Standblog

I was invited to hold a workshop at Lift France '09 which title was What's wrong with the Web. It looked like the topic was interesting, because it was the first workshop to reach the fully-booked status (with 25 seats) and we ended up with twice as many people in the workshop that we wanted! No doubt, LIFT participants – just like me – do think there are things to improve on the Web. I started the session with a brainstorm on sticky notes with the whole audience. We tried to put on the notes keywords describing what one considers as an issue with the Web (and more generally the Internet). We quickly ended up with hundreds of thee notes, posted on the wall. I asked Charles Nepote (FING member and LIFT co-organizer) to help with by categorizing the notes in order to list the top issues. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Identity management
• Universal access
• Too much centralization of services
• Off-line
• Security
• Privacy & big brother
• Business
• Content

Workshop "what's wrong with the Web?"

Then we discussed most of them, trying to identify the sub-issues and potential solutions. Here are the notes I took on the whiteboards^[1]:

• Identity management
  • Right to be forgotten
  • Ability to have multiple identities
  • Right to anonymous access (for political dissidents, whistleblowers...)
  • Ability to take back my identity if abused by a third party

• Universal access
  • The digital divide
  • Seniors
  • Accessibility
  • The lack of broadband in remote places
  • One single Web, for mobile and desktop users
  • Users need simplicity!
  • Authors need to share best practices
  • I need to be able to give feedback if a site does not work for me
  • Politicians should work on this

• Too much centralization of services
  • Makes censorship easier
  • Gives too much power to a couple of search engines
  • What happens when a service shuts down?
  • Lack of control over my data
  • We should operate our own servers
  • Devices such as Fonera2, NAS Home servers and ISP "boxes" could host me on the Internet.

• Off-line
  • How do I work while disconnected?
  • How do I sync my off-line work with the Cloud?

• Security
  • Spam is making email irrelevant
  • Hackers crackers are dangerous
  • Security is painful to deal with
  • Security is a necessary evil
  • It's complex. We need education
  • Security UI is key to education (but if only people read the dialog boxes!)
  • It's everyone's responsibility (users, software vendors)
  • People tend to externalize these issues to large service providers (see too much centralization of services)

• Privacy & big brother
  • Security is too often an excuse for monitoring people
  • Security is too often an excuse for censorship
  • The notion of privacy is evolving over time

• Business
  • How can I make money on the Web? Is advertising the only way?
  • Is free content sustainable?
  • What does "free" mean? (Am I bartering my privacy in exchange of free services without knowing it? Or is is really free, no strings attached?)
  • There is way to much advertising
  • Flash advertising (animated with sound) sucks.
  • I hate pop-ups (and pop-under too), along with ads that float over the content

• Content
  • There are sites I cannot comment on. Can browsers fix this?
  • Comments are too shallow/too aggressive
  • Signal to noise ratio is too low
  • It's all too serious
  • Can I trust what I read on the screen?
  • Where is the poetry on the Web?

During my workshop "what's wrong with the Web?"

Conclusion

Actually, as I'm using text to describe the issues, one can see they're all pretty much correlated. Security links to privacy, which links to data ownership, which links to identity, for example. So actually a graph would make a lot more sense to describe the relationships between all these issues.

After The discussion, I gave a quick wrap-up talk of these issues. I'm not to write it down here this post is already too long, but will certainly do in my next post. The idea of having my talk at the end of the workshop was two-fold:

1. Let people come up with issues I did not have on my radar. 50 brains are more efficient than one!
2. Try not to impose my view of the world to people in the room, but instead let them discover the issues (which is more powerful than hearing about them). In short: let people think by themselves instead of throwing a message at them.

Overall, leading this workshop was certainly a blast. It was intense, fun, challenging. I'm looking forward doing more of these in the future. In the mean time, thanks a lot to LIFT organizers, Laurent Haug (LIFT Founder), Charles Nepote (FING, for helping during the workshop), Jane Finette and Chris Hofmann (both from Mozilla) for preparing this with LIFT.

There are tons of new developer-oriented features in Firefox 3.5 that are waiting to be used to create new Web applications. Geolocation. New canvas features. Native video and audio elements. The amazing Tracemonkey JavaScript engine. The ability to use Web fonts. A flurry of new CSS 3 properties and improvements. These are things that really get me excited because I understand their potential as I've been in the browser business for so long, but can be really hard to grasp for ordinary people in some cases.

But the truth is that Firefox 3.5 is a modern browser, part of a movement who wants the Open Web to thrive, with the help of other browser vendors such as Opera, Chrome and Safari. An Open and Generative Web where one can invent new stuff without having to ask permission.

hacks.mozilla.org banner

So we have to explain how these new features work, and what they enable developers to do. Enter Hacks.mozilla.org, a new blog put together by the Evangelism team, with material provided by the worldwide Mozilla Community. Over the 35 days to come^[1], starting today, we'll try to post 2 articles per day. One to demo something really cool, one to explain something new. Get ready to get excited. Get ready to learn new stuff about Web development.

The first articles are:

1. Introducing the Hacks.mozilla.org blog by Chris Blizzard. "While Firefox 3 was a signifigant upgrade for the web’s users, Firefox 3.5 does the same for developers."
2. Pushing pixels with canvas article, by Paul Rouget ;
3. Content-aware image resizing demo, by Stéphane Roucheray, a French Web developer.

I mean "hackable" in the sense that one can decide to experience it in ways that were not exactly what the author decided it would be. In short, the Web is not TV. It's not PDF either. Nor Flash.

A couple of months ago, we had this discussion during the Mozcamp in Utrecht. It's hard to summarize all of this in a blog post, but I'm going to give it a try.

I guess that all my readers know that a Web page is made of HTML (structure of the document), CSS (presentation via style sheets), JavaScript and DOM (behavior of the doc, if any). It's sent from a Web server on which one has no control (in most cases, of course), carried using the HTTP protocol, on an IP network and then displayed in the browser of your choice. (please bear with the over simplification here).

What's cool for the (Open) Web is that one can tweak/change/hack most of the pieces of the stack. Of course, some of the pieces are out of reach (the DNS servers, the Web server, most of the network) and it's good. But for a lot of the pieces, the users has – if he wants – the ability to change the pieces in order to fit his needs. This sounds a little complex? Let's use examples:

• Changing the look of the document via CSS : you can use User Stylesheets (even better and easier with Stylish)
• Changing the content via user scripts, implemented via Bookmarklets, GreaseMonkey or Jetpack.
• Change the look of the browser using Themes for your browser or Personas
• Change the way you interact with the browser, with add-ons such as Ubiquity, which completely redefines how we interact with the Web browser and the Web itself.

The beauty of all this is that the people who have invented this did not have to ask permission to innovate. The way the Web was invented, with standardized layers, enable these kinds of things^[1], and it's good.

This "hackability" (or generativity) is one of the key things I love about the Web. Now the issue is that this key ability does not have an actual name. Mark Surman has a good post on this topic. Should we call this essential "characteristic" about the Web "Generative", "remix", "opportunity", "hackable", "permissive"? Go and read Mark's post and comment here or there!

My colleague Gen Kanai and John Lilly have pointed me to an interesting article on Wired: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online.

Of course, the author is not really using the word socialism in the same way we use it to refer to Eastern Europe 30 years ago, and I'm not sure that resorting to such a loaded word is really helping in starting a discussion, because we have to clarify so many things before the conversation can start. However, there is indeed matter for an interesting discussion:

We're (...) applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn't solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

There are a couple key differences in the Eastern Europe socialism and this new collectivist society.

1. the old socialism is a story used by the elite to dominate the people. On the other hand the new collectivism is something done on a daily basis by the people, without any authority trying to impose it, without necessarily giving it a name.
2. the old socialism took place in the real world, ruled by the economy of things, while the new collectivism is taking place on line, ruled by the economy of ideas. This makes a huge difference, summed up by this sentence:

In the economy of things, sharing means dividing. In the economy of ideas, sharing means multiplying.

In short, this new digital collectivism may work where the old socialism failed, just because in the online world it's much easier to be generous and give things away as you're not deprived of them.

edit: Mozilla lives in this world where sharing means multiplying. When you understand this, you realize that the utopia of what we do (building software given away for free) suddenly makes a lot more sense.