Doc Searls Weblog

Yesterday, when Anil Dash (@AnilDash) spoke about The Web We Lost at Harvard, I took notes in my little outliner, in a browser. They follow. The top outline level is slide titles, or main points. The next level down are points made under the top level. Some of the outline is what Anil said, and some of it is what I thought he said, or thought on my own based on what he said, and then blathered out through my fingers. Apologies to Anil for what I might have heard wrong. Corrections invited.

David Weinberger also blogged the event This wasn’t easy, because David also introduced Anil and moderated the Q&A. His notes are, as always, excellent. So go read those first.

You can also follow along with this photo set.

Here goes:

POPS — Privately Owned Public Spaces

• In NYC (logo)
• Denying your rights to transgress
• Improv Everywhere has to mislead and operate anonymously in order to perform.

A secretive, private Ivy League club.

• Facebook was conceived as that.

Wholesale destruction of your wedding photos

• We hear stories about this, over and over, when a proprietary silo — even a POPS — dies, gets acquired or otherwise goes poof
• Think of what matters. (e.g. wedding photos) Everything else you own is just: stuff
• The silo makers are allowed to do this, because they have one-sided and onerous terms of service. For example:

Apple’s terms for iOS developers

• Amazing: “We view apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app. It can get complicated, but we have decided to not allow certain kinds of content in the App Store.”

There is a war raging against the Web we once had.

• “Being introduced as a blogger is like being introduced as an emailer”

They are bending the law to make controlling our data illegal

• Watch what’s happening. We won SOPA/PIPA, but that was just one thing. Are we going to do that twice? The same way?

Metadata is dying. And we didn’t even notice.

• Compare Flickr (old Web) and Instragram (new Web), which has no metadata
• Props to Berkman for doing the right thing by RSS

Links were corrupted. Likes are next.

• Economics are getting divorced from original contexts.
• Remember Suck.com? It was all about linking outward. (See David Weinberger on hyperlinks subverting hierarchy)
• Now links (at pubs and ad-supported sites) go to internal aggregation pages. SOA.
• Google converted the meaning of links from the expressive to the economic. (Or, to an economic statement.) Link-spam went viral in less than six months.
• Facebook has what they call Edgerank. “Likes” at first were an expression of intent. Now they are fuel for advertising. We’re seeing “like fraud.”
• On Flickr, favorites are still favorites because they aren’t monetizable. Thus Flickr has remained, relatively speaking, blessedly uncorrupted

They are gaslighting the Web.

• Note how unevenly Facebook places warnings. “Please be careful…” they say, about clicking on a non-Facebook facebook link. You see this on many non-BigCo sites that use Facebook logins. But…>
• With big Facebook partners you don’t get the message. Coincidence
• >Also, sites that register with them get the warning, while those that don’t register don’t have the message, even though they are less trustworthy. (Do I have that right? Not sure.)
• This is not malicious. It’s well-intended in its own pavement-to-hell way.>

In the best case, we’re stuck fixing their bugs on our budgets

• In the worst case, they’re behaving badly
• This is true for all the things that compete with the Web

Ideas get locked into apps that will not survive acquisition

• Content tied to devices dies when those devices become obsolete

We’ve given up on formats. We lost.

• Watch out for proprietary and under-documented formats
• Exceptions are .jpg and .html.

Undocumented and non-interoperable are now too common.

• There is an intentional pulling away from that which lowers switching costs, and creates public spaces.
• “Town halls” in POPS are not happening in public spaces. Example: the White House “town halls” on Facebook

TOS + IP trumps the constitution

• Everything you say can be changed on FB and they would be within their rights to do that

It’s never the Pharoah’s words that are lost to history

• POPS and walled gardens are not level playing fields
• Ordinary people’s interactions are being lost.
• Can’t we just opt out? What does that cost?
• There are opportuity and career costs
• Can I meaningfully expand my sphere of opportunities in a silo’d world run by pharoahs?
• “If I hadn’t participated in the blogosphere I wouldn’t be here today”

Our hubris helped them do this.

• We, the geeks of the world, the builders of public spaces, created non-appealing stuff. It didn’t compete. (e.g. OpenID)
• Thus we (i.e. everybody) are privileging prisons over the Web itself.
• We (geeks) did sincerely care
• We were so arrogant around the goodness of our own open creations that Zuck’s closed vision seemed more appealing
• That Z’s private club was more appealing says something.
• How we told the story, how we went about it, also mattered. We didn’t appeal. We talked to ourselves.
• It’s not just about UI, though we did suck at that too. It was about being in tune with ordinary non-geeks
• If we had been listening more… and had been a little more open in self-criticism…

Too much triumphalism in having won SOPA and PIPA.

• Can we do that again? Our willingness to pat ourselves on the back isn’t helpful.
• The people we count on to rally behind our efforts may not show up again

The open web faded away was not for lack of a compelling vision.

• We were less inclusive than Facebook and Apple.

But it’s only some of the Web, right?

• We built the Web for pages
• Then we changed from pages to streams… narrow single column streams
• Yahoo is now a stream too. See recent changes there. The Web is now more like radio. Snow on the water.
• These streams feel like apps. But users are chosing something different.
• (Shows a graph.)
• Half the time we spent in 2010 was already in a streaming experience. The percentage is much higher now.
• These streams are controlled-access. They are limited-access highways. This is part of the mechanism for constraining the conversation. A mismatch between the open web advocacy community and what people do. These others have a much more

Geeks always want to fight the last battle.

• What they need is a new kind of stream compelling enough for normal people to use.
• Mozilla is an exception, thanks to Microsoft being evil and IE bad.

So, what do we do?

• Are FB, LI and TW the new NBC, ABC and CBS?
• The web follows patterns.
• The pendulum swings
• Google is trying to be the evil empire now (whether they know it or not), overreaching, making us feel itchy the way Microsoft did in ’97.

Policy works. Fighting Microsoft helped.

• Reality is: public policy can be an effective
• Policy is coming around social networking. Count on it. Facebook’s overreach has that effect
• There are apps that want to do the right thing. (Anil, for example, is doing ThinkUp)
• The open web community mostly makes science projects and tool kits. Not enough.
• Are you being more sensitive to what users want than Zuck is?
• Item: it’s very hard to learn the history of the software industry, even here. How did software impact culture? How did desktop office suites affect business? The principal actors are still here. They have phones and email addresses. Yet we can’t seem to learn from them.

There are insights to be gleaned from owning our data.

• Can’t imagine a less attractive name for something than Quantified Self; but the movement matters
• This stuff that is already digital we pay no attention to. Instead we (companies) rely on marketing reports.
• Odd: it’s much easier to track my heart rate than how often I visit Twitter.
• These are the vectors for displacement, e.g. Google on meaning, emotion, expression… We have to be able to do better than them.
• Think about it: if you allow one more color than blue you’re ahead of Facebook

There are institutions that still care about a a healthy web.

• The White House has a podcast
• The Library of Congress? (not clear about the reference here)
• Facebook terms of service had a conflict with federal law
• Would hve been fun to see them shut down the White House Facebook account.
• Terms of service aren’t laws. Break them sometimes.

PR trumps ToS 10 times out of 10

• Look at our culture as being negatively affected by ToSes
• Look at Facebook’s ToS the same way we look at public laws. They even eliminated the token effort.
• Look at YouTube. “No infringement intended.”
• The people have already chosen a path of civil disobedience
• A Million Mixer march happens every day

Bonus links: Bruce Schneier in the Q&A brought up his Feudal model, which he talked about on Thursday in conversation with Jonathan Zittrain. And this very thoughtful piece by