The Social Stack: what’s in and what’s out at the various layers

I wrote this back in late 2010 from August to November. This was around the time of the first and only OpenWebFoo so I was trying to think through the stack of specifications, protocols and standards that would have let us build a federated social web.

I've ensured that all the links still work as of June 2016 but apart from that this represents what I believed all those years ago. I'm posting it here because I want to remember the past. At the same time it's a marker of the end of that particular phase of my life.

Today I can clearly see the connection between

• Scott Rosenberg's thoughts about the 'web parenthesis'
• the painfully slow evolution of my thinking about the intrinsic and predictive value of openness
• the techocratic web we rejected
• the closing of the 'browser parenthesis'

At the time I remember pointing out the incongruity of a closed event about the open and social web. In hindsight I should have been asking questions:

• Who isn't represented in this room?
• Why is that?
• What will be the consequences?

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