On 12 March 2013 16:35, hellekin (GNU/consensus)
<address@hidden> wrote:
As an intermezzo while the User Data Manifesto is still cooking,
I'd like to ask a simple question so that we can feed the wiki a bit and
bring in more people.
IMO, there are interesting side-effects going on in the online world,
regarding the complex relations of technology development, attention
scarcity, attractiveness of novelty, and NIH syndrome.
For example, as Melvin keeps pointing out, there are existing semantic
web technologies that are working, and decentralized, but lack of
visibility: FOAF, RDF, WebID, etc.
Im unsure this is accurate, I advocate using the WEB, and that's about it. The reason is that the web has a strong track record for network economics, and that is well suited to socially oriented projects.
This means understanding the nature of the URL, HTTP and HTML, in that order.
The issue is partly that people (with the exception of mark zuckerberg) have pre concieved notions about how this works, and do not understand that it has the power to do everything you need.
People have the tendency to think you need something new to be successful. The reality and history has proved the opposite. Making something new leads to a local minimum that is rarely interoperable.
The majority of successful projects come from cloning something existing and putting it in a slightly different context.
There's also plentiful of "niche" social networking that actually gather
millions of users, but are not perceived as social networking at all
because they lack the general purpose of the giant players, such as
MMORPG, the good old FICS and MUDs and MOOs... Without mentioning our
beloved IRC, or such prestigious sidekicks such as blogs, mailing-lists,
and wikis.
Each new generation of developers--i.e. every few months these days,
seem to look at the previous stuff and think "yeah, well, not good
enough." They quickly come up with shiny new concepts and
implementations, and then what? Each new language gathers a herd of
enthusiasts and soon, an old bum such as _javascript_ finds rejuvenation:
NodeJS is born, and the world is rewriting Lisp, Perl, Python, and Ruby
libraries in ECMAscript!
So I understand that is a fast development, and that you can run the
same code on the server or on the client, blurring the architectural
foundation, and certainly there are actual innovations, in the sense of
iterations not previously contemplated, but... What is driving all of
this? Is there a technical, and engineering foundation to embracing such
drastic changes every couple of years? Or is there something else, more
irrational going on?
With that in mind, which does not really call for a debate, but rather
for personal reflection on the evolution of techniques, and the
refinement of technologies vs. starting from scratch, I'm wondering
who's on your radar appearing as truly innovative in our problem space.
==
hk