Bringing the Tower of Babel down a notch
A small rebellion is being incited on Scott Gilbertson’s Compiler blog on Wired News. He’s been calling for open social networks. When you join a social network site you go to a lot of work to put in all you personal info and all you friends, music, etc., etc. If you then want to join another site you have to go through the same tedious process. The sites are walled gardens where you can’t exchange information. The reason is that the computer world and internet is made up of countless providers and services that benefit from corraling an exclusive bunch of users and then battering them with products or ads from which the site gets revenue. Openness is not generally seen as in the interests of businesses.
But the call for open social networks is a hopeful sign that computer and internet users are getting fed up with all the proprietary strategies that waste so much time and effort. The internet itself is the ultimate social network, is it not? Must we endlessly repeat logins, registrations, profiles, battle file incompatibilities, and struggle with incompatible IMs and VoIP schemes? Must we endure the agonizingly slow market process of waiting for rival schemes to die and for a monopolistic de facto standard to emerge? Perhaps there’s no way around business model gamesmanship, but certainly we users can hasten the arrival of sensible systems by seeing through the traps, refusing to surrender to dependency, and putting our support behind open source and open standards efforts.
