More of our social interaction in moving from the primitive but relatively open and egalitarian world of the blogosphere onto a set of closed or at least controlled applications. How can we -- as a community or culture -- influence actions or product decisions that companies like Apple, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube are taking that could 'enclose the commons' and disrupt or rework the Web that we have been making?
Some of my concerns are about about making a social space that remains ours, and becomes more humane over time. That's why I am calling for a movement -- like New Urbanism in city planning -- bringing together designers, investors, developers, users, and thinkers, to make sure we can rethink social tools based on what does and does not work today, and based on principles that engender the world we want.
But my deepest worries are about ownership and governance, and the tensions between us, the denizens of the web, and those that own the means of connection. We have to plan how to take back the web that we animate, that we make valuable by our actions.
Opera Unite could cut out the middlemen
I've once done a scenario analysis to think about whether the server market will be growing in the long end, or shrinking in proportion to the total amount of nodes. With Web2.0 there's already a shift towards 'production' instead of just consumption by internet users. Yet, this is still done via the platforms of often commercial entities.
In that regard, Opera Unite, which proposes to change that, might be interesting to check out:
unite.opera.com/