THEOF THE

AND HOW TO STOP IT

FUTURESOCIAL WEB

Photo by Isaac Hsieh - http://flic.kr/p/5EgDZm

Good afternoon. I’m happy to be here today — quite an honor

to get to speak at PARC — home of so many critical innovations

and contributions to the web.

This past weekend I was in Vancouver at Northern Voice and

gave a similar talk to this one, but without slides. It was an

interesting experience to go without slides for 45 minutes, but

it turns out, unicorns do exist: I was able to put together a

couple hundred sentences to fill the time and it worked out

pretty well. I hope to do the same thing today, but this time

with a few visual aids.

chris m!"#, !og"open web advocate

parc fo$m %ri!

Engi#$ing Co%uniti& Acro' t( Int$#t

#parcfo)m

Thu*+y, 13 May 2010 @ 4:00 - 5:00 pm

Before I get started, my name IS Chris Messina, and I DO work

at Google as an open web advocate, which is partially the topic

of conversation today.

You can also use the PARCFORUM hashtag if you're tweeting

about this.

The name of this talk is a gross bastardization of Jonathan

Zittrain’s book, is “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop

It.”

His thinking is well worth checking out if this stuff interests

you, and I couldn’t resist a good pun so I called my talk “The

Future of the Social Web and How to Stop It.”

fu!reoft"int#$t.org

For those of you interested in reading the book, you can buy it

online or if you're a communist, you can download it for

free on futureoftheinternet.org.

Just kidding about the communist thing.

This stuff that I want to talk to you about today is the stuff that

keeps me up at night. And I haven't been sleeping much lately,

so it’s basically all I think about.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We need to set the context

here.

So I don’t know how many of you know who I am, and I don’t

expect that many of you necessarily do — but there is a piece

information that I think is relevant to what I want to you

about. Specifically, in January of this year I decided to give up

my own company — which I had run for a couple years doing

consulting in the social media space — to join Google.

This was a big decision for and took me a while to come to.

However, the role that I took at Google is a rather curious one.

I was fortunate enough to pick my own title, and so I chose the

role of Open Web Advocate.

Now, I think this is interesting for a couple reasons — least of

which is that Google actually entertained the idea of having an

open web advocate (whatever that means). If you think about

it, nature has environmentalists, women have feminists… but

the open web?

The web has enthusiasts, advocates, sure, but have we

congealed into a solid movement that reaches out beyond the

technorati? Doesn't seem like it. And I think this is becoming a

problem. And it’s time to do something about it.

“it’s c%nch time for t" web”

As Tim O’Reilly recently said — it’s crunch time for the web.

As the web has become more popular, more infused into our

daily lives — something many of us frankly rely upon — for our

work, our livelihood, our ability to stay in touch with friends

and family… it’s become the target of a number of attacks, from

a number of different directions.

Whether you want to talk about regulation and net neutrality

in the states, or content filtering in Australia and elsewhere, or

you want to talk file sharing in France, or censorship in Asia,

you’re just hitting the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, there are some

who even worry that in the future, there may be more than one

web — in fact, there be several webs that may or may or not

interoperate. We just don’t know what’s going to happen.

But what is clear is how important the web has become, in not

a very long period of time, especially if you start counting from

the days of the first browsers.

Now, the crazy thing is that I — and I’m sure many of you —

have grown up through the transition from dialup modems and

AOL accounts and FTP programs to the modern web which is

largely delivered over broadband cables and interacted with

using hosted web services and websites. So we actually have

some perspective on what it was like before we had Foursquare

and Twitter and Facebook and all the iPhone. And we’ve seen

how powerful this technology is — and how much it’s changed

our culture, and the world around us.

But I want take you back a decade. I went to high school in

Manchester, NH on the east coast.

(For those of you don’t know, I thought I’d show you how far

away that is from here.)

Ok, this next photo is a little embarrassing...

credit: megan higgins

I graduated in 1999 — right before Y2K — remember that? In

high school, I’ll admit it — I was a bit of an outcast. I didn’t

exactly get along with my peers; generally had a chip on my

shoulder and really didn’t have much use for school. It mostly

seemed — as I’m sure it did to a lot of kids my age — like a big

fat waste of time.

credit: megan higgins

My junior year I decided that there really wasn’t much more

that my high school courses could offer me — especially when

the best technology they had to offer was Adobe Illustrator 5

and Aldus PageMaker 2. I was able to get better software from

warez sites over a dialup modem than I could at school. And

this greatly frustrated me.

credit: megan higgins

Fortunately, I ended up getting a couple after school jobs — the

first at a print shop doing bindery work — basically stapling

annual reports together — and the second, a much more

interesting job, doing web design for a small local design

company. Now, this part of the story isn’t that interesting,

however, my work at the web design company coincided with

work that I was doing on a volunteer basis for my high school

— namely, I had taken it upon myself to build the school’s

website AND create all of the club’s and sports’ homepages.

It was an ambitious project, but I was convinced that

everything would be SO much better for everyone if parents,

students, teachers, and everyone else could keep in touch with

each other online. Of course, it didn’t occur me that people

weren’t all that interested in the web just yet. Nor that the web

wasn’t readily available to everyone. NOR that the browsers

that we had back then really weren’t that great or all that

stable.

But, this was a labor of love and it was important and — hell —

gave me something to do. So I built the site and I even added a

rotating ad banner. No, I didn’t charge and the ads weren’t

commercial in nature, but I did promote local student events

and organizations like the National Art Honor Society.

Now this was all well and good — and in fact, I was hosting the

site on my own server, the librarian and the principal all knew

what I was going. It was fine. In fact, in the meantime the

principal decided to take a special interest in me, to see if he

could reignite my interest in academics. Terrific.

So one day, I get called down to the principal’s office and I’m

brought in to his office and he sits me down and starts yelling

at me. “How could I betray him like this? How could I do this

to him?”

I was shocked — what had I done? I was completely confused.

And then he showed me a printout with the Gay-Straight

Alliance banner ad that I’d put up on the site three months

prior.

You see, where I come from, people are both libertarian AND

conservative. And the fact that a bunch of snot-nosed kids at

the public high school wanted to have their own little support

club for gay kids just didn’t sit well with the administration. So

he suspended me. For five days. Now I mentioned that I

graduated in 1999. BUT — that was almost not the case. As it

turned out, the issue of the Gay-Straight Alliance — or GSA —

at my high school was just about to become a full on court case

in Boston, involving the ACLU and GLAD. As a result, the

administration really didn’t have much extra attention to pay

to my mom when she threatened to sue the school for

suspending me, which would have caused me to not graduate

with my class.

My suspension ended up being reduced to just a couple days

on the condition that I cut a deal: I had to turn over the entire

website and all of my source files and agree not to make any

more sites related to the high school. I refused and argued that

I wasn’t about to put another student in my position by

handing over the site’s source code without clear guidelines

from the administration on what was, and wasn’t, allowable on

the site. They refused to play ball and so I shut the site down

and the issue… somehow passed.

It later on turned out that the librarian with whom I’d worked

had secretly made a partial copy of the site — and to this day —

you can actually still see pages that I designed and wrote on my

high school’s site.

Oh, and as it turned out, the GSA won the court case and the

school district was compelled to allow the group to meet on

school property.

I tell you this story not because it’s terribly interesting

necessarily — but because it demonstrates two things:

• First, a shift in power. If the principal had believed that no

one would ever see the website, then he probably wouldn’t

have gotten all that upset. As it happened, the principal had

plans at the time to run for mayor of the city. And so he

clearly was concerned that people might stumble upon the

high school website with a nice big Gay-Straight Alliance

banner right at the top!

• The second thing was that this whole scenario probably

couldn’t happen today, what with Facebook and

sophistication around website access and control… I mean,

it’s possible, sure, but unlikely. I mean, I hosted the site on

my own server. So think about it: if my high school, let’s say,

had decided to outsource all their web needs to, say,

Facebook… well, there really wouldn’t have been that much

room for me to make the kind of statement that I made.

And yet the medium of the web, is perfectly suited to provide a

venue for all kinds of voices and perspectives. And it’s

important that, in the technology that we create, that we make

sure that we preserving freedom, choice, and the ability to

disagree.

That said, I’d argue that there are actually several more subtle

threats at work — that are less obvious, and possibly — because

of how they’re being baked into the interfaces that we use to

interact with the web — potentially more dangerous to the

health, wellbeing, and longevity of the web.

&p 'mputing

ge$(tivity

There are two concepts that I want to use to counterbalance

what I see going on on the web today:

The first is what I call “pop computing”. The second is

“generativity”. Think of these as the yin and yang of the

modern, open web: two competing forces driving the way that

we are able to use — or not use — technology.

&p 'mputing

I have yet to write my blog post — that of course has been

lingering in my drafts folder for months — about this idea of

“pop computing”. But there are several symptoms that I’d like

to highlight today.

. . .

d&th of t' url

The first is described in a post that I actually did write called

The Death of the URL where I called out how the potential

demise of the address bar in web browsers could cause a great

shift in the way that we access the internet.

In particular, I cited four exhibits:

• WebTV

• “lean back computing” devices

• app stores

• short URLs (which I won’t be covering today)

web tv

WebTV is like the canary in the coal mine because people are

used to a very simple “change the channel” modality in how

they control and manipulate the device. TiVo gives you a little

more control — but for most people, channel surfing is still

where it’s at.

There’s no “channel surfing” on the web. Certainly there are

scores of directories that list sites that you can visit, but

ultimately you aren’t punching in numerical ID (like Channel

12) to get to content… you’re typing a URL.

So check out this quote from a story in USA Today about

WebTV:

“Manufac!r"s say t#y $ar%d an im&rtant $'on from (r)" *n+rgence failur,: View"s want - relate - .ts as te$vi/ons, 0t *mput"s.

“T1t’s why t# %w Web TV 2dels don’t *me 3th brow.4 t1t 5uld gi+ peop$ t# fr6dom - surf t# fu7 Int"%t, e+n though t# TVs *8ect - t# Web via an et#r%t cab$ or home 3re$' %t5rk. T# *mpani, want - pro2te *nsum" a9eptance of Web TV by making t# tech0logy /mp$ - u.: T1t m(ns 0 keyboard or 2u..”

—USA -:Y

“Manufacturers say they learned an important lesson from

earlier convergence failures: Viewers want to relate to sets as

televisions, not computers.

“That’s why the new Web TV models don’t come with browsers

that would give people the freedom to surf the full Internet,

even though the TVs connect to the Web via an ethernet cable

or home wireless network. The companies want to promote

consumer acceptance of Web TV by making the technology

simple to use: That means no keyboard or mouse.”

So if WebTV takes off, and it very well may — that means that a

generation will grow up with a very limited set of

expectations for how big the web truly is.

“$an-;<” *mputing devic,

credit: apple

On top of that, we’re see a rise of what I would call “Lean-back

computing” devices. These are devices like the iPad, or

JoliCloud or Kindle or even ChromeOS (to some extents) that

trade freedom and self-determination for simplicity and a

certain brand of usability.

credit: litl

And the popularity of these devices, especially of course the

iPhone and iPad, indicates a strong desire for computing to

become more simple. And you really blame people. I think the

PC — in so many ways — has been a failure because it left much

of the computer’s core systems vulnerable to malware and

viruses that people really didn’t know any better to avoid.

So you have devices like like the Litl that are more like

“managed appliances” that look more and more like TV.

And so to avoid that fate, and to create more stable computing

experiences, people are now more willing to accept using a

tethered device that restricts their freedom in exchange for

someone else dealing with the hard stuff.

As a designer, it is hard for me to suggest that this is really a

bad thing… I mean, it means that more people will be using

computing devices and experiencing a taste for how useful

computers can be. But the reliance on central authorities — like

Apple or Amazon — to control what goes on or doesn’t go on

the devices is something that worries me.

a= s-r,

Which brings me to my third exhibit which of course is the rise

of App Stores.

The thing that worries me about most of the App Stores is that

the gatekeepers tend to act erratically, and sometimes unfairly.

The App Store, like the Web TV experience, also only provides

a subset of the material and options that exist on the open web.

So the question becomes: who gets to determine what is

acceptable for a given app store? And if something that

you want is not allowed to be part of that App Store, how can

you get it?

This kind of “ask permission” model of content access has a

deleterious effect over time, such that, eventually, people

stop asking for things that aren’t there. They become

inured to the idea that someone else knows better and is

effectively keeping them safe.

This has all sorts of ramifications for startups, businesses that

want to compete with the gatekeepers, and again, for individual

freedom.

obso$scence of view source

Another aspect of “pop computing” — is the gradual

obsolescence of view source.

• More complicated web apps

• Code obfuscation

• Data services and APIs

• Default to private rather than public

So in a browser like Chrome, view source has been deemed a

“developer feature” — rather than a tinkerer’s feature — and

relegated to the status of serving as the appendix of the

browser, stuck deep in the View > Developer menu, when it

used to be a first level menu item under the “View” menu.

instant p"so>)?tion

The last aspect of “pop computing” that I want to describe is

“instant personalization”, the term that Facebook uses to

describe some of its new platform features.

Specifically, these are social features that are designed to work

without your involvement… that is, if you’re logged into

Facebook in one tab, and you visit another site like Yelp in a

different tab, you’ll automatically be signed in to Yelp, and

your friends will be there waiting for you.

On the face of it (no pun intended) I think this functionality is

awesome. It’s exactly how user-centric identity should be

experienced.

However — the problem is that the act of signing in to your

Facebook account is not necessarily the same thing as saying

that you want your Facebook account to be available to every

site that you visit.

So by disintermediating you from that decision point — that is,

where the “instant” in “Instant Personalization” comes from —

it’s essentially as though Facebook and Yelp got together in a

smoke filled backroom and invited you in to the party, without

exactly letting you in on what they’d been saying about you

before you arrived.

And that’s not to suggest that they had been talking about

you, only that you just don’t know. And so, like the iPad is

magic, instant personalization creates a situation where you

are no longer in control of where your profile shows up or

which profile you get to use in different contexts.

And that choice — your ability to put whatever face forward

that you desire in different contexts — should be essential. You

should be making that decision, not Facebook.

It isn’t that the feature is the wrong feature — it all comes down

to the implementation.

&p *mputing

And so stacked up together:

• the death of the URL

• the dying of view source

• instant personalization

...these are all trends that are giving rise to a generation of

people for whom computing will be a simple, clean, sterile

experience. And that threatens all of us.

ge$(tivity

So if we have pop computing on the one hand, then we have

this notion of “generativity” on the other.

@+ prinAp$s

In his book, “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It”,

Jonathan Zittrain introduced this term “generativity” which he

articulated in five principles:

1. how exten/+ly a system or tech0logy $+Bg, a .t of &'ib$ tasks;

2. how we7 it can C a:pted - a Bnge of tasks;

3. how (/ly %w *ntribu-4 can mast" it;

4. how a9,/b$ it is - tho. r(dy and ab$ - build on it;

5. how tBnsDBb$ any c1ng, are - ot#4 — including (and p"1ps ,peAa7y) 0%xp"ts.

• how extensively a system or technology leverages a set of

possible tasks;

• how well it can be adapted to a range of tasks;

• how easily new contributors can master it;

• how accessible it is to those ready and able to build on it;

• how transferable any changes are to others — including (and

perhaps especially) nonexperts.

Generativity is the quality of a technology — and I mean

“technology” in the broadest sense — that allows others to

benefit from your work — without first asking you

permission.

This is largely the quality that has lead to the overwhelming

success of open source.

Now I want to talk about three examples, that are personal to

me, that demonstrate both the power and importance of

generativity in the technologies that you create:

• BarCamp

• Coworking

• Hashtags

;rcamp

Story of BarCamp; first BarCamp in August 2005. Planned in

six days. 300 people. $3000. Documented on the wiki. Some

basic rules that were self-evident if you attended one of these

events.

I made the logos in the beginning and then other people just

started making them for themselves and being much more

creative than I ever was!

There have easily been over a thousand of these events since

2005 — and more are organized everyday.

And the secret of BarCamp — and why it was generative — was

because it was accessible to novices.

Just by attending a BarCamp you could figure out how to run your own.

*5rking

Photo by superfluity - http://flic.kr/p/75SVAU

Started coworking in 2006. Name came from Brad Neuberg

who had started “coworking” in a women’s center in the

Mission in San Francisco. It started modest: every Thursday a

group of folks would get together, set out card tables in this

small space, and “cowork”... just to have some companionship

so that they didn’t have to work alone.

I believe I met Brad at a SuperHappyDevHouse and when we

discussed his idea, it coincided perfectly with an idea that I’d

had for some time about creating open, collaborative spaces

largely targeted at independent information workers and who I

might call, “people of the web”.

That is, we didn’t need much in the way of infrastructure

besides a wifi network, a decent place to sit, and some company

from our peers.

The first coworking space was called The Hat Factory…

But it wasn’t until we opened Citizen Space in SOMA in San

Francisco that the idea really started to resonate outwards…

1shtags

I tweeted the first hashtag on August 23, 2007. It was casual,

unassuming — another one of my hair-brained ideas. I asked:

“how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in

#barcamp [msg]”?

That was it. That’s all I said. And then I started doing. I would

tag my tweets at events or about different topics or subjects. I

was doing it for myself, but also to demonstrate the concept.

here’s what the first hashtag looked like.

There were other microsyntaxes around that time and shortly

thereafter that other people tried to get off the ground, and a

few them have stuck — for example using the dollar sign to

indicate a stock ticker — but some of the other more esoteric

that required people to think more like machines than like

people, didn’t.

And so the hashtag is a great example of a generative

technology because, according to the principles:

• they can be applied to many different tasks (or topics)

• new contributors can master it very easily — though

admittedly some people take it a little too far when they’re

first getting started

• it was accessible and available for anyone to use — mostly

within Twitter — but of course, this design (a stupidly simple

one) can apply to just about any context — including events

like this one!

• and it’s also “transferrable” insomuch as people can watch

other using hashtags and then adopt them. Or, if a hashtag,

let’s say, starts getting spammed… people can transfer the

momentum around a hashtag to a new one… and so this

folksonomic system can breathe in and out as necessary. It

doesn’t require a central index or authority to function.

Some popular examples?

• #barcamp

• #sandiegofire (nate ritter)

• #pman and #iranelection

• #swineflu

&p 'mputing

ge$(tivity

So again, we have these two trends in the marketplace: pop

computing and generativity. I pit them against each other

because they are actually two logical halves of a whole. That is,

we need technologies — social technologies — that are simple

and easy to use and don’t take too much for granted and that

make it possible for the uninitiated, or nonexperts, to benefit

from.

The iPhone is, after all, a great device. Is it great because it

restricts our freedom and reduces complexity and choice? I’m

not so sure.

On the other hand, we can see that simple social technologies

like BarCamp, Coworking, and hashtags, can be generative in

that they provide a simple structure or foundation — a protocol

if you will — that is adaptable to new uses and environments —

beyond the original conception or context.

The web is a generative structure. It is quite simple in its

architecture, and through the playing out of chaos theory, has

given rise to much much more complex structures.

In the beginning of this talk, I told you about an experience

that I had in high school where I encountered both the power

of authority and its desire to control my ability to influence my

environment. I also, however, realized the power of the web —

and its this power that I want to make sure continues to be

available and distributed to more and more people — NOT

fewer.

t" fu!re of t" so)al web

And so I want to end by describing what I see as a challenge for

the open source, and open web communities.

As I pointed out in the beginning of my talk, Earth has

environmentalists, women have feminists, animals have PETA,

et… but the web — the web has us…

And I worry about what’s happening to our community.

Moreover, I worry about the open web community, and it’s

ability to adapt and to modernize itself. I think that, with the

onslaught of pop computing — more and more new developers

will be spending their time developing apps for closed

ecosystems rather than building apps that are available to

anyone on the web. And so we as a community need to

diversify — we need to think very critically about who our

audience, and how we interact and engage with the world.

Y’know there was an interesting story on NPR recently about

how girls in grade school think of engineers as these stinky

boys who work in dungeons and sit in front of computers all

day. Well, that’s not a terribly compelling vision for sure… and

the real problem is that if we don’t attract more women into

this industry, ironically or NOT ironically, we’re going to end

up just building software for ourselves — which becomes

increasingly marginalized, as more and more people opt for

controlled, sterile devices to access the web.

Now, it isn’t just that bringing more women into technology

and open source is going to solve the problem. That’s not what

I’m saying. What I am saying is that learning to be more open

minded and inclusive — of people unlike the majority in our

community is the only chance we have to perpetuate our

culture and our community in such a way that we might be able

to make an impact on the changes that are coming to

computing.

Dial it back to my experience in high school… my ability to

view the source of some random webpage and hack around and

figure out how to upload it to some web server and to get

people involved in the project and to be aware of it to the point

where the school principal fears for his reputation because of

this stupid little project…. that’s important. That means that

people of authority and people who are used to having more

control are going to increasingly want to exercise that control

into the domain of the web… as I pointed out earlier, it’s

already happening… and it’s only going to get worse and so we

need to think seriously about these threats and mobilize

ourselves — and build software and technology that distributes

this control and decentralizes it in the same way that BarCamp

and Coworking and Hashtags and OpenID and microformats

do…

Now, those technologies aren’t perfect — but they are social

technologies. And we need more of them, and it’s up to us to

create them.

After all, if we’re not going to be the advocates of an open and

free social web — who will be?

t" end.

answ"s & qu,tions