As an intermezzo while the User Data Manifesto is still cooking, I'd like to ask a simple question so that we can feed the wiki a bit and bring in more people.
IMO, there are interesting side-effects going on in the online world, regarding the complex relations of technology development, attention scarcity, attractiveness of novelty, and NIH syndrome. For example, as Melvin keeps pointing out, there are existing semantic web technologies that are working, and decentralized, but lack of visibility: FOAF, RDF, WebID, etc. There's also plentiful of "niche" social networking that actually gather millions of users, but are not perceived as social networking at all because they lack the general purpose of the giant players, such as MMORPG, the good old FICS and MUDs and MOOs... Without mentioning our beloved IRC, or such prestigious sidekicks such as blogs, mailing-lists, and wikis. Each new generation of developers--i.e. every few months these days, seem to look at the previous stuff and think "yeah, well, not good enough." They quickly come up with shiny new concepts and implementations, and then what? Each new language gathers a herd of enthusiasts and soon, an old bum such as Javascript finds rejuvenation: NodeJS is born, and the world is rewriting Lisp, Perl, Python, and Ruby libraries in ECMAscript! So I understand that is a fast development, and that you can run the same code on the server or on the client, blurring the architectural foundation, and certainly there are actual innovations, in the sense of iterations not previously contemplated, but... What is driving all of this? Is there a technical, and engineering foundation to embracing such drastic changes every couple of years? Or is there something else, more irrational going on? With that in mind, which does not really call for a debate, but rather for personal reflection on the evolution of techniques, and the refinement of technologies vs. starting from scratch, I'm wondering who's on your radar appearing as truly innovative in our problem space. == hk
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