How to break the internet

How to Break the Internet

Paul Johnston

Entrepreneur, Innovator, Businessman

Addicted to Twitter (when it's up!)

http://twitter.com/pjnet

http://friendfeed.com/padajo

http://padajo.wordpress.com


In The Beginning...


It was all very simple

First came email

The internet came into being off the back of email

Then some other stuff like Usenet and Gopher

Then came HTML and the Mosaic browser

The interwebnet was truly born


The Egyptians are coming!


Companies started creating brochureware

Lots of content started to be added to the fledgling interwebnet

It all got a bit difficult to navigate

Companies started providing organisation and searching

Yahoo! Won the day


Wandering in the Wilderness


Proper Search Engines started to come along

Google happened!

Everyone loved Google

Google ads started allowing people to easily make money


Peer to peer technologies emerged

Really big files started to move

Copyright started to be infringed

Media companies started seeing revenue problems


The Promised Land...? Web 2.0


Blogs, wikis, RSS, Video, all started to happen

UGC happened

The interwebnet felt like it was changing and becoming more something for the community that used it

Someone thought that we should call all this stuff something different


So someone came up with...

Web 2.0

And we had a proliferation of Web 2.0 Websites and Social Networks

Then we got things like Twitter

And then Friendfeed came along


Uh Oh


I love Twitter

... and blogs

... and friendfeed

And I love content aggregators


The Problem with Aggregators


Friendfeed is the most interesting tool of the moment (for me)

It's an aggregator of all your stuff on the internet

Commenting on any web-based content

Aggregators cannot easily distinguish between 2 versions of the same content


RSS is the problem... or is it?


So here's the problem

Setup an account on twitter (e.g. extremefeedback)

Then go and setup a friendfeed account (the same)

Tell friendfeed you've got a twitter account and it starts to consume it

Then use twitterfeed to consume the friendfeed feed and post it to twitter

You have the perfect feedback loop


Internet Feedback Loops: SpamBack


One piece of content

Propagation across the internet

Re-post back to the original place

It's not new

It will become a problem

We're going to get more and more SpamBack


Is there a way out of this?


Yes

But we need to change how we consume content

Especially RSS

The key is the unique content ID

As well as passing around the content we need to pass around an ID


Pass around an ID alongside the content

System that consumes will need to check that it hasn't already seen that ID

If it has, it drops the content

It's not foolproof, but it's a starting point

The more aggregators there are, the more this idea of SpamBack will need to be taken into account


Dude! You'll break the internet!


We have to be more careful about how we program consumption of RSS and other content feeds to avoid SpamBack

Responsibility lies with both the aggregator and the feed creator

As a friend of mine said when I was going to test this theory:

Dude! You'll break the internet!


Paul Johnston

Entrepreneur, Innovator, Businessman

Addicted to Twitter (when it's up!)

http://twitter.com/pjnet

http://friendfeed.com/padajo

http://padajo.wordpress.com

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