(2012-12-13) Dash Open Web We Lost

Anil Dash celebrates the OpenWeb we traded in for the Critical Mass of Walled Garden-s. This isn't our web today. We've lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich.

Good related Dave Winer piece: there still is art, even if most people don't live artistic lives. And you can still use the open Internet even if most people don't.

I wonder what would have happened if the OpenWeb players (Technorati, FlickR) hadn't tripped?

I think a lot of the open-ness then was

• unemployed post-DotCom folks just wanting to build something cool not encumbered by the bubble bullshit. So they weren't worried about a Business Model. But eventually they got DayJob-s again.
• lots of services wanted to plug into an open EcoSystem to build traffic. Once they hit Critical Mass they didn't need to be open any more.

What should you/we do now?

• have your own primary Thinking Space that you control, under your own domain
• use relatively-open services as much as possible: FlickR
• if your stream has stuff that you don't want to lose, mirror it in your own space (Integrating Linkblogging Bookmarking Microblogging Into Wikilog), or at least archive it
• use an RssAggregator

Dec20 update: Dave Winer connects the Walled Garden-s to the pre-web Packaged Software market, and notes that the OpenWeb gives people willing to make their own software more Freedom of Creativity.