The Burgeoning Openly Owned Web

So here’s an idea that Dave and I have formed over a late night of brain-storming - it’s a work in progress and items still to be fleshed out - read and tell us what u think!

The Open Web Manifesto (Draft)

• We believe that we should be able to CRUD our own data on our own terms
• We believe that our data should be owned and accessed directly through open standards
• Proprietary web services take our rights to our own data away
• Portability is our right

The disintermediation of personal data
Our personal data is increasingly entrusted to third parties, for instance:

• Your Photos reside in a proprietary File system (Flickr, Picasa etc.)
• Your Email resides in a proprietary File system (Gmail, Yahoo etc.)

This is a bad idea, because you have no control over your own data. Your data is stored in proprietary storage, and is hidden be hind proprietary web applications. Some of your data is accessible over the published API’s, but you have only limited functionality, and you do not have any guarantees over the long term life of your data.

Taking Back Control
We think that people are going to start wanting more and more control over their data. Services like Amazon S3 and Dreamhost provide inexpensive, enterprise class data storage. If we can access many (or one!) data stores in a useful way, there is no reason why we should use other proprietary web ‘land grabbers’. You can easily move all your data to a secure, agnostic online drive with multiple backups over multiple vendors if you so desire. Or, you could keep a backup of your online data at home on a USB drive. It’s YOUR choice.

Costs

• The bad news is that you’re going to have to pay to host your data. But from there, it’s all free (if you want it to be).
• The good news is that utility storage services (e.g. S3) charges a lot less for data storage than Flickr! And by choosing your storage provider you can store files up to what ever size you want!

Accessing your data

• We think that you should decide how your data is accessed, and who gets to access it.
• We want to develop open source services and tools to assist you in accessing your data. Web services are analogous to software, in that they should be free and open source. Although there is a cost associated with, say, indexing and then making your data available on a web service, we believe that these costs are very small and can be absorbed through donations etc.
• Creating an open market with low barriers to entry for, say, photo sharing apps (running on our aforementioned free web service) will drive down costs and promote better products.

Service need to be built

• A service which indexes you public and private data, and provides a ‘private search engine’
• A service which can display media (photos, video, music, documents) in a cool way
• A service that will sync your media to other services (flickrsync, picasasync)
• A service that provides a single interface for multiple front and back ends
• A service that manages your metadata (tags, EXIF etc)

What already exists
Tools to upload and download to utility storage services (e.g. S3)

Use Cases

• Dave lost all his old emails when he moved from hotmail to Gmail. If he had used S3 for his email storage, he could have backed them up, or just switched frint-ends.
• Andy uses flickr to store his photos. Most of his friends use Picasa. Andy can’t participate in their ’social web’. Andy should have used S3 to store his data, so he could then sync it using 3rd party tools with any online photo provider.

Draft
So I’ve been using EC2 for the last few days and while it’s a super idea in principle it’s pricing model is just a little unfair. Amazon say that per instance hour you will be charged $0.10 - great! But wait… even when your virtual instance is running at 98, 99% idle you are still being charged A quick calculation and using EC2, for just computing power, is going to cost $67.20 per instance…. for potentially doing nothing!
Yes I know an idle machine is taking resources, but surely the guys can come up with more innovative things? Dynamic and predictive computing resource allocation anyone? Seems others are beginning to wake from dreams too

So google look to be bringing such applications to the masses, Scoble has more details and O’Reilly too. Yea there have been notions of this in the more tech oriented press… Firefox 3 to add support, Dojo already implementing it in their toolkit and this web site claiming that they have it already in their web app. I’ve a feeling, that with this plugin, google will reach out to the masses and with their want on standardization this whole venture is very worthy. All we want now is for them to go GWT style shouldn’t be long Gears is open source and licensed under the New BSD license. and release it as open source so all can benefit from this goodness. They guys that implement this gotta get talking ASAP to the people responsible for GWT - seems like they already have and there’s code! There’s already a posting up on the Gears group. O’Reilly picks up that there is no real mention of how synchronisation will be performed and looking at the supplied code there isn’t many hint there either. By the way, my reader of choice, google reader works quite well with gears!
Fabric Live 23 Death In Vegas from the album “Fabric Live 23 Death In Vegas” by Death In Vegas