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I read over this twice and couldn't understand what is being said. Can someone explain what is being said here?

What is being said is something on the lines of there being no URL so to speak. So when you type facebook.com what is it the reason that got you to type that? Most probably being able to see "pics from the party last night".

Now imagine if the pics were distributed on Facebook, Flickr and Picasa along with a few tweets that I had made and pics added via TwitPic. Do you still think Facebook.com is what you should type?

Now think of a setup where the thing to be typed is "username: pics of the part last night /twitter facebook flickr picasa"

Gone is the idea of any advertisement and revenue model based on the content's location/web page.

Hm? Those pics (and their backup) would consume disk space and bandwidth. Obviously the huge majority of ppl prefers to see some ads instead of paying the cloud expenses.

Facebook screws over developers because they can. Expect more of it. From lots of other vendors.

The reason they screw developers and consumers over is because of the way we access the internet, using a browser, an URL, and a single-site "visit" metaphor. We are programmers, though. We are free to redefine how we access the internet any time we like. We have created our own prison.

We can do better than this.

I agree with you that this doesn't seem to be leading us towards a great utopia.

The problem isn't just programmers creating their own prison though - it's about business models. How do we create this seamless brand-free info sphere and still get paid?

I agree it is a tough question.

But it is a different question than "how did we get here?" which is the question I answered.

If we don't know how we got here, or what the nature of the problem is, how can we ever expect to solve it?

History is a slippery beast. We only understand the past in terms of what we know in the present. To change the future, we have to build it now. If we spend our time trying understand the past before we act, time will have moved on without us.

I don't understand. How can a company that doesn't intermediate the web browsing experience screw developers over if they are free to add a new site to the Web at will? You don't need a relationship with Facebook to run a web site.

We can and we are creating a new open platform built entirely on open technologies so it can never become yet another walled garden.

IkoniqueOS

Be your own Google.

We're still a good distance from having the kind of intelligent agents that would be needed to implement your vision (which isn't strictly your vision, I remember reading about this sort of stuff over a decade ago in science fiction books!).

Certainly this would be an interesting world to live in, but so far the only entity which has enough processing power to figure out what you want and act as your intelligent agent is, in fact, Google. Even with Moore's law it might take a while before everyone can have a googleplex in their iPad.

I think you're trying to solve the generic problem -- how can I speak and have things magically delivered to me?

That, of course, is a long, long way from here. But I don't think we need to boil the ocean. Fact is, you could make 10 or 20 categories of things folks do on the internet and cover a huge chunk of activity. As one commenter pointed out, lots of folks want pictures of folks from the party last night, not "facebook". There's no reason you couldn't have a handheld device (or program) that you pushed a button and it showed you recent pictures from your friends -- no matter where they posted them online.

If you wanted to get ambitious, you might could come up with 100 use-cases that would cover an enormous amount of online activity: checking my account balances, hearing from friends, sharing pictures or videos, providing feedback on what I thought after consuming some kind of material, etc. I'd be willing to be such a list would be so complete that's it's not important about the remaining items. You'd simply use a browser and an URL for those.

I bet you could create a device with 20 or so buttons that would cover so much common activity on the net as to make the device useful as a stand-alone appliance.

The beauty of this, of course, is that since people's behavior is more or less unchanged (people have been sharing pictures with each other ever since there was photography) the same buttons could be easily learned and would work no matter what the underlying technology or transport mechanism was.

And people have been building this sort of stuff... as online services.

Why would you build it as anything else than an online service (as the person building it)?

There are two reasons that come to mind immediately.

First, legally you can't use one online service to aggregate from other services -- every walled garden has clear TOS that prevent this. You can, however do the gathering and processing locally. After all, you own your own computer equipment and are solely responsible for how data is collected and presented there.

Secondly, and more importantly because of the history, you're trying to solve the problem using the constraints and assumptions that created the problem to begin with. You can't fix seven walled gardens -- by creating yet another walled garden.

Stand-alone targeted web apps are great for finding needs and servicing markets, but the nature of the net is monopolistic. That's why many of these stand-alones end up getting flipped. We need to break the technical backbone that keeps creating monopolies if we really want to get rid of them.

General Magic and Telescript went down that direction. I wonder who owns their IP / Patents?

> This puts the user back in control of their internet activities, the way it should be.

Why should the user be in solely in control of how a content producer's material is consumed? The vision you reference scares me a bit: We've already got a "race to the bottom" among manual laborers in the world, now we're looking to dedifferentiate and disempower our content producers as well? If I put effort into writing a movie review, I think it's reasonable to expect some control over how it is consumed (e.g., people look at ads that benefit me, pay me, or maybe just come look at my website with a pretty picture of my face to make me feel special).

Don't get me wrong: I like having some freedom in how I use content. I like having my music unencumbered by DRM to use on any current or future device I might buy. I like using Google Reader to keep my finger on the pulses of all of my hobbies. But I also sympathize with publishers about the Kindle DRM (and laud Amazon's attempts to make my Kindle content available on lots of platforms and devices) and with websites that just put a quick blurb or title in their RSS feed to force me to come to their site if I am interested.

Sadly, I haven't yet heard a proposal for how content should work in the future that strikes the right balance. We seem to have publishers pushing toward extreme inflexibility and "freedom" advocates pushing towards (what you describe) a situation that diminishes any benefits (financial or otherwise) of content production. I hope we can find a way to empower content producers while providing users with flexible (though, probably not entirely unencumbered or "free") ways of consuming content. The status quo, even with its annoying ads and restrictions, seems better to me than either of the extremes.

> You could still consume multimedia and interactive material, of course, but only under terms you set, not terms the various site owners set. Perhaps you would want no ads, or no hyperlinks, or a time limit each day that would be acceptable for you to play games.

What incentive do people have to create content with such a system? Altruism is fine, but content creators need to pay rent.

I worked on something a little while ago that was similar - allowing people to mash arbitrary content together - but abandoned it because of the hassle of trying to prevent it being used for leeching.