Some might say the World Wide Web is growing up, and some might say it's selling out. Anthropomorphisms aside, things have changed. If you cast your mind back to the late nineties, the Web was like a great open plain where we all had our own watering holes from which we quenched our need for news and information, but there was little sense of community – unless you were knowledgeable enough to be using things like IRC or News Groups.
During that era, there was little online shopping, no social networks, and it was wise to consult several search engines – not just one. Now, search engines have catalogued (almost) everything, social networks have joined up a colossal amount of data about us, and we can buy just about anything with just a few clicks. In comparison, the 90s Web now looks archaic.
Wait a minute – no one was tracking you, your purchases, or who your friends were; and there was no single gathering spot on the Internet (e.g. Facebook) where you could be easily profiled. Perhaps things weren't so bad after all!
The truth is that the D.I.Y. spirit of the old Web is still there – it's just that we now have tools to save our websites from looking like something from Geocities. However, the user population of the Web has exploded too, and as such the proportion of enthusiast users who want to build their own corner of the Web has shrunk. With the rise of mainstream 'non-geek' users, there has been a natural tendency to gather around places like Facebook and Twitter, and to thus stop exploring.
We are now using the Web as a platform and a service, rather than a place to explore and enrich. Combine that habitual type of usage with the type of user profiling that Amazon pioneered, and it's easy to see why we've now got to the state where we are now.
The habits we've formed online and the businesses that we've helped build up have come at a cost though. Part of the core spirit of how Internet technology works is based on open data. Now though, most of our personal data is in proprietary silos like Facebook and transferring your information from one social network to another isn't easy, and there's no way to be friends with someone on a different social network; e.g. a Google Plus user and a Facebook user can't connect as friends. Therefore we're locked into these social networks for the sake of maintaining our social connections.
The Guardian recently wrote:
[Sergey] Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive," he said. "The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules that will stifle innovation."
Of course, Google is in competition with Facebook, and so we should expect to hear this sort of comment. While Brin is correct, we need to make a distinction. The type of data that Google indexes – i.e. open data – is still available. The type of data that Facebook has about all of us could never be made public, because it is private user data – which is exactly why Google launched Google Plus; it needs to obtain its own social signals.
In balance, the benefits of using this relatively homogenised World Wide Web appear to outweigh the disadvantages. Bear in mind that I'm speaking from the perspective of a Western consumer who doesn’t live in an overtly restrictive country. The power wielded by those who hold our private data is great, and could easily be abused. For now, capitalistic pressures provide a degree of democracy that largely keeps Google and Facebook on the straight and narrow – notwithstanding the screw-ups that neither company are immune to making.
The great thing about the Web and the way technologies are able to interoperate is that, given sufficient pressure, it's possible for people to move away from the mainstream services – just how much of a kick would it take to make the rest of your family to quit Google or Facebook though?
Image credit JeremySimpsonPhoto.