Web 2.0 Expo keynotes

Brian Dillard, Monday, April 28, 2008 @ 4:53 pm

I spent a lot of time at Web 2.0 Expo session-hopping - and a lot more time hanging in the speaker's lounge fine-tuning my own talk. That's the curse of going on the last day. You can't fully enjoy the rest of the conference. That said, I had pretty strong reactions to some of the keynotes. The big platform announcements from Microsoft (Live Mesh) and Yahoo (SearchMonkey plus), were OK, but I was most struck by author Jonathan Zittrain and Mozilla exec Mitchell Baker.

Mitchell Baker on the future of the mobile web

In a keynote titled "Opening the Mobile Web," Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker argued that there should only be one web: Developers should be able to focus on building great web experiences, while only end users should have to worry about what which device they happen to be using. Data should be 100% portable. Search results collected on a desktop at home should be accessible from a smart device when that same user is on the road. What the end user can get to and do shouldn't be dependent on the type of device they have or the location they're in at any given time. That hasn't been the case so far in the mobile space; right now, device and service limitations cut off huge chunks of functionality for users on the go. Ultimately, however, there's no such thing as the mobile web. There are only mobile users who want access to everything no matter where they are.

Baker also made a strong case that the mobile space offers an opportunity for innovation; without 35 years of desktop GUI convention and 15 years of web-based expectations to bog them down, mobile user-agents are free to evolve in interesting directions. Mobile payment systems suggest that people want to do all sorts of unexpected things with their internet devices; browsing is an outdated metaphor. We should use the mobile web as an opportunity to abandon the mental constraints of the desktop and the browser. (This point echoed Mosaic/Netscape veteran Marc Andreesen's keyonte, in which he expressed surprise that the browser had lasted this long as a standalone application.) According to Baker, the problems with today's mobile browser are all engineering problems, which our industry is good at fixing. But we must also expand our creative vision of what the mobile experience can become.

Up to this point, I was totally down with Baker's analysis. But when she used that analysis as a springboard for Mozilla cheerleading, she sort of lost me. She highlighted some of Mozilla's ongoing mobile experiments - such as Fennic - and suggested that they would play the same function in the mobile web that Firefox has played in the open web/Web 2.0. But she didn't provide much supporting data as to why and how.

I'm about the biggest Firefox cheerleader there is, but to date, Mozilla has played almost no role in the mobile space. Competitors Opera and Safari actually have a foothold on today's devices. Mozilla has a lot of catching up to do if it wants to be a player. I kept expecting a concrete product or distribution announcement to support Baker's claim that Mozilla would lead us to a better mobile future. In the end though, she had nothing but vague promises and specious logic. It's a shame that somebody with so many smart things to say had to undercut them with meaningless PR.

Jonathan Zittrain on the lure of the walled garden

Jonathan Zittrain proved more persuasive in his examination of the "gated communities" that are starting to undermine the open web. An Oxford and Harvard law professor and author of "The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It," Zittrain didn't bother to hawk his book explicitly. Instead, he condensed its ideas into a 10-minute video lecture about the dangerous allure of the programming model used by systems such as the iPhone. It's tempting for both users and developers to adopt closed systems in which a central gatekeeper handles security and decides which applications are allowed to be run. The stability and predictability of such a platform make it seem far less scary than a completely open model. But there are hidden costs.

The "winner take all" network effect makes data portability a huge issue. If Facebook becomes "tomorrow's Friendster" - i.e., a must-miss destination - then what happens to all the information "mouse droppings" you've accumulated there? What happens when platform developers reserve the right to toss your application on the scrap heap after you've invested enormous assets into building and marketing it? And how might the power you cede to these platforms make it easier for government to step all over your civil rights? If your personal data happens to live in the Google cloud, does that mean you should be entitled to less protection?

Zittrain wasn't all doom and gloom. He didn't offer specific solutions to all of the problems he identified, but he did suggest that we should put pressure on platform developers to architect their walled gardens in ways that protect application developers and end users. If all of your personal data migrates to the servers of a few companies, government gets a free pass - a single point of access to snoop on you. It's up to platform developers, then, to "tie [their] hands to the mast" - to architect in a way that protects privacy and portability.

Venturing into historical analogy, Zittrain described the Constitution as "U.S.A. 2.0." In the early days of the country, if you didn't like somebody, you could just "move west." But as time went on, we needed an operating system for government, and that's what the Constitution became: a big shell game in which power was spread out among many entities. Many lessons from that era resonate today as we build powerful social communities and knowledge-sharing endeavors. "Whom do we trust ultimately to clean it up," Zittrain asked of malware, spam, wiki vandalism and other open-web dangers. His answer? Ad hoc community networks in which we add more elements of citizenship to the net. Instead of writing a check to Norton Antivirus to protect us - "the Pinkerton model" - or turning to the government, we should share responsibility among the citizens of the web. "If your ethos is just to call an 800 number to get help, then we deserve the future we're going to get."

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1. 

   Both interesting topics. I think the “walled garden” topic is especially important to future web growth. Take for example, software development. For years companies just pushed out their products using a Microsoft codebase, as that was really the only market available. But now companies are scrambling to go cross-platform with their software, as more and more users migrate to Mac and Linux. It also implicitly pushes the ideas behind open-source software, where the “community” provides solutions to your problems. I think in 2-3 years almost all mobile devices will have to have full access to the web, just so providers can stay competitive (Android will help as well). Also, they should stop calling things “Web 2.0″, that’s the worst hype term in the market today (at least Cloud Computing and SaaS make sense with the model). Here’s to hoping next year it will be named the “Evolution of the Web” conference.

   Comment by T.J., Tuesday, April 29, 2008 @ 1:30 pm

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