Omnivorous inclusiveness and the closing of the browser parenthesis

In the past I've thought of the web as a convoy of browsers. That turns out to be wrong.

Nowadays (thanks to a long lunch with Paul Downey, Jeni Tennison,  et al) I've begun thinking of the web as a ship of Theseus where, despite replacing every single part of the stack, what's left is still recognisably the web.

This made me realise that we are surrounded by unexamined and ossified metaphors that are in danger of becoming thought-terminating cliches. For example:
- open web versus (presumably) closed web
- the web browser is the web platform is the web
- the web as a platform
- web apps
- web versus native

One of the reasons I present at conferences like OpenTech is because I want to have my mind changed and my complacent metaphors jolted. This year my presentation came out of asking myself "what do I most like about the web?" My initial list was:
- its universality (view source meant everybody everywhere could cut and paste their way to something that sort of worked).
- its omnivorous inclusiveness (it tended to absorb neighbouring or competing technologies like WAIS, Gopher, NNTP and FTP).
- its hypertextuality, intertwingularity and document orientation because they open the door to new forms of argumentation as well as letting us create living documents.
- its peculiar notion of addressability without guarantees about the nature of the resources at the end of the links.

This presentation started out as my oft-repeated but never documented "HTML 3.2 was the last good version of HTML" rant. It channeled some of my distress with the ideas behind HTML 5 and the notion that there is a "web platform" which arbitrarily excludes certain technologies (like Flash and native apps) but includes others (like JavaScript). In its final form it asked if today's open web platform is still the web. Now I have my answer.

That answer is driven by two realisations. Firstly it turns out that browsers are not the only user agent. They're not even the only kind of user agent. Secondly now that deeplinking is becoming mere linking it is clearer than ever that apps are just domain-specific user-agents. As a consequence it becomes clear that native versus web is merely a debate about whether we should use 1 universal user-agent or N domain-specific user-agents.

Since browsers and native apps are merely different kinds of user-agents I think it's a mistake to conflate browsers and the web. I think we run the risk of mistaking the capabilities and roadmap of today's most popular kind of user agent for the capabilities and roadmap of the web. For example user-agents that don't support Javascript or CSS are equally legitimate but less popular constituents of the web. However there's a strong temptation to consider them to be obsolete or lagging members of our convoy and thus leave them behind.

So.

The web has changed, is changing and will keep on changing. The convoy is bigger than I originally thought because there are lots of overlooked user-agents out there. These apps aren't part of the web any more than browsers are but their addressable/linkable content most definitely is part of the web. Just because that content has a preferred user-agent doesn't change this.

Perhaps, like the Gutenberg Parenthesis, there is a 'Browser Parenthesis' that is also closing?



Update: The audio from my OpenTech 2015 talk is now available.

The other side of creating more value than you capture

+Tim O'Reilly likes to talk about "creating more value than you capture." The obvious logical alternative to this is "capture more value than you create."

However I suspect that this is a false dichotomy.  I think we've missed something. It's possible for a vendor to create more value than they capture and yet, by building a new network, ensure that the surplus value eventually flows back to them. This ends up primarily magnifying the value of their network rather than the wider web. 

For instance a post on Tumblr is easier to reblog, if you have a Tumblr account, than to re-post elsewhere. It's easier to 'follow' a tumblr than to subscribe to the RSS/Atom feed for that same tumblr. Tumblr's bookmarklet makes sharing to your tumblr easier than cutting and pasting it elsewhere.  By building proprietary solutions that have a better user experience than the open solutions, Tumblr created a situation where sensible people act in ways that keep them inside the Tumblr network. This is more like a gated community than a walled garden precisely because the members of this network made an informed choice and are happy with the consequences of being inside it.

The hidden assumption in Tim O'Reilly's thinking was that the network that would primarily benefit from all this surplus value was the web. But it turns out that large social networks and large blogging networks and other sites that host large numbers of activity streams are the primary beneficiaries. We can see this in Tim O'Reilly's examples from his original presentation which primarily focusses on Twitter and the benefits for Twitter users. At the time making a distinction between Twitter and the wider web would have seemed nonsensical. 

Today we realise that creators go where they can reap value and that's increasingly in networks (like Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn's Influencer platform, Google+, Medium, Instagram, etc) which can help them easily discover a community that cares deeply about their creations. We also realise that the necessary walls (which take the form of privacy controls and API restrictions) between these networks and the wider web means the networks can benefit from Reed's Law and grow their value in proportion to the number of such communities that are formed rather than just the number of users. 

Every creator and their audience forms a new community where value can be created and captured. Some of these communities may even be generative. They may be creating more value than they capture. So where is that value flowing?

If you own a network where people create more value than they capture then most of that surplus value flows to you rather than to the wider web. The challenge for the owners of these networks is to invest that surplus value back into the wider web in the hope that they'll reap even more surplus value in the future. The challenge for those who believe in the virtues of the wider web is to show these network owners how they can contribute to and benefit from the wider web.