Anil Dash has a great piece cross-posted on Gizmodo today, talking about how we’ve lost something of the open web over the last ten years. His thesis is that social networking has taken us backward toward a more walled-garden experience with limited interoperability or room to innovate, something I’ve touched on before with the notion that Facebook is the new AOL (something that will ring painfully true if you’re doing tech support for office workers).
This has gone through my mind recently, albeit in a slightly different form, thinking about the prime movers in our industry today. When the iPhone launched, Steve Jobs had the ringleaders of Yahoo! AND Google on stage demonstrating how their mail and maps respectively were crucial to the function of the phone. This week, we finally got a standalone Google Maps app for iOS 6, incorporating all the features they’d withheld from the Maps app in iOS over the last couple of years, bringing it to rough parity today with…Android.
Meanwhile, Amazon forks Android, creates its own 7-inch tablet, and then its own 10-inch tablet to compete with the iPad, while Microsoft belatedly wakes up and churns out a typically-Microsoftian product in the Surface, the all-in-one tablet-laptop-Windows-touchscreen device that is apparently selling with all the speed of a snail riding a tortoise through molasses in a Big 10 stadium. And Google is ramping up its media content in Google Play, improving its media offerings and trying to constrain the malware problem from the old Android Marketplace.
More and more, we’re edging toward a world where all the major tech players are trying to craft a fully-functional ecosystem. Facebook is trying to leverage its chat and messaging and its purchase of Instagram to become the full-service one-stop communications hub. Apple, Microsoft and Google will all sell you a handheld device with its own map system, its own email service, its own web browser, its own mobile operating system and its own place to purchase apps to run on it. Amazon has its own line of hardware now and its own streaming video service on top of its usual offerings.
The point, in each case, is to serve the company’s own primary need by reducing the number of things that company’s system cannot do for you. Apple needs you all in so that it can sell more Apple devices. Google needs you all in so that it can show you ads – and provide advertisers with a richer way to more precisely target those ads to you. Microsoft needs to keep Windows relevant to modern computing and find some way of dragging their waning monopoly into the 21st century. Amazon just wants you to buy more stuff. And Facebook is still trying to become your one true Internet identity and most meaningful point of contact so that it can sell even more precise ad info than Google. (The bait-and-switch by which Facebook insisted on authentic identity and then tore down the walls has never yet been recognized as one of the most dastardly moves in the history of the Internet.)
Thing is, we need that flexibility. We need not to be tied down. Google Maps on the iPhone was shit on a shingle by 2012 standards until Apple kicked them off and went their own way, and in response we finally got a best-of-breed Google Maps implementation for iOS. Twitter and Instagram and now Flickr are dueling over picture sharing as if “filters” are the secret sauce, when in fact the seamlessness of the sharing process is what let Instagram kick the shit out of something like Hipstamatic. Tumblr might be a centralizing feature, but just about anyone can do microblogging with this thing we call a web site. TypePad Micro or WordPress or Blogger or hell, why not just throw up some simple HTML on a page, the way this blog ran for its first incarnation from 1999 to 2002?
I may be the last person still relying on RSS, but I am, because it works. Email still works. SMS still works. They work because they’re not tied to any specific provider. They’re implementations of standards, of a process that consists of putting the intelligence at the ends instead of in the network or the system itself. The public Internet was famously sold to us as an information superhighway, and the big players are busy trying to cram us into ever-shakier public transit. Time for another Negroponte Switch, perhaps?