Digital Me – Or what’s really wrong with the online portion of our lives
The Great Experiment, a.k.a. The Internet, rolls on at ever greater speed – but I would like you to stop for a moment and think about the points below. There are some fundamental problems, that I believe needs addressing to avoid the experiment going bad. In no particular order:
Social Networks are fundamentally broken. To illustrate, imagine if emails only work within the same domain – e.g., you’d need a hotmail account to email hotmail users, and a gmail account to email Google users. The idea about email would become useless, yet, this is exactly how social networks work today. Users today ‘fix’ the problem by moving to the same the domain (i.e., Facebook) and thereby artificially inflating the perceived value of the network – in effect re-creating the web version of Microsoft’s Windows monopoly. I for one could do without another one of those monopoly. The truly scary scenario is when people start to see the Internet = Facebook (or any other company – shiver). There is a good cover story on IEEE Spectrum about Diaspora – four New York guys working towards an Internet not dominated by a single company. Read more
