[Crowd Leader] Ville Miettinen: Communication Breakdown: crowdsourcing the future web

Like any kid today, when I was growing up I spent a fair amount of time playing on the internet. Needless to say for those who have seen my profile picture, this was quite some time ago and the internet was rather different to what it is today.

This was back in the dim, distant days of the early 1990s. My father was working at CERN, which meant I was able to spend my weekends there, messing around with some cool stuff. For those who don’t know, it was about this time that buried deep in this computer lab in Switzerland, one man, one machine and one website got together and changed the world.

Just to avoid confusion, that man was not me. It was, of course, Tim Berners-Lee, general all-round genius, and founder of the world wide web. Why (other than the love for geeky facts and the letter “w”) am I telling you this? Because Tim Berners-Lee (TBL as I like to call him) is back, and word on the web is, the big guy ain’t happy.

Born free
In a recent article in the Scientific American, TBL set out his objections to the way the web is going. To sum up six pages of detailed argument in a word, TBL’s big problem is fragmentation.

Okay, let’s take a quick trip back to the early nineties: a time when Gameboys were hi-tech, most PCs ran on DOS and Mark Zuckerberg was still playing with Legos. From these earliest days the web was conceived as an open, free and universal resource. Any piece of online information could be linked to any other, using one markup language (HTML), one addressing system (URLs) and one protocol (HTTP).

For the next fifteen years or so, that’s how things stayed. The power, popularity and innovation of the web astonished the world, all built on the basic idea that anyone could build or link to a website.

But recently, social networks, mobile apps and other sites have started to form their own, mini, sub-webs with internal links that can’t be accessed from the outside. TBL’s problem is that (rather like a breed of Twilight 2.0, cyber-vampires) these sites suck data – the lifeblood of the net – out of the universal web and wall it off for themselves.

The crowd in pieces
So what difference does all this make? Well, to us ordinary web users, not very much – not as yet anyway. We can sign up to Facebook, download apps, come and go between the “web islands” as we please.

For crowdsourcing startups though, there are a couple of issues. Let’s take, I don’t know, a social network with around 500 million users. That’s definitely a crowd worth getting to know. But what if the network decided to charge for access? Or demanded a cut of any profits made from their crowd? And what about the users themselves? (Facebook has already had its fair share of privacy issues) regarding how much control users have over the (often personal) information they’ve given the social network.)

Much to the delight of Julian Assange and the horror of state departments everywhere, the web has allowed us to collect, display and sort incredible quantities of data. What code can’t do (at least not well, not yet) is manipulate content. But the crowd can. Innovative companies and individuals are constantly pushing the boundaries of crowd-computer interaction and opening up new possibilities for the web itself.

If more and more data is taken out of the “free web” and held by a few, massive online players, the question is whether the crowdsourcing industry will be allowed enough access to reach its full potential. I’ll give TBL the final words:

“The goal of the web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.”