The fact that the Internet is an open platform allows us to create and develop all sorts of applications and sites without having any restrictions or the obligation to buy complex licenses and proprietary software. This is all a result of the open standards - HTML, XML, RSS, HTTP -and the open source software available to develop, upload and debug our apps.
The Internet went through evolution and what was first only the ground for the technologically savvy was know the land of everyone with access to a computer and the disposition to learn some simple steps. This is what people call Web 2.0 - I hate the term, but it’s there so let’s use it -. Web 2.0 innovations allowed anyone with a computer to create content and publish it with just a few clicks. Then cloud computing kicked in and made sharing photos and videos cheap and easy .
This turned the Internet into a true information leveler letting not only people to publish data instead of depending on big media, but also giving the ability to break the walls down and make the connection between countries easy and fast. The myriad of apps and sites around have made people able to share a whole lot of information and all this information is stored on the web and not on the users computers allowing computers with less processing power do more.
But as much as the Internet is open and we say Information wants to be free the truth is that much of that information isn’t free. Lot’s of our information on the internet isn’t free it’s on silos and sometimes it’s hidden from us, the producers. Facebook for example won’t let me download my profile, close my account and go to “BookFace” or Amazon won’t let me use my shopping record with them on Borders so I can get better recommendations there too. This is why Data Portability is so important. Data Portability is “the ability for people to reuse their data across interoperable applications - the ability for people to be able to control their identity, media and other forms of personal data. The DataPortability Project works to advance this vision by identifying, contextualizing and promoting efforts in the space”. - Wikipedia . There’s still a lot of effort to make on Data Portability and the establishment of open standards for web data. Some services already give us data so we can export it while others are able to scan the HTML code and get it for us, but we still got a long way to go. We need to be able to get our Facebook data out of Facebook and our Tweets out of twitter and have them with a standard that let’s us mash them up and make sense of all this data when combined with our Amazon buying record.
So to start the Internet week I think we as customers and users should start to demand the adoption of open standards and availability of our data so we can use it as we see fit. This will not only open the market to a myriad of apps that interpret information but will also empower us as users.
What we can do now is start emailing and contacting all the services we use and demanding our data, we can also support the Data Portability Project.
Openness took the Internet very far, it’s time to take it to next level.
