tags” (O’Reilly,Toc (B) 2008). Organization It can be seen in the next page in

figure 1.

Figure1 Tag Cloud

Folksonomies are not managed or edited by a centralized team. They are

created via user collaboration. The Folksonomy of the web is primary

generated by the Millennials (Generation-Y) which is all of those people who

were born between 1982–2001. The Generation-Y are mostly responsible for

the mass involment that social platforms inspire. According to USATODAY

“Millennials have grown up with technology and use it constantly, not just for

work, like many of their elders, but to maintain relationships. This is the group

whose multitasking lifestyles rely on iPods, instant messaging, cell phones

and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.” (Jayson, S.

2006) Millenials and elders represent an estimate of 475 million online active

users (Universal McCann 2008).

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Everyday, whenever those 475 million active users wake up, they start a

routine that most can identify with. Logging in to their email account, answer

and write emails. Then, logging in to their social networks (Facebook,

MySpace, etc.) updating their status and profile, and possibly write on a few

friend’s walls. Log-out and log in to their favourite news site (Reddit, Digg,

Stumbleupon, etc.) read a couple of popular news and comment on them.

Finally, maybe micro-blog something in twitter about their upcoming day and

upload last night’s pictures to Flickr. All of that before their working day

begins, not even taking into consideration the infinite times they will log back

in to any of these sites during the day.

Figure 2 Web 2.0 World

Some of the thousands of Web 2.0 sites that exist today can be seen above in

figure 2. An investigation by Universal McCann, that it is committed to

measure consumer usage, attitudes and interests in adoption social media

platforms on active internet users, concluded that Social Media is a global

phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social

and cultural development. If you are online you are using social media.

McCann Universal also highlighted that 57% of active internet users have

joined a social network, 55% have uploaded photos and 73% have read a

blog. Most active users use ten key social media platforms. (Universal Mccan

2008)

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Key Social Platforms Importance Example

Photosharing Has made everyone into amateur photographers Flickr, Picassa

Blogging Has given a voice to everyone Blogger, Wordpress

Micro-Blogging Allows people to report in short and precise matter Twitter, Facebook Status

RSS Allows users to get updates live Blogs, Twitter, 2.0 service

Widgets Allows users to take services from one place to another Blog Plugins

Social Networks Allows users to connect with other users and share data Facebook, Myspace

Chat Rooms Allow users to communicate, pre-web.20 yahoo chats

Message Boards Allow user to communicate on specific subjects Forums

Podcasts Anyone can have their own tv, radio show Diggnation

Video Sharing Allows user to share moments in videos, and comment on them. Youtube

Figure 3 Social Platforms

Users use social media platforms to get around the web and share. On most

of the platforms they build a “Social Graph”, a term used by Facebook that

Brad Fitzpatrick described as “the global mapping of everybody and how

they're related” (Fitzpatrick,B., Recordon,D. 2007) When users join a new

social web site they have to sign up, fill in all of their information, create their

profiles, and then make new connections in the new web site. Most social web

sites require that users have an extensive social graph so that they can get a

full service experience. Can you imagine Facebook without having your

friends in your social graph? Facebook would be a very boring place to visit.

Same as Twitter, what if you could not follow anyone on twitter? Twitter would

become some sort of 140 character diary entries that quickly becomes dull. In

several conversations I have had in the last couple of months with friends and

colleagues the main reason people are put off of using a new social media

platforms is the fact that they have to go all over the process of signing up

(figure 4) and making new connections, even with people that they are

already connected in other services.

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Figure 4 Current Sign in

Web communities and user sharing data is a reality. The web 2.0 concept is

not a myth or a tendency, it is finally a reality. With millions of active users, the

web is gathering a collective intelligence that will become the greatest man

made product. The Web 2.0 represents a new stage in the history of Men kind

and technology. This new stage is driven by the newest workforce generation

the Millenials, who demand a collaborative world full of openness and

networking tools. An Immediate future for an open web can be perceived on

the horizon.

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Chapter two: Opening up the Web.

Web 2.0 companies depend almost entirely on user-generated content.

Somehow along the way companies have lost the concept that users are the

most important aspect of their business models. Millions of active users keep

sharing and contributing data within social websites and certain groups want

to give the contributors more control over their data.

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Millions of dollars have been spent creating and developing sites like

Youtube, Facebook, Digg, Twiter and all of those social websites that have

millions of active users. The internet ‘s “Cloud Architecture” has allowed many

to have access to virtually any type of information from anywhere in the world.

Gadgets like the Iphone, RIM’s Blackberry, personal laptops, desktops, and

WIFI have allowed almost anyone to be online whenever they wish to.

Weather you are looking for an address in your phone or flying across the

Atlantic Ocean and pin pointing your exact location using Google Maps.

(Recordon,D 2008) Companies and developers are using the cloud’s data to

create better and more efficient services. Remember the time when students

had to grab an encyclopedia and read through dozens of pages for a school’s

homework. Now all they have to do is get online and search for whatever

they are looking for. In a matter of seconds students have all of the possible

information on a particular topic. Wikipedia has become the primary source of

information for students.

Figure 5 Wikipedia

Using the cloud as an important building block, Wikipedia allows users to

update a topics entry with the most up to date information (figure 5). Many

social web sites, like Wikipedia, depend on the content users generate. Now a

day, most of the online content is filter free. In other words, no more editors,

single, selecting the information that they want to publish. Now, the Internet as

whole serves as an editor. Digg.com, which launched in 2005 (figure 6),

revolutionized the way people got their news. Digg developed a ranking

system of online news were users could vote up (digg) or down (bury) a

selective news. Popular news would show up in the front page and buried

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news would disappear. In a matter of a few months Digg got a huge user

base. Now many internet users chose to get their news on Digg rather than

the BBC or mainstream filtered mediums.

Figure 6 Digg

Sites like Digg , Facebook, and Flickr have millions of active users creating

and sharing content. However most of this content is kept within the sites.

Users share on independent sites. Sometimes, users log in and out of

different social websites, without having the opportunity to take their

contribution from site to site. Companies like Facebook are very protective of

their users and their content. However, Sir Tim Bernes-Lee initial view of the

web was not one of companies having control over users or information. Sir

Bernes-Lee view was one of openness were information could travel freely

through the web.

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Sir Time Bernes-Lee mentions that “Semantic Web is an extension of the

current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better

enabling computers and people to work in cooperation” (Bernes-Lee, T 1999).

What this means is that the “Cloud Computing” is allowing sites and users

interpret information in a simple way. The only problem is that social websites

are keeping most of their information within the virtual walls of their site. They

do it to protect their users, information, economics, and to maintain control on

their niche market. Because of venture interests users are the ones that suffer

the consequences and have to deal with many users accounts, profiles, social

graphs, filling forms, and spending numerous amount of hours trying to sync

their accounts together. In a conversation with Matt Biddulph, CTO of Doppr,

he spoke about Facebook. “Facebook rather than being a World God it is a

guardian of most venture assholes” (Biddulph,M, Personal Communication,

2008). Some users and developers started talking in 2007 about how users

should have some sort of portability within sites. The Dataportability Project;

which is a group created to promote the idea that individuals should have

control over their data by determining how they can use it and who can use it

(Dataportability Project 2008), has been of the most influential critics on how

the user generated content is being handle by companies in the web. In 2007

The Dataportability Project was launched with members from various web

organizations like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and many others The

Dataportability Project promotes the idea that you should be able to carry your

information from site to site and share it with whoever you wish to. In other

words the Dataportability Project is pushing the industry so that users could

take control over their data rather than having companies take complete

control of user’s information. Imagine being able to log in to your photo

sharing account uploading last night pictures of you and your friends.

Automatically your social network updates your albums and tags all of your

friends. All you had to do was upload the pictures and social websites would

sync your data for you. It does not sound to difficult does it? A couple of

websites talking to each other, sharing the information you chose to allow

them to use. However, in reality it is a whole different game. One of the main

problems of the Dataportability Project is the fact that some companies are

reluctant to understand the benefits of opening up their services. Companies

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like Facebook decide to keep developing their platform on top of their existing

platform rather than opening their platforms with other services. Tim O’Reilly

pointed out on his paper of What is Web 2.0 how Mapquest a company that

pioneered on web mapping failed to understand the importance of sharing

their information. When Google launched their map system they allowed

users to control and remix the mapping data. Google took a big share of the

web market just by providing the users control over their service (O’Reilly, T.

2005). Another perfect example of companies not understanding the concept

of openness is the browser war that took place a few years ago. Internet

Explorer controlled 100% of the web browser market. Microsoft pre-installed

their browser in all their operative system and like most of the things Microsoft

does, they developed their browser in the companies best interest. In 2003

Firefox emerged and gave the power to the users. Firefox was a open

standards web browser. Users could freely develop on top of the browser. In a

matters of years, Firefox has capture 20% of the whole web market. Microsoft

was forced to take a new direction on the development of Internet Explorer.

Mapquest and Microsoft learnt from their own experience that closing

themselves in a bubble was a bad choice. David Recordon, one of the most

active open web evangelists, spoke about the benefits of open web at

OSCON 2008. “The web has to be accessible by everyone, I mean, we have

seen the value of network effects, we have seen the value of collective

intelligence. The web can not be something which is silo off into just one

area”(Recordon, D. 2008). Now, companies and developers have started to

get into the whole concept of the “Open Web”. Companies like Twitter,

Dopplr, and flickr have started developing and using 3rd party API’s

(Application Programming Interface), which according to PC Magazine is a

language and message format used by an application program to

communicate with the operating system or some other control program such

as a database management system (DBMS) or communications protocol (Pc

Magazine 2007). The fact that these companies and many others are

developing and using API’s have allowed information for the very first time to

flow freely from site to site. Data from different sites can be pulled together in

order to provide new values with the different combination of the data. This

allows for a whole range of handcrafted merges of data sources, from

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dynamic embedding of advertisements in AdSense to dynamic visualisations

of housing information on Google Maps (Ankolekar, A., Krötzsch, M., Tran,

Vrandecic, D. 2007). Opening up services gives business strategists the

opportunity to be more competitive against competitors or possible ones.

Dopplr a social network site that allows users to create itineraries of their

travel plans and spot correlations with their contacts’ travel plans in order to

arrange meetings at any point on their journey has used 3rd party API’s to

expand their users experience. “Everything is about us (Dopplr) and

answering the question what is is Dopplr’s core business? Our business is not

helping you upload pictures to the web. Flickr is already best and already

better than what we can ever be at uploading photos. So there is a pragmatic

business decision , Can we use Flickr to save us some work? Or can we

further down the road more quickly by building on something users already

use or use features the internet already has” (Biddulph,M, Personal

Communication, 2008). At the end, users are not the only ones benefited by

opening up services, companies like Dopplr and many others have been able

to progress using 3rd party API’s. Matt Biddulph talked about Flickr and

referred to it as “ one of those companies that has open their platforms with

API’s getting a lot people to do a lot free work for them. It is not free work as

in that Flickr is getting more money for it, it is free work in the sense the Flickr

is consolidating its position in the internet” (Biddulph,M, Personal

Communication, 2008). Users can now enjoy hundreds of information

mashups thanks to the opening of a few companies. “I love that with the

Dopplr API people are creating things without us asking” (Biddulph,M,

Personal Communication, 2008). Widgets have been created for personal

blogs or websites. Users are enjoying being able to carry their picture

information from Flickr and sharing it with their blog readers. Sites like Flickr,

Dopplr, and Twitter are just a few on the social websites that have started

using API’s, however there is still a big number of sites that refuse or are not

as eager to open up their systems.

In September 2007 Joseph Smarr, Marc Conter , Robert Scobble and Michael

Arrigton published The Bill of Rights for The Users of The Social Web. In this

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symbolic bill they pointed fundamental rights that users should have. First,

they pointed the ownership of personal information. This includes profile

information, people who the user connects to, and all of the content they

generate. Second is the control users have over their information and third is

the freedom for users to allow sites to access their information (Smarr, J.,

Canter, M., Scoble, R., Arrington, M. 2007). The Bill of Rights for The Users of

the Social Web was one of the starting points for making social websites and

users aware of the importance of opening services. Wesabe a community of

people trying to deal with money issues created the Data Bill of Rights. They

pioneered in a concept of user rights that hopefully many sites decide to adopt

in a near future. The bill states that users can export and/or delete their dat

from wesabe whenever they want to. Wesabe acknolodeges that the data

belongs to the user, not to wasabe. They will keep all of the users data online

and accessible for as long as the user has an account. Anything users would

like to have private, Wasabe guarantees that it will be kept private (Wesabe,

2006). Users might not use all of these things Wasabe is promising, but just

the fact that a company understands this is priceless for the user. Social

Websites forget that whatever users contribute to a site is their information.

Yes, the social sites are the medium for which users decide to share or

contribute but it is still the users content, not the social website’s content. Matt

Biddulph compares user contributions and social web sites with money and

banks. “The bank can do more with your money that you could do individually

but to pay you for the privilege of getting to use your money over a broader

range of activities, it should pay you back in interests. it is very important to

me that the bank never forgets that it is your money, or that the website never

forgets it is your data” ” (Biddulph,M, Personal Communication, 2008). In

November 2007 Google, Myspace and other social websites released a set of

common API’s for web-based social network applications called OpenSocial.

These set of API’s would allow any social network that adopts the API’s to

inter-operate between each other. Some of the sites that currently support

them are Hi5, Frindster, Myspace, Orkut , Yahoo! among others. However the

social network giant, Facebook, decided not to join Google’s initiative at this

time. They decided to implement their own set of API’s that will work on top of

the Facebook platform. They called it “Facebook Connect” it was announced

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almost a year later than the OpenSocial project was launched. Since the

OpenSocial launch many developers like David Recordon, Chris Messina,

Joseph Smarr, John McCrea and many others have started developing tools

that would allow a more “Open Web” to exist. Tools like Oauth, Portable

Contacts, OpenID, XRDS-Simple and Googles OpenSocial make “The New

Open Stack”. The “New Open Stack” has tools that will benefit users and

developers. One of the most popular tools is called OpenID that is a single

user online ID that will eliminate the fact of having to have many user names

and passwords. Portable Contacts are trying to make for all of your

connections you make online (friends, co-workers, family, chat buddies, etc)

you can take with you from site to site and not be forced to make new

connections every time you join a new service. Oauth allows sites to talk to

each other so users can import data from site to site without having to divulge

their real ID or passwords. The tools are build developed it just a matter that

companies decided to utilize them.“I think something really happened last

year around this (open web). I mean we are getting to a point were we have

an understanding what it means to have services in the cloud. The web as a

platform is a something that is coming around as a term more and more and

something that it is becoming understood. I think we understand the value of

openness, lets not repeat what happened on the desktops, with the web when

we have the opportunity to change that” (Recordon,D. 2008). The words of

David Recordon at OSCON 2008 referring on how the web industry is

becoming aware of the opportunities of an open web. All of the advancements

taken place on the open web have taken place in the last year, It is exciting to

think how things are going to progress in a few years time. Users might not be

aware of the movement that is taking place but once the technologies develop

users might become more responsive. It is a matter of getting a balance

between technology, business, and grand gestures before we have a true

web, a web Sir Tim Bernes-Lee once dreamt.

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Chapter three: My “real” Cyberself

In society it is normal for people to have different masks and faces according

to situations. The World Wide Web for many years in the past served as

another place to experiment with identities. Now, with current technologies

and advancements in Web 2.0 it is more difficult to unattached offline ids with

online ones. Online companies need to take care online identities just like

costumer services take care of real persons.

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“The irony is that in all its various guises – commerce, research, and surfing –

the Web is already so much a part of our lives that familiarity has clouded our

perception on the Web itself” (Bernes-Lee, T. 2000). The words of Sir Tim

Bernes-lee reflect our reality. The World Wide Web has become something

so familiar that we take for granted what it actually is. It is more than place to

exchange emails, it is more than place to upload pictures, it is a lot more than

just a place in a computer were people lose track of time. The World Wide

Web is the greatest and biggest creation of Men. Not even Nostradamus

predicted it, Julius Cesar could not even dreamt it and not even John Paul II

could have imagine that magnitude of the World Wide Web. Even on third

world countries like El Salvador the Web is an important aspect on

Salvadorans daily life. From keeping up with friends and family all around the

world, to getting news as they happen, Users all over the world are emerge in

a Web culture. Everyone is an editor, everyone is a producer, and everyone

run its own show.

At the beginning , when the web was gaining its momentum, things were very

different. In a 1995 publication on interaction using computers, it mentioned

“Because computer-mediated interact ants are unable to see, hear, and feel

one another they cannot use the usual contextualization cues conveyed by

appearance, nonverbal signals, and features of the physical context” (Jones,

S.G. 1995). At first, the fact of communicating within the medium of a

computer it was thought that all interactions had a degree of anonymity. It was

thought that because interactive parts did not immediately revealed crucial

information about their identity like gender, race, rank, physical appearances

and any sort of identifiers from public profiles, users had complete anonymity.

Because of the anonymity there was an equilibrium between ideas, and

messages being sent through the Web. Peoples opinions were not being

judge by their ethnic backgrounds or their academic ranking. Everything being

said on the Web had and equal status, something that in the face-to-face,

physical world rarely happened. Most of the interactions going on in the 90’s

were deeply affected by the systems infrastructure, or in other words the

computers and networks. Most of the people that were really active online

were normally very computer savvy persons. Nonetheless a very diverse

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community started to built up, doctors, house wife’s, engineers, students, and

all sort of profiles came together in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels, and

message boards. Users tended to take alter identities that most of the time

affected the way communication took place in the Web. Having a second or

third identity online was part of the experience. Remember joining chats and

the first question a person would ask would be “ A/S.L?” Age, Sex and

Location. They could be 54 and actually be 18 years old. You could play

someone’s wife that lived in Hawaii if you wish to. The Web was this dark, fun,

anything-goes place were people could become whomever they wanted to.

As the Web matured users also matured. Anonymity became an option, users

started to developed connections with others users, resulting on a faded

anonymity. As stated before on this paper, the Web started to change. Users

started to get more control over web sites information. Users had more

options than chats and message boards. The same user that had adopted the

nickname “Haxor Lord” and had a dominant male role in message boards

suddenly started uploading pictures of himself, that revealed that he looked

like a cast member of the film “The Revenge of the Nerds”. Connections

started to have avatars, avatars had profiles, profiles had emails, emails had

contact cards, and contact cards had real names. A real anonymous id was

something of the past, the Web would never be that place were anything-went

and no strings were attached. Users had to act more consciously than in the

past. The evolution of technology made it easier for people to engage with the

Web. Most people in first world countries had some sort of access to a

computer with internet. This accessibility allowed a rapid growth of social

networks, and therefore users developed online connections at a staggering

rate. On a study done by the Sociology department of the University of

Temple on Facebook’s user profiles, they found out that users have as an

average 241.9 friends. That means that most people who have a Facebook

account share all of their information with over 200 people they know. Most

users share 88.4 pictures of themselves (Zhao, S., Grasmuck, S., Martin, J.

2008). Can you imagine how many people have seen your drunken nights out

with the lads? People are losing that feeling of a “ virtual world” and they are

connecting their offline identity with an online one. Social network sites are

just permitting this merging of identities to occur. People still have multi

25

personalities and identities online as they would offline. Most people have a

different face with their families than what they really are with their co-

workers. It is normal to have masks in society. The only main difference now

is the fact that online identities are synchronizing with offline ones. Some

social network sites allows users to have limited profiles were the user can

chose what sort of information they want to divulge to a certain friend.

Facebook can sort user contacts within groups such as family members,

University friends, and network friends, and share different profile information

with each group. Users might want to share their photos with their university

friends but they might not feel comfortable sharing those pictures with their

family members. Facebook without a doubt has been the leader on the

pursuit of linking offline identities with online identities. Joe Stump one of the

lead developers of the social news site Digg.com talked about Facebook at

The Future of Web Apps 2008. “Every meeting I have had with Facebook and

every time you talk to them, they are very focus on, online identities being

directly tied to offline identities, and they are super hardcore about policing it.

They have hundreds of support people that their entire job is to delete fake

accounts”( Stump,J, Rose,K, Recordon,D., Messina, C., Carson, R. 2008).

There might be a point were your Facebook account becomes your real

identity everywhere. Rather than showing your driving license as a proof of

age, you might have to show your Facebook profile to prove your age.

However many like Joe Stump, David Recordon, Chris Messina, the people at

Google, Yahoo! And many others criticize the approach Facebook is taking

regarding information gathering. On their terms and condition Facebook

states the following:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing

26

Meaning that Facebook can do whatever they want with your information. If

you wish to delete it and take the information off the site, You can, But

everything is archive and they can do whatever they want with it. One of the

main objectives for an open web to exist is the fact that terms like this would

cease to exist. Social sites like Dopplr and Wesabe on the other hand

understand that all of the data users share is the users data from the start, if

they wish to remove their data from their service Dopplr and Wesabe are

more than happy to send them their information back. “we don’t shout about it,

because we don’t want you to close your account”(Biddulph, M. personal

communication 2008) Matt Biddulph expressed when asked about Dopplr’s

account closing procedure. “ Every now and again I scan tracking feeds, and

might see a post about Dopplr saying ‘Ok Dopplr is not for me, I closed my

account and they emailed me all my trips I had shared’. For some reason we

have gone into a habit of not saying a nice goodbye to people when they

leave. That is part of the ethics of data online” (Biddulph, M. personal

communication 2008). Can you imagine if Facebook was this good? You

closed your account and they would gladly send all of your pictures, all of your

wall posts, comments, links you’ve shared, notes you wrote, messages you

sent, and everything else you did. Once a site has 100 million active users

you cannot expect such kindness. Facebook sometimes is compared to

Microsoft , and its software bundle Microsoft Office. Facebook has a lot of

services embedded into one single user interface. Matt Biddulph also mention

this on my conversation with him, “Facebook has aspects of Flickr, Twitter,

Upcoming and all these open things and yet it is the only way to get all of this

in one page but the possibility of having it all together in one page is now

being enabled by the open web” (Biddulph, M. personal communication

2008). Many people feel that it is necessary for the whole Web to be open,

Facebook cannot become the Monopoly Microsoft once was.

The Open Web technologies are being built as you read this paper. The

Single user Identification, named OpenID, has taken a big role on the Open

Web movement. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Myspace, and thousands of other

sites are supporting the unique ID, so users can experience connecting with a

single ID. Matt Biddulph ponders on the availability of a current Open Web “I

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think the open web is an practical actual thing right now, I mean, I have

various things that are open. Through my news feeds, through OpenID,

through various things I have in my blog that I aggregate things to. My ID is

sort of portable between different sites that I get information from different

places and it is possible for me to do less work when I join a new site”

(Biddulph, M. personal communication 2008). Like anything new, things have

to start from nothing and slowly build up. The Open Web is in an early stage

where not everything is nice and glamorous. However it has the potential for it

to become a reality. Companies like Facebook who are that are trying to

protect by all means the control they have over information will eventually

have to accept that it is impossible to withhold that sort of information on the

Web. David Recordon mentioned it on a conversation over at Future of Web

Apps 2008 “you get another year or two down the road, and they (Facebook)

are still doing it in a way that is specific to Facebook, I think the web is going

to go around them. The web does not allow only one company to control

something as core as identity” (Stump,J, Rose,K, Recordon,D., Messina, C.,

Carson, R. 2008). Average users might not be aware of the control companies

like Facebook have over their information, but at the rate social networks are

increasing and technology is developing it is just a matter of time before

average users like my mom and sister realize the importance of an Open

Web. At the end, normal users will not understand that they are using open

technologies or how they work. For them, things will just work. It is just like

going to the library. For most students books are just there available for them

check out whenever they need to. When they are done they just return it and

that is it. However, a library catalogue exists that is core for the library’s

service to be successful, Librarians are crucial for sorting out new books and

getting them back in their shelves and hundreds of other procedures take

place in a library that most students do not even see, they just need the final

service. The Web is just like a library, When it becomes an Open Web, users

will not know about the technologies and the people behind it, however they

will enjoy the benefits of it. Towards the end, that is the idea of an Open Web,

to make it easier for the user, so that users will not have to make new friends

every time they sign up to a service, for users to have control over the data

they contribute to the web. Like Matt Biddulph said “A lot of the open web stuff

28

the Web API’s, and the OpenIDs are just the product of some of the people

who look at Sir Tim Bernes-lee’s earliest work and try to continue to its natural

evolution called the web of data or the web of link data” (Biddulph, M.

personal communication 2008).

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Conclusion

The future is unpredictable, trying to anticipate what is going to happen In

future days is impossible, but in the World Wide Web’s case the future is

already here. In the words of the science fiction writer William Gibson “The

future is already here it is just unevenly distributed”. Technologies are better

than ever. Users can access the World Wide Web from anywhere in the

world, whenever they want to and however they want. Gadgets like the

Iphone and low budget computers have allowed over 400 million active users

to populate the Internets Computer Cloud with all sorts of information and

data. Information that is vital for any Web 2.0 social website. If it was not for

the millions of people like you that reviews products online, that Bloggs about

recent films and events, that uploads videos on Youtube, you that creates

events in sites like Upcoming and RSVP’s all invitations online. You that fixes

any inaccurate Wikipedia entries. You who spends a good portion of your day

updating profiles and contributing for the common good, If it were not for

people like you, sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, and thousands of

others would not exist. If sites like these did not exists people like Mark

Zuckerberg, who have become millionaires thanks to user generated content,

would not be as wealthy it were not for you. It is time that companies realize

the importance of users and its generated content. Users need to be

protected by commitments and bills that companies should agreed on.

Commitments that would give users more rights over their generated content,

that it would allow users not companies to control their information. Visionary

companies like Yahoo!, Myspace, Microsoft, and Google have realize the

importance of the users, of their content. These companies have started

implementing technologies like the Open Stack that will eventually be the

fundamental pillar of a true Open Web. Companies that refuse to understand

the Open Web concept will eventually pay the price of doing so.

The Open Web is a reality it is happening as you read this paper. It is there

when you use your Google account, and it is there when you install widgets in

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your Blog. The Open Web is out there, but it is still on an early stage. Like a

small tree that has recently been planted, you need to give it the enough

amount of sunshine, the exact quantity of water, and you need to protect it

against plagues and bugs. If you take care of it, that tree will grow to be tall

and strong. It is time for developers and business thinking minds to come

together and think on the collective wellbeing of all of the World Wide Web’s

users. To work united and as team protect and take care of the Web, then like

our tree, We will have a strong Open Web were everybody wins.

31

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Appendices