Tag: data portability
Occupy Facebook: innovation in the era of social protest
Wired reports that a group involved in the Occupy movement is working on its own decentralized social networking platform: “I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest. Dave Winer notes that it probably won't succeed: Internet In principle, I agree with Dave. It's a fundamental mistake that a lot of people
Is it time to revive the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web?
In some ways, the web industry seems to have lost its way. From empowering users and smashing incumbent gatekeepers, the emphasis is now on how to raise the next round of funding and convert active users into their maximum possible value.. My piece about Facebook, contextual identity and radical transparency continues to get a lot of attention, and the conversation continues. Dave Winer urged his readers to log out of Facebook, and Nik Cubrilovic countered that logging out doesn't help. In shor
Danger in the cloud: a proposal
In response to recent events, I’d like to propose a different kind of web service that overcomes the privacy and reliability issues with cloud web applications, while providing a solid business model for both application developers and service providers, as well as a seamless, easy-to-use experience for end users. The T-Mobile storm Over the weekend there’s been a storm surrounding the T-Mobile Sidekick, which is produced by Microsoft’s Danger subsidiary. It turns out the device stores the pri
Building the user-centered web
The following post contains my notes for a talk I gave at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University on June 25, 2009. What is a social network? I would like to reclaim some language: Social is an adjective that means relating to human society and its members. A network is an interconnected system of things or people. Therefore, I’d suggest that we can define a social network as just being an interconnected system of people. The audience of this talk is a social ne
Social networking: beyond the silo
1. The rise of social networking 2. Monetization vs. collaboration 3. The open web 4. Fluid collaboration The rise of social networking Social forces have been the driving force behind application innovation on the web. Whereas previously we might have looked to advances in computer science for new directions, now some of the most dramatically impactful applications are lightweight, simple, and technologically unimpressive. The best new web applications have centered around collaboration,
User control on the open web
Data portability and the open data movement ("the open web" for simplicity's sake) revolve around the idea that you should be able to take your data from one service to another without restriction, as well as control who gets to see it and how. Very simply, it's your data, so you should have the ability to do what you like with it. That means that, for example, if you want to take your Wordpress blog posts and import them into MovableType (Wordpress's competitor), you should be able to. Or you s
Digg Joins the DataPortability Project
Digg Joins the DataPortability Project Digg has joined the DataPortability Project, a group of websites cooperating to help you securely use your data however you want. Why? Because you own your data. It’s that simple. From the start, Digg has supported the idea that you own your own data. Chris Saad talks about dataportability An...