The Times paywall is going to work … for now …
[update : I've provided extensive feedback to @davidcushman's comments below, further elaborating on the ideas in this post]
When you click an article on The Times site you get confronted with the paywall
The Times paywall is now active, I read this morning in a short piece on The Next Web. You know what? I’m going to make a bold prediction about this (which I always love doing). Contrary to what many Internet experts say, this is going to work.
Towards a web of activity streams realizing the synaptic web paradigm
In the previous two weeks I’ve been reading multiple posts and tweets that show the vague contours of a trend towards a new kind of web, the web of (real-time) activity streams. This new web will effectively implement the synaptic web paradigm. In this post I give a rough overview of some of my current thoughts about this; if you really want a quick summary you can skip to the conclusions at the end. I hope to write more about this in the near future with more structure, deliberation and further elaboration on its potential impact. For now, please bear with me!
Already Linked?
Roughly two and a half years ago, the Linking Open Data community has established itself. The basic idea in this initiative is to publish data in a machine understandable format on the web (RDF and RDFa) and to allow for linking these data sources. Instead of a web of pages that we have nowadays, i.e., a web where human readable webpages are linked, we would get a web of linked data objects. Such a web will allow you to find information more easily and browse the web using new kinds of user interfaces. Further, it will allow publishers to better monetize their content.
Is the web establishment overlooking the opportunities of the open social web?
Already for a long time questions about the future structures of the web unconsciously flow through my mind. Now, in this post I will not give definite answers to those questions (sorry! :-)). But in this context I noticed the news that Yahoo! will allow you to login with your Facebook identity on Yahoo! properties through Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect will allow you to login with your Twitter account on all sites using it.
This actually implies that Facebook and Twitter have sunk their teeth deeper into the social web infrastructure. On the surface this sounds like a great idea; many people are using Twitter and at least an order of magnitude more people are using Facebook. But as is pointed out in this excellent post on Read Write Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick these deals sidetrack open standard initiatives that work to create an open social web infrastructure.
Beyond the Twitter horizon
This post was first published at the web2life blog.
Twitter represents an important step in the evolution of the real-time web, but what’s next? There are a lot of opportunities to create new real-time web innovations allowing you to manage, aggregate, engage in, and extract value from the real-time web. Such innovations can enable the adoption of the real-time web on a larger scale, allowing anyone to engage in real-time discussions, break news and create context around stories that are happening at any time. Twitter itself can play an important role in this future but I argue that they need to at least add capabilities to augment tweets with metadata enabling developers better opportunities to innovate on top of it.
From Freddy’s Tweet overflow blog …
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