Ngineer.net

There has been more and more discussion about the growing nature of the world wide web, in particular in the thoughts about privacy, openness (closeness), controllability, and even censorship.

The initial idea about writing this article stemmed from this interesting article from New York Times, The Death of the Open Web by Virginia Heffernan, on May 17.

The article offered the closest analogy I have read, which compares the open web as urban city centers, vs the gated web (like Apple iPhone/iPad, or Facebook) to the  suburban livings.

Like the great modern American cities, the Web was founded on equal parts opportunism and idealism. Over the years, nerds, students, creeps, outlaws, rebels, moms, fans, church mice, good-time Charlies, middle managers, senior citizens, starlets, presidents and corporate predators all made their home on the Web. In spite of a growing consensus about the dangers of Web vertigo and the importance of curation, there were surprisingly few “walled gardens” online — like the one Facebook purports to (but does not really) represent.

The analogy stands in many ways, it explained why people flocked to the gated communities after experiencing the “anything-goes” wild wild web.  It is simply because it works well without worrying about security, vulnerability, and other potential dangers.  This is the reason why iPhone and iPad were selling like hotcakes, not just to technophobics, but also very tech-capable geeks.

Some may argue, that this is a repetition of history, that back in 1990s (I was too young to remember that) the fight between Windows vs Mac had the same fight between open and closed platforms.

At that time, Microsoft opened up its platform to allowed PC clones, and dominated the desktop market over Apple.

The closed group this time, is led by

• Apple – with its iPhone/iPad app store platform creating a controlled environment, no flash, no freedom for its user to choose what to install
• Facebook – taking users’ privacy and keeping for its own use and for its partners.  the information are not indexable.

The open group, represented by

• Windows, Linux, Android – install any programs (apps)
• Twitter  - very open API that allow anybody and whatever program to access information

There is a big difference between the last fight circa-1990 vs the one fighting today: North American population using technology has gotten matured.

Matured people have experienced all the greatness and all the dangers of the open web, and hence, they would prefer the comfortable, safe suburban life, where one can easily achieve what they would need.

I would like to end the blog by throwing out another dimension of open web, comparing the North American culture vs Chinese culture, that North American culture would embrace more to the gated community, where as  Chinese culture would embrace the wild wild web much more because they have not experienced it enough.  Hence, I can imagine the Open web will be very successful in China (Android, non-Apple), if the government censorship allows.