djsipe.com | Web Development

Most internet services are valuable to us because they can add value to our personal information. Google can deliver more relevant search results by monitoring which search results we click on and then tailoring future results to our preferences. FaceBook asks us for some personal information like geographic location and our immediate network of friends, in return they let us connect with new friends and contacts that we wouldn’t have found otherwise. In both cases, these companies are using our personal information to provide a service we find beneficial.

What concerns most people is what else companies do with our information when we’re not using it. Do they use it to spam our friends? Do they monitor our internet behavior and share it with other companies? In truth, most people don’t mind companies keeping track of our data for us—but when they try to monetize that data we begin to feel uncomfortable.

Whenever companies distribute software, as the owner of software, they can place strict legal limitations on what can be done with it. They can say who can use it, in what way, and for how long. Why can’t we, the consumer, place the same limitations on our own information that we let companies use? We should be setting the terms upon which they use our data.

It’s a bit of a role reversal that might take some getting used to but, when it comes to social media, the consumer’s data is the real currency companies value. Why should we have to read a 50-page TOS that tells us how the company is going to use our data? It’s ours.

I would love to see an organization like Creative Commons come out with a personal profile license that companies have to adhere to. There could be a couple flavors, letting us pick the types of activities we’re comfortable with. Maybe we don’t mind our consumer behavior being tracked. (You could get better ads that way.) Maybe we’re cool with email blasts. (Coupons in your inbox?) Or maybe we’re like Steve Gibson and would just assume the company not even be able to decrypt our data on their own servers.

I’m sure this would be a huge pain for companies to keep track of—especially if the number of profile licenses in the wild got above 4 or 5. But companies could tell us to take a hike if they don’t like the type of profile license we’ve chosen. That’s fine with me. There are other fish in the sea. At least this way everything’s up front and both parties know what they’re getting into.

It’s our data. They want to make money off of it. It’s about time we set some terms of use.

As a casual observer of the Web 2.0 boom and fizzle, I’m left to wonder if the Internet as we know it is as mature as we all think it is. However you slice it, the Internet still utilizes the same metaphor as notepad: a page. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against pages—working for a newspaper, pages keep me employed. But you have to wonder if a page is really the peak of innovation or if maybe we could come up with something better.

Does it make sense to load GMail on a page? Sure, I’m reading my email, but GMail is a full-fledged web application. I’ve never heard it called a “web page”. My newspaper can’t automatically mark the sports section as read or filter out all the unwanted ads tucked in between stories. It just sits there. Many web applications, like GMail, Yahoo! Mail, and BaseCamp, have been painstakingly built on top of this page metaphor—not necessarily because it’s the best platform for building web applications, but because the delivery mechanism is so prolific.

The changes have been slow and incremental, but there has been a steady push away from the original concept of a web page. Macromedia, er, Adobe has made tons of money with Flash. The Web 2.0 craze brought us AJAX. Java applets run on countless intranets worldwide (thankfully, less are being seen in the wild). Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies all have plugins that let you watch video on a web page. All of these things are great examples of innovation, but if you look a little closer, they all share another common trait. Each one seeks to add a feature or some new functionality that was not part of the original page metaphor.

It’s getting crowded in the browser. Plugins are great; I love ‘em. But when you need all these extra applications running inside your web page, you have to wonder if we’re just polishing a rusty relic. Perhaps the Page has run its course and we should be looking for its successor, whatever that may be. Or perhaps we’re entering an age where the metaphor doesn’t matter. Have people become so acclimated to computer technology that tried and true metaphors like the desktop and folders are loosing their cachet? When a web page isn’t a page at all, is anything lost?