Archive Fever: a love letter to the post real-time web

mattogle.com

30 pointsrussss2 comments

The main-point is: To really do something useful with all the data we produce on the web daily, we need to have public APIs that allow to access old data.

In my opinion better than all Facebook of the world are things like HTML5, truly open standards that allow for simpler data-retrieval (even if its just web-scraping).

But if everyone (Twitter, FB, Tumblr, etc.) opened their APIs completely and released their data into the wild, who would profit then?

See sites like efreedom and other (basically) spammers: They make money with StackOverflow's contents.

Will Matthew's idea remain wishful thinking?

I see this as part of the challenge - being able to access archives while maintaining and controlling a hierarchy of usefulness/meaningfulness. I think the author would agree with you on the issues you bring up, but worrying about spam is part of building tools where you still get to choose who accesses your 'memories', as much as we choose who comes into our house and into our lives. Open standards for controlling access to data is needed alongside any building of memory aggregation tools.

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