“Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service — but only within their sites … So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform — a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.” —Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with the idea that started the World Wide Web, argues that closed systems and monopolies pose a threat to innovation and an open, neutral Internet. It’s possible the fans who keep posting this article to his Facebook wall skipped a few paragraphs in between.
Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality [Scientific American via Fast Company]
