[VBbuilders] [OK] Re: Why and how work together?

[Sam Putman]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 4:38 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So where we are is with this flourishing of myriad initiatives, each trying
> to re-invent the wheel and duplicating efforts,
>
> BUT, we can use each other's differential strengths to rally around certain
> initiatives for certain goals, and around others for other goals,
>
>
> at this stage, this is unavoidable,
>
> Michel

This is an invisible consequence of poor protocol design on the part
of the Internet community.

Back in the (g)olden days, the trend was to solve a communication
challenge by designing a protocol that was robust, easy to implement,
and would therefore let any server anywhere implement the protocol.
Such are email, usenet, IRC, and HTML, and the suite of lower-level
and supporting technologies.

bittorrent is an example of a protocol from the more modern era which
was developed correctly. It is inevitable, unstoppable, and
democratic. These protocols can succumb to poor design (as usenet
largely has) but when executed well they are what let us organize in a
peer-to-peer fashion.

Internet existed in competition with many walled gardens: Compuserve,
Prodigy, AOL and the countless bulletin boards. All are gone, or
assimilated into the collective; for the most part, the work that went
into making them, the content they hosted, is lost.

Facebook may look 'too big to fail' but AOL once bought Time-Warner. A
walled garden is simply not an Internet-compatible solution; what's
needed is a Social Networking Protocol, something that works in a
fine-grained way to let someone define their own social network across
the entire Internet, without prejudice of provider, and interact with
that as they move from node to node.

Wave, from my perusal of it, has (more than) what it takes to do this.
Modern Internet standards tend to have the relatively obese quality of
Wave, with XML as the shining example. Wave has a long way to go
before we can set up a Wave server as fast and easily as we can throw
up Apache now, but when that time comes, Wave may well have what it
takes.

In the meantime, we'll muddle along with forums, Drupal sites, and a
thousand and one passwords. However, if we keep in mind the kind of
architecture we actually need, it will be faster and easier to
eventually get it.

cheers,
-Sam Putman.