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I mentioned in my previous post that this past weekend I attended the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). The keynote speech was given by Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center. Kuhn’s talk centered around the proliferation of “software as a service” applications, or what buzzword-happy people call “the cloud,” where all of your information, applications, and programs are stored in datacenters and accessible to you from anywhere on the Web, rather than being based on your computer and accessible to you and you alone. The accessibility and ease of use this brings us is offset by the loss of ownership of our information, which is something I’ve discussed before, especially in relation to Google and its ever-growing feast of online services.

Although Kuhn only briefly touched on social networks and various Web 2.0 (or whatever it is now) applications in his talk, he did bring up a few important points I want to expand on here. More after the jump.

“Free” Is Not The Same Thing As “Open”

One of the main reasons why things like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are so widely and massively adopted is the low cost of entry–that is, none. They’re completely free, and enable a wider range of communication than any for-pay service could muster. This freedom has enabled the whole range of social Web services to reach millions of people around the world, opening doors to communication, commerce, and innovation like nothing we’ve ever seen. If I sound like I’m bromancing this, I am, trust me–I think it’s amazing.

But that open door can smack you in the ass if you’re not looking, because it comes with a price–the price being these companies’ willingness to purloin your information and use it for their own purposes. We saw this just happen with Facebook’s attempted theft of users’ content, and that’s far from the first time, nor will it be the last. As I said before, when the dreaded word “monetization” comes up, the dollar signs in investors’ eyes aren’t generated by the platforms or services themselves–they’re actually kind of weak. Facebook is clumsy and hard to navigate, Twitter crashes all the time, and MySpace is where HTML goes to die. No, the value is in the content–the things users post, their pictures, links, conversations, notes, emails, etc.

In order to make money off your content, social networks want to keep you enmeshed in their fleshy grip as much as possible. On the one hand, they’ve all taken pains to open up their APIs and enable third parties and each other to write all kinds of fun code and widgets for them–so you can post to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, for instance, or post photos from Flickr to Facebook, as I do. On the other hand, this is essentially a bunch of closed, proprietary networks talking to each other, and in the end, you still give up your underlying power over your information and your data when you work with them. They’re communicating, and they’re enabling you to converse, but they’re not really including you in the conversation. Think about when you were little and surrounded by adults talking around you, about you, and to you, but never with you.

So what do you do? Do you want to be included in the conversation, or do you want to start your own?

Identi.ca Crisis

In his talk, Kuhn mentioned Identi.ca, a Twitter clone that is built entirely on open-source and enables developers to create entirely new services for microblogging–or their own microblogging platforms. Identi.ca enables you to enjoy everything about Twitter while still maintaining control over the information you post, and freeing you to post from or to multiple services at once.

The problem is that these two platforms–and many others like them–don’t communicate effectively. Kuhn humorously analogized this by saying that his wife–who uses Twitter–can read everything he posts to Identi.ca, but he can’t see anything she posts from Twitter, so they have an entirely one-way convo where she hears everything he says, but not vice versa. (The mostly-male audience found this hilarious.)

Identi.ca could, theoretically, be the bridge to get all of these different platforms working together through the OpenMicroBlogging project, but there is one big pitfall preventing this, even more than the logistical challenges of getting platforms to communicate. It’s getting people to do the same. As Stuart Langridge said last year:

The second reason Twitter is good is that everyone’s already there. They got first-mover advantage. There’s no point going to an alternative because none of your friends are there. This is also the reason that Twitter has fifty desktop clients and that things like Twitterfeed exist; it’s worth the investment. It does mean that if people leave Twitter they’ll all leave together and the bottom drops out of their market, but that’s the way the internet cookie crumbles. Photo sharing sites have the same issue — it’s difficult to build a Flickr competitor because everyone’s already at Flickr, so none of the “social” stuff happens elsewhere because you never hit a critical mass of people.

In order to build a truly open Internet where everyone can share data freely and yet be able to control and turn off the spigot as they desire, we have to educate and empower users to want to do so. That’s not hard to do–witness the furor that erupted when Facebook tried to bogart users’ uploads for all time, and their quick surrender. But most people on the Internet really don’t care about the ins and outs of open-source, or OpenSocial, or even OpenID. They just want to go where their friends are and share their lives. That means we have to build exemplary infrastructure for the Web that makes the open alternative so popular and so desirable that it will be the destination for people to go to.

The Next Web

And there’s a deeper purpose to this. In a talk celebrated author Bruce Sterling gave at Webstock, he decried all the Web 2.0 development and social Web emphasis as so much foofery, saying the real developments were to come from “ubiquitous computing”–smart cars, smart appliances, smart gadgets that can all communicate with each other, and so on. While I think there’s a lot of grumpy-old-man “GET OFF MAH LAWN!” in Sterling’s comments, he makes a centrally strong point–that we’re just scratching the surface of what a truly interconnected Internet can accomplish, and we need to dig deeper than just building some cutesy application with a silly name and hawking it to VCs in the hope of getting bought–though with the economy as crappy as it is, that seems less likely.

Building a truly open infrastructure that enables users to build, control, and manipulate their own platforms will empower them to interact with the Web on their terms. As I said to Gavin Chait back in 2007, we should have the complete freedom to decide who, how, where, and on what terms we will interact with each other in this brave new next Web. You can be a dog, a cat, a woman, a man, or something entirely undefinable, and no one should be able to stop you, nor would they want to–because they can all do the same thing.

If that’s not social, I don’t know what is.