Back in December I decided I was going to run a little experiment and try moving my blogging entirely into Wave (wavelogging?).  It was an interesting experience but there is a deal-breaker that I just can't work around at the moment.  

I thought it would make for an interesting discussion to report back on where things are at right now.  What works, what doesn't, what's awesome, and what NEEDS to be fixed.

 When I first started blogging in 2006 or so, I loved the idea of being able to have conversations with people all over the world, many of whom I didn't even know existed.  It's served me really well in that respect, I've met a ton of people and developed my most important online social network.  I have several relationships in the real world that developed because of blogs.

Then Twitter came along, and was all real-timey and stuff.  It's fun.  It feels like a cocktail party.  I can blurt out things that I think would make funny fortune cookies and there's an audience for that I guess.  But in terms of content it was a real lightweight compared to blogs, the medium is just too constraining.  At its core Twitter is a 140-character message bus, and there are lots of things lacking there for heavy-duty collaboration to happen.

Next came Facebook, which allowed me to find a lot of people but not necessarily the ones I wanted to have technical conversations with.  It's also completely ungeared towards anything longer than a sentence or two, the commenting system resembles a car with just an engine and a frame and a steering wheel.  Also not suited to hard-core collaboration of any kind.

Over time the collaboration model on blogs got better with the introduction of commenting systems like Disqus (although I still don't like the fact that I rely on them 100% to safeguard those comments).  But it never really changed much, we always had blogs and RSS to distribute and comment on meatier content.

But then, this year, came Wave.  And I fell head over heels in love with it.

I view a major shift in technology, like the one that I see materializing right now with Google Wave (the protocol), as a huge object crashing into a an existing landscape.  There's this massive change right in the middle, a new space that has to be filled, and then all these fissures spidering out from the main event where the rest of the world is affected by that event--new spaces that must be filled with something.

One of the fun things about technology disruptions is trying to figure out what the landscape will look like after the main event.  It's those changes that nimble businesses can take advantage of to pivot into the new spaces that were created.  For example when the Web finally went mainstream it created an entirely new industry, but it then proceeded to change the way every other existing industry operated to some degree, and we're still working through that with things like hosted applications and the SaaS model.

So here's the deal with Wave:  If you deal in technology, and you get this one wrong, you'll miss the boat.  And it's a big boat.  If, on the other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some incredible innovation.

In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture.  Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap since HTTP itself.

I've been wanting to write this post for a while, but first I wanted to read fully thru and digest the specs and available code.  I haven't done any posts about XMPP for quite a while, but you're going to start hearing a whole lot about it, and not just from me.

A couple of glasses of vino on a Sunday night and I got to thinking about what I believe will be the technologies that are going to reshape the world in 2010. After a stagnant year or two in there are some really killer things on the horizon right now.

This is a follow-on to my post the other day about peer-to-peer debt.  It's some of the stuff I've been drawing on napkins for a couple of years, an idea for building a peer to peer service network on top of BitTorrent.

I try not to use words like that too loosely, either.

This banking system is dying.  I don't talk about it too much anymore because there's nothing that can be done to stop it at this point, but the Bretton Woods monetary system that has been in place since 1944 at the conclusion of World War II is coming to an end.  An interest-bearing debt based monetary system, which is what we have, has a finite life span from the moment it's born, and this one has reached its unsustainable peak and is on the way back down, fast.

It's sixth-grade math, you can't deny it, there is no wishing it away.  It just is.

So then, the question is what will rise as the next monetary system.  Never complain about me giving problems and not answers, here's a doozy.  I've been sketching these ideas out for several years now, and I've finally found a few other people who are thinking along the same lines.  If the current crisis has the end result of giving an alternative monetary system critical mass then it may be worth it.

I admit it… I thought I got the semantic Web before, but I didn’t really.  I really got it just recently.

People have noticed that I haven’t blogged much (well, really not at all) for the past week. That's partly because I’ve been under some pretty tight deadlines at work lately, but also because I’ve also been feverishly working to fully grasp the semantic Web—not an easy task, for me at least.

Now that I’ve emerged on the other side of that process, the semantic Web seems like a pretty uncomplicated concept.  But boy, let me tell you, trying to wrap my brain around it was quite a challenge. I always knew what it was about from a high level—RDF, triples, vocabularies and all of that. I could just never mentally translate those ideas into solutions for the problems I was working on. And it’s interesting, because I can plainly see the vision now and, more importantly, how it fits into real-world problems.  I also see why it has been utterly failing at gaining any kind of traction outside of academia.

My little self-education process started when Kingsley Idehen invited me to a semantic Web get-together at MIT. We had emailed each other a few times before as a result of him finding my blog, and some posts I wrote about a year back about what is now being called data portability and distributed social networks. Since I’m now living in the Boston area, he invited me to MIT to meet in person and to get a sense of what the semantic Web ideas are truly about. The meeting was interesting, but I still came away unimpressed.

I kept in contact with Kingsley, peppering him with rapid-fire questions about semantic Web technology, technical details, and how it applies to my real-world problems, and he patiently answered all of my questions.  Thanks for the tutoring there man, appreciate it ;)  I thought I was pretty forward-thinking for writing about things like data portability and distributed social networks a year or two before they became hot stuff, but I now have to tip my hat to Kingsley and a few select members of the Semantic Web crowd and admit that they had this problem figured out back when I was still in college.

Now that I understand it, I realize that the semantic Web is some very, very cool stuff. It includes many of the ideas that I’ve been writing about for a long time without fully realizing that they were encapsulated by semantic Web ideas. Many of the things that I’ve been wanting to do for a while—data portability, being able to use objects distributed across the Web, global object identifiers, distributing software across networks, and using converged online identities—are achievable by the semantic Web, and pretty much all of the details have already been worked out. It was an epiphany for me when I realized this, and I have to say I’m extremely happy about it because I had been thinking that all of this was a new trail that had to be blazed. Turns out, all the heavy lifting has already been done, it’s just never really been used much.

I think the biggest problem the semantic Web is facing is the fact that most of the people who understand it come primarily from academia. Academia, to me, is plagued with a disease that I myself have suffered from my entire life—that is, the urge to build something just because it’s cool technologically, not because it’s useful in the real world. While something I built might impress the hell out of other computer geeks, and I’d be extremely proud of it, other people would look at it with mild interest and then quickly move on to something else, because they couldn’t see the value in it. I’d have to say that I owe a lot to the experience of building Latigent and to my former business partner Chris Crosby for helping me overcome that handicap. Having to build something with resale value in order to pay the bills this month has a way of grounding you in reality.  Having somebody else depending on you to build something of resale value, and remind you of that constantly, helps even more :)   I’d highly recommend every geek who thinks he’s hot stuff work closely with a sales-oriented person for a period of time if you really have a desire to make any money.

Besides suffering from being sold by people who don't really understand the real-world problems that it could fix, the semantic Web is plagued by a layer of jargon and terms that takes a significant investment of time to work through. While I understand that it’s important to clearly define what you’re talking about, people who are pushing the semantic Web are generally not very good at dumbing it down enough so that it’s easily palatable. It took me a good week of pretty focused research and having somebody there to bounce questions off of before I really got it--and I like to think that I'm a pretty technical guy. Now that I get it, I’m sure that there’s a better way to package these concepts so that more people understand how they relate to the problems they’re facing. The straightforward concepts that underlie the idea of the semantic Web are so obfuscated by the terminology and the W3C standards that come up when you google them that the mental barrier to entry is just way too high right now. The fact is, people will not adopt semantic Web ideas until semantic Web ideas are the ones that get returned when they search for a solution to their problem. In order to get to that point a radical change in the way these concepts are sold is needed.  That, and people like Kingsley, Danny Ayers, Tim Berners-Lee and others who are out there tirelessly promoting it as a real-world solution to real-world problems.

Kingsley has started calling the semantic Web the Linked Data Web, which is definitely a good step towards packing the idea in a more attractive way. I would personally prefer something more closely related to living, breathing objects (not literally, but in the sense that they can actually do things besides just being queried for data). I think that the semantic Web crowd is a little too focused on the data output side of things—all of the excitement seems to be around querying data, finding data, building a better Google, etc. That’s cool and all, but it seems to me that the real killer application for these ideas is allowing nodes on the Internet to find and then actually communicate with each other.  That key point almost seems lost in the shuffle to me. What is called the semantic Web today, with a nice healthy injection of service-oriented architecture, is going to be a revolution in computing. That's the bit that excites me—enabling an Internet where any node can communicate and interact with any other node on the network.

I'm looking forward to continuing to learn more about the details that have been painstakingly worked out over the years on the semantic Web, and at some point actually getting an opportunity to put them into practice.  I now have no doubt that the next earth-shattering applications, the revolutions in the way we use computers and the Internet, are going to spring from this movement, and I'm pretty excited about that.  All it needs is a little sex appeal and it'll catch on like wildfire.

There’s been a pretty fascinating discussion going on in the blogosphere recently about the benefits and hazards of centralization on the Internet.  Three main hot button topics have come and have ignited the discussion:  TechMeme, TinyURL, and FaceBook.

If you’re not familiar with TechMeme, it’s a site that aggregates blog posts around a particular topic (meme) and creates “conversations” around them.  It’s pretty popular among the Web 2.0 crowd and many people—myself included—tend to use it as a tech newspaper.  It’s really handy in that regard, because you can see when there’s a popular topic that’s getting a lot of coverage without having to subscribe to thousands of feeds.

On the other hand, the way TechMeme aggregates the posts is something of a mystery.  It’s unclear whose blogs are on its “reading” list (my blog is part of the mix, and I’m not exactly sure how it got there), and they seem to be giving a lot more traffic to the big corporate blogs such as CNN, CNET, and TechCrunch lately. People are complaining that this is killing genuinely new and innovative memes off the site, and I tend to agree.  It used to be an incredibly interesting site to read because you’d see all kinds of offbeat and obscure ideas that you would otherwise never have heard of.  Recently it’s been more along the lines of technology news commentary, which is a real shame.  I would almost rather see the site broken up into an “A List” and “B List” site, I’d probably pay much more attention to the “B List” version.  But the point is that the one site having the power to decide which blogs are important, and thereby which memes are important, seems to be hurting the diversity and egalitarianism that made blogs interesting in the first place.  It’s a single point of failure in the brainstorming business.

And then there’s TinyURL.  Most people are probably familiar with it—but if you’re not it’s just a service that will take a long, obtuse URL and shorten it into a URL of about 15 characters.  It’s become more popular recently thanks to the micro-blogging phenomenon using sites like Twitter which let users post extremely small blog posts.  Usually the posts are limited to about 200 characters, so if you want to embed a link in your Twitter post, TinyURL is a handy little tool to help save space.

The downside, as with TechMeme, is that TinyURL is a single point of failure.  It went down the other day, and all of a sudden many, many links stopped working.  It poses the question of whether using any single point on the Internet as a conduit for so much traffic is actually a good idea, even if it makes life a little easier.  (I also have questions about where the Google juice for TinyURL’s go, to TinyURL itself or the destination site.)

And then there’s privacy—the big 500-lb gorilla hiding in the corner.  People are starting to have concerns about what Facebook and other social networks are doing with their data.  I’ve been blowing this horn for so long I’m starting to get tired, and the only way around this roadblock is to actually OWN OUR OWN DATA (duh).  IMO trying to fix the companies themselves is just a band-aid--just like tamed lion, even the most trustworthy companies can turn on you at any time ("Don't be evil" comes to mind here).  Of course, if you willingly give a company your data, they will use it to make the most money they can.  If you don't like it, you should rethink capitalism.  Don’t try to fix the companies, fix the freaking paradigm.  This is one area that needs decentralization in a bad way.

What I think is interesting is to watch this dance back and forth between centralization and decentralization.  For every two steps we make towards decentralization, we take a step backwards towards centralization.  What starts out decentralized ends up centralizing for a time in the name of progress and convenience, until the centralized systems are shattered into a million pieces as necessity and self-preservation demands it.  Technology innovation tends to happen in one spot (company, site, community, etc), and shortly afterwards that one spot becomes a centralized hub for all activity around that innovation.  Until it’s not.

This whole discussion leads to another fascinating topic, one that I think is going to be the defining trend in the next phase of Internet evolution:  personal Internet ownership.  It’s the ultimate level of decentralization, decentralizing the Internet so that it operates on the basis of each individual person, not relying on these central hubs we have today, like social networks and Old Media outlets.  Taking the Internet’s server network and turning it into a human network.