The Open Web is Dead

Yep, that’s right. Let’s forget all the talk about the open web. This weekend made me realize that the achievements of the last few years were in vain.

The next two quotes are from blog posts on Facebook‘s recent changes in privacy settings and the invention of the Open Graph protocol and the subsequent discussions about it (emphases by me).

Stowe Boyd:

Facebook’s shifting policy from private as default to public as default is a reflection of the open web. Twitter, in particular, has always been based on a public model, where the default modality is that all information is public unless you go to great lengths to conceal it.

Robert Scoble:

Whoa?!? Here’s the deal: I wish Facebook had NO PRIVACY AT ALL!
That’s called the open web. I wish Google could index every word I write on Facebook.

If those high-profile bloggers think the open web is about spreading personal data across the web, then something went completely wrong in the past. My understanding of the open web always included these principles:

• open standards
• interoperability
• transparency
• data sharing

If you haven’t noticed it yet, those are – among others – some of the principles of, e.g. DataPortability.org and Kantara‘s UMA working group. And didn’t Mr Scoble join DataPortability.org more than two years ago? Maybe no one explained the concept to him.

I’m disappointed and angry. Of course, you could argue that those are just two voices. But they are influential and I doubt they are the only people who didn’t get it. Sad weekend.

Image by Thomas Hawk