Thinking Out Loud

Far too busy with this, working on this, and getting this up and running, but wanted to share a couple of things in the hope that writing a paragraph about each of them would help get my brain processing them.

Wicked Problems. A really interesting post, and given a similarly interesting discussion I had last night (which I’m afraid I’m not going to write up here, sorry), wonderfully timely. The universe as serendipity engine in full flow.

Google+. Have been on it for a week or so, and I’m not really seeing how it’s different/better than Facebook or Twitter. And I’m getting a little disillusioned with both of those two (though I was never really illusioned with Facebook…). Pete Ashton covers lots of the problems over here. Lots of good stuff in that blog post - owning where important stuff of mine is stored is important; advertising-funded models aren’t good; blogging as a useful tool for the writer, rather than the reader… That last point is what I get most out of my blog, and something that’s been lost as an explanation in the professionalising of blogging.

I think Google have taken the wrong direction with their more recent approaches to helping people cope with the amount of information out there. They’re sticking the filter at the wrong end - it’s happening with search, where we’ll end up in little echo chambers based on our social network, and Google+ has it built in. Filtering at the source is good for privacy, but a bad solution to information overload.

It feels like we’re experiencing an enclosing of the Internet. Facebook turning off RSS feeds; Twitter restricting client apps… Maybe it’s Apple’s fault, they’ve shown how nice closed systems can be, and closed systems are definitely easier to build. But it stifles innovation, and locks people into one platform. Good for the companies who “win”, bad for society.

I think Schroeder is right (at the end of the Wicked Problems post), that open source hasn’t lived up to its potential. It could be building the tools that we need to cope with the modern world, and instead it seems to be driven by people who want to build a free version of whatever the latest cool commercial app is.

Finally, there are murmurings of another Barcamp Liverpool, and so I’m starting to ponder what a follow-up talk to this one would be. I wonder if I could persuade Dan to do some bigger-picture thinking and give a talk challenging the open source movement to look to a higher purpose. That’d be a superb talk.