I've really been enjoying the response to my recent blog posts — here are some more thoughtful replies.
Rafe Colburn, one of my favorite bloggers for a decade now, followed up my Apple and secrecy post with "Apple vs. my preconceived notions":
In one scenario, this is a bubble of sorts. Apple may be doing OK now, but they’re headed for a big crash when people get sick of their behavior. In another scenario — one that I think is, sadly, more likely, Apple continues as they are, adjusting when it must to address reality, but only in the most minimal way.
I've also really been enjoying watching Dave Winer's work recently. In the past we were both too young and stubborn to realize we're amused by a lot of the same things (There's my refrain of "We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves" again!) but these days it is just plain entertaining to watch Dave go. My amusement is amply covered in "Anil's belly laugh", which mentions my response to Dave's latest bit of hacking. As I mentioned on my Twitter account, I also recorded an episode of the Bad Hair Day podcast with Dave and Marshall Kirkpatrick last week.
Speaking of podcasts, This Week in Google is a new one featuring Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis and Internet Hero Gina Trapani. This week, they had a very nice look at The Pushbutton Web towards the end of the show. I'm delighted how many people have told me they found that post valuable or useful in talking about this whole area of innovation. Since I'm a lousy coder, writing blog posts like that is the most helpful thing I can do.
Finally, as it's come up in several contexts lately, it's probably worth repeating the key point of a post I wrote two years ago, which attracted some attention then but is probably even more relevant today. The core concept is about "The Watery Web":
It's not true to say that Facebook is the new AOL, and it's oversimplification to say that Facebook's API is the new [MSN] Blackbird, or the new [AOL] Rainman. But Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.
Thanks, as always to people who've responded to what I've written, and especially to all of those who've taken these posts as starting points and expanded the ideas into some truly inspiring creations.
Would you say that perhaps it's only when the ice cubes reach a certain critical size that they inevitably melt into the water of the web? :)
Actually, larger cubes melt slower. That image matches another classic one in Transaction Cost theory (the school of though most suited to explain digital economics phenomenon) about cream and butter pieces — except the buttery metaphor goes the other way. You can try to justify only one direction is possible for both direction (people can't collapses their varied interactions into a proprietary context; proprietary copy and improve the most commonly used open tech) but I wouldn't bet an ounce of entropy things are so simple in the social realm.
I'll take the opportunity of this rearview post to thank you for your blog post: I haven't discovered any good blog recently, and yours was a revelation a week ago — I've been scavenging in your archives since. I won't try to understand why it took me so long to find it.
I am bookmarking this post! Love the example of the watery web.