Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) How The Web Evolved - The Reunion Of The Social Web TV Crew (Fixed)

Episode Date: May 1, 2022

(The audio has been fixed in this version) How was the web won and lost? If you had to do Web2.0 over again, what would you do differently? What is the future of Twitter under Elon Musk. All this and more from a huge crew of web 2.0 OGs. Check them out from 15 years ago on YouTube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Hey, everybody, real quick. We had some recording issues on this one. So if after a while, the sound changes slightly, that's why. Also, if you want to see the videos that they're referring to in this episode from, I guess, 15 years or so ago, go to YouTube and search the social web TV. Welcome, everybody, to the TechBeam Ride Home Experience for April 28, 2022. We have a very special, very large cast of characters today, joining. us to talk about the revenge of Web 2.0 social. We've got a lot of people today who I have

known for a very long time who have been around in the industry and we've sort of gone our separate ways for a couple years. And with everything going on, of course, Elon, you know, ostensibly buying Twitter, we thought it be worthwhile to bring in perhaps the old school perspective on, you know, where this stuff has been and what things we've tried in the past and what lessons and learnings we've got from those worlds. And just, you know, in some ways for a bunch of us to reconnect and say hello and see where we're at with things. So to begin, why don't we actually just go around, you know, say your name and I don't

know, what can be even say like where you were before? Anyways. Say your name and perhaps, you know, where you were, I want to say in the 2007, 2008 period, just to kind of like give some sense of that. then we'll go from there. So actually, I'll start. So I'm Chris Messina. And back in the day, I was on my own. I was independent. I worked on a project called Dezo, the distributed social networking project, and eventually ended up at Google, where I worked in developer experience and as a developer advocate. Joseph, you want to go next? Sure. Yeah, I'm Joseph Smar. I was the

chief technology officer of a startup called Plaxo back then, and we were helped trying to open up social web so people could stay connected in terms of their contact info. I then also went to Google and helped start Google Plus, among other things. And a decade later, I finally made it back into the startup land where I'm CTO of Triller. Right on. John. Hey, this is John McCrae. And I was a partner in crime with Joseph Smar back in the day at Plaxo, where we were a bit of a Switzerland amidst all these different walled gardens and we're trying to figure out how to use technology and PR and early podcasting to try and make a dent in the world to get to that open, interoperable world. And I am delighted that Joseph and I who part it ways a long time ago when he went off to Google,

we always said we'd work together again someday, even if not in the same company, but somehow managed to help rope him into where I'm at with him, Triller, which we could talk more about later, relevant, but super excited to get this band back together in the old days of the social web TV. Oh, shit, he did it. He did it. All right, we'll give you guys context for that in a minute. Kevin. Scott Kavitin here. I think back in 2008, I was rocking a really horrible goatee. And I knew Chris through the, I got to know Chris through the spread Firefox campaign and droopal days.

From there, when, you know, sort of the open web stuff we were doing, I was the CEO of Jan Rain and on the board of the Open ID Foundation and the Oath Foundation. And then went on to do urban airship, short stints in cannabis. which I was happy to get out of with an exit, and then now doing Web3 stuff with Jump.com. I feel like you maybe needed to do the cannabis after Web 2.0. But anyways, do it. Hey, everyone. Hello.

How are we going? Yeah. It's really good to see some old friends and familiar faces again. So for those who don't know me, and I hate to complete my identity with their job. At this point, I'm there's so long. They're probably somewhat synonymous. I'm with Google, and these days I do privacy preserving machine learning.

It's a fascinating field inside research, and I like to think that we're on the good side here. But back in those days, maybe it was the same thing. I was on the good side, even inside a big company. And we tried to back then use the power and leverage that Google had. to maybe have some influence, but I think the biggest influences came, you know, in conjunction with everybody here and the stuff that we were doing on the outside. So fun to see people again. Yeah, totally.

Dick. Hi, I'm Dick Hart. And to see, about that time, 2008, I was running my company Skip Identity that I had X-I-P for anybody who wants to go to that. Yeah. Still own Skip, almost everything dot something. Nice. And, you know, I funded that myself after selling ActiveState, which was my successful venture in the earlier days of the web around open source and hoarding curl over the windows.

And lots of excitement around the open source area. And then I got interested in identity. And Skip didn't survive the 2008 craft. But at that time, I was on the board with Scott. and we helped create the Open ID Foundation. We convinced all these big companies to deploy Open ID and make it happen. After that, I went to Microsoft for a while and started what became OA2 and JSON Web tokens, hung out in SF for a while, trying to do a few startups, and then got pulled back up to Seattle,

where I spent a couple years at AWS doing identity and Alexa doing identity and left there. and I'm now doing hello, a cooperative to build a missing internet identity layer. I love that you're still on that beat. It's just like the proverbial thing. It's like Dennis and Foursquare and Dodgeball and the rest. Anyways, Raval, say hello. Hey, I'm Rabel. I was at Odeo building the podcast platform and stayed there

through the pivot to launch Twitter. And then I made the dubious decision to go over to Yahoo and Joycatering a fake and the folks over at Yahoo Brickhouse with the idea that Yahoo would provide more resources than Twitter in terms of being able to build web 2.1. That did not work. Did a bunch of projects. spend a stint at the MIT Media Lab, the Center for Civic Media to understand what we were doing,

and now I'm building a decentralized social media protocol and app called Planetary.com, and have been working with the Twitter Blue Sky Project. Amazing. It all just goes back to the same thing. I feel like so many of us have been working on or around a lot of the same problems, you know, from a technical solution space,

from a societal solution space, from just user experience, design, marketing, I don't know, all the rest. So, okay, amazing. Thank you guys so much for those introductions. I actually wanted to start with Joseph and John talking a little bit more about the social web. TV. And the reason why I think that's important is because fortunately, one, we have the recordings. Originally, they were uploaded to a Gary Vaynerchuk sponsor.

I'm not going to make an analogy to his current enthusiasm for NFTs. But anyways, he was very excited about a video sharing platform called Vidler, and the social web.tv was uploaded there, not YouTube, to share around. And Vidler no longer exists. And so the archives were lost for some time. And then a couple years ago, we actually found them. And they were re-uploaded. So they are on YouTube now. You can find the social web.tv and all the conversations that we had back then. But I wanted John and Joseph actually just to start there and kind of frame that moment. Like, why was it that we needed? essentially kind of a web TV show about what was happening in the space. What were we thinking we were doing? Like why did we think it was important? And what kind of, I guess, you know, brought you guys together. And why did you think it was, I don't know, had a potential future? Sure.

Maybe I'll kick it off. My role at the time, I was the CMO of Plaxo. And Joseph was the CTO. And Joseph, who was then and is still now an extremely excited. person was getting really passionate about open ID, OA, interoperability, data portability. And it seemed to me that that was, A, the right stuff to be worried about and thinking about and excited about. And B, also like a smart way to put Plaxo in the conversation.

And essentially to position Plaxo. as an open alternative to the Waldgarten vision of the future that Facebook and others were presenting. And, you know, there was this community that so many of the folks who've come up on stage were a part of then, a vibrant community. And it was so cool to get folks together to essentially nerd out on these topics on video, on, it wasn't even really a podcast. but it was an episodic video thing that we managed to shoot sometimes at F8, sometimes at Google, and get major companies to come on and talk about what they were doing to open up. So that's kind of my view on it, but Joseph would love to hear your perspective. Yeah, I think it was the confluence of two factors.

So on the one hand, you had this bottom. That was a joke, right? That we could build the standard, the technical standard to enable digital identity and open social networking. And, you know, it came out of a lot of places. But the Internet Identity Workshop that was the sort of biannual get-together of a bunch of people was a big place where a lot of these standards were developed. We just finished one this week, in fact. And I hadn't been there for 10 years. since I moved away from doing Google Plus and now back at the controller, it's relevant again.

But it's amazing that there's still that same energy of solving all these problems. And you see some of that in Web 3 as well, right? Just kind of working through the building blocks and the solutions and making the demos. And it really does give you that feeling of possibility. And at the same time, it was hard to remember back then, but the social networks weren't that big. Twitter was still pretty small. Facebook wasn't that big. And it wasn't yet clear how the whole space was going to play out.

And so we were having success with the, at the time, the big Internet giants, you know, Microsoft and Yahoo and AOL and Google and so forth playing along. And there was definitely interest if ambivalence from the social networks, but it did seem like maybe there was an opportunity to turn the tide of history by, you know, just being both evangelical enough and substantive enough and connected enough to get people involved in having them think this is the good thing to do. And ultimately to get enough demand from end users to support a kind of interoperability that would ultimately be necessary.

And, you know, it's pretty clear we were off to a good start, but then the Wild Gardens realized they could just kind of hold out and win, and they did. And it's only now, I feel like, that we're starting to get to this new phase where that chapter has played out. And they're sort of discontent with the current incumbents. And people are now, once again, asking, like, isn't there a better alternative? And I think that's what sort of brought us all back together again. Amazing. Brian, you want to jump in here? Yeah, can I take back just real quick?

And I'm going to let you all slow because you all were there and I wasn't. But just to contextualize a bit, one of the things that people have to understand about identity and the Internet is that at the very, very beginning, your identity was everything. You couldn't, before it was commercialized, you couldn't get on the Internet unless you got on from your school or from your work or whatever. So, you know, you couldn't get an email address unless it was assigned to you. And then, you know, sort of the training wheels period of the Internet era were things like, you know, CompuServes IDs were literally strings of numbers. And then you had your AOL ID and things like that. So the period of time that you guys are going to be talking about is like there's this window where the original people going on the Internet, your identity followed you around because that was the only way you could get on the Internet. And so where today it's just like you flip a switch and you're there and you can go wherever.

Like there was a period of time where it was completely walled gardened in the AOL sense. And then a few years later, it got walled gardened again by, you know, the Yahoo's and the, especially the Facebooks and even Twitters and things like that. But I think what you guys are going to talk about is there's this period of time where before it re-wall garden. walled gardens well it was like the web yeah right right it was just like wait there's a there's a vision where you can be sort of like this

person going around the internet free like on your own sale under your own power well it was like blogs right exactly exactly and so I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth but from the era of

you only can get on the internet if it's assigned to you and your ID is assigned to you to the AOL era where again your ID is assigned to you to now where it's your Facebook ID or your your Twitter ID and things like that. There's this brief window of time where there was a vision of maybe we can all be on the internet under our own steam and and sailing our own boats. And so sorry, I just wanted to contextual with that. It's so important because I think what I've noticed is the way in which the many things. but internet culture in particular tends to pendulate from kind of one extreme to another.

So like you're describing, there was an era with AOL and Prodigy and these kind of, there were like kind of internet telcos where you kind of had to like get service from them. And through them, they would provision you an account. And that account was how you connected to other people and found other users. And the web was this kind of creeping thing that came along that blew all that up, decentralized everything and gave people, essentially removed the gatekeepers and allowed anybody to be able to publish their own outpost in the web and then to connect peer to peer to any other service that existed. I see that Brad Fitzpatrick is in the office, the audience.

And he, as the author of Open ID, kind of came out of the Zanga world, as far as I recall, with early blogging platform and live journal and six apart. And the idea was that you could actually have your own website, go to someone else's blog, leave a comment, and essentially authenticate that you came from the other website. And so that peer-to-peer, decentralized social web was the cornerstone of what we were trying to build. And through a number of, I guess, you know, challenges from a user experience perspective,

from a security perspective, from market dynamics perspective, that idea of actually having your outpost, you know, out on the wild web of the West turned out to be a little bit too much for too many people. I do want to bring up Ravl to talk a little about the tension that existed back then between some of the Nerdu Wells, you know, the Plaxo era that we're trying to shake things up and decentralize things and also some of their reputation for maybe doing things

that were a little dubious. Ravel? Yeah, I mean, I made the point in our back chat that, like, at the time, I perceived Plaxos as being kind of a privacy problem. They were hoovering up all the email contacts and address books and everything else. Yeah, to be clear, I want to make a point or add to your point, which is that back in the early days, especially the early days of the iPhone, there were no permissions that you had to grant to gain access to your address book. So these things were just available to any app developer whose app was installed on your phone. And they could just grab your contacts and instantly, magically, some might say, could find your friends.

Yeah, go ahead. And so I remember thinking that Plaxa was this privacy problem, but it was attempting to build it in an open way. And now what it got replaced with is a much worse privacy problem. In many ways, people perceive the companies that came out of Web 2.0 as big, Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of others, as the results of Web 2.0, when in some ways they were the, the

sort of they're what came after this attempt to build everything as open protocols

and there's an open network and it's not clear to me why the open project failed like I actually

don't know because it was dominant and there were lots of people working on it and lots of energy around it

it didn't have much money but it did have a lot of momentum It failed because of ThinkD. At ThinkD. At ThinkD, of course, if you are a Twitter user, is Mark Zuckerberg.

Can I chime in there for a second? Oh, where you go, Scott? John was going to cover that one. Oh, sorry, I was just going to just quickly say the Think D thing. I sent around that screen grab where I accidentally out at Mark Zuckerberg. on Twitter and his like first comment was love watching the social web TV small world so good how did you find this account by the way because it was actually a big deal to figure out that Mike Zuckerberg was on the competitor like social network yeah I mean first of all I assume the context

was that they were considering acquiring Twitter yeah and this is 2009 and the inner circle who was exploring it were not as native to the platform as and so they they were chatting back and forth and I followed Dave Morin and suddenly like I saw interactivity and then I followed Mark and he was freaked out like he thought he was under the radar and suddenly his response was so telling to just everything and how he's run that come in my opinion. Say more. Say more.

How has he? I mean, it's like, hey, how'd you find this out? I mean, it's, you know, it's kind of public anyway, but how'd you tell me how you found that. It's like, oh, you think you caught me right-handed, but actually. Not that there's a problem. Exactly. It's so good.

Anyway, sorry to interrupt. On a funny aside, last week, Eb sent me a bunch of DMs, claiming that he in the early days never actually intended to sell Twitter and that although meetings that they had with Google and Facebook and Yahoo were just because the investors pressured him to do it. And they never took any of the offer seriously. I don't know if that's rewriting history, but it's interesting. I mean, that is. And I guess to this broader point about the economics of it, there, look, I mean, certainly, I can only speak for myself. I came out of the open source tradition, just like with Kavitin,

we were super-blooded about Firefox, about browsers, about web technologies, and about giving people a new platform to publish, again, without keykeepers. And so the commercial angle was actually quite, you know, boring to me, just because I had a broken relationship with money, but that's a different story.

And yet there were a lot of people who clearly, you know, saw dollar science, whether it was because they saw that advertising was going to become a big deal, or because there was just a huge amount of activity, and data, you know, from this. But a lot of people actually didn't take the social web very seriously early on. But some folks did.

And I guess, you know, I want to bring Bewit into this because one of the, one of the sort of key moments that I remember in sort of the annals of the web two kind of like history and developing some of these standards. And actually, Dick, you probably have a perspective on this, actually, as the second version of this protocol. But some of us were working on Oath. And I remember this one time, like, it was. was, you know, a bunch of like small startups. Like it was house and it was Twitter. And again,

these were like really small, you know, social web sites. And I made this joke to somebody who was working on it about how I thought it'd be really funny if Google one day actually, you know, used O-O-O-O-O-F. Like, wouldn't that be so great? Ha-ha. Like, you know, why would they ever use something that we built? Because it was all NIH over there, not invented here. And do it. Actually kind of, I remember he was so punk rock. He like came out and he was like, hey, what would you say if Google adopted Oath? And I was like, no way. And it was like, one of like great, crazy moments. So do it. I don't know if you can like bring us in, you're still there. So you're probably under, you know, 8,000 NDAs. But if you can bring us back to that moment

and walk us through a little bit about what you saw, you know, kind of in the social web and in adopting some of these standards and moving some of those things forward. What was the conversation inside the company at the time? I, you know, A, that's too much credit to me, maybe even too too much credit to Google. I think that, you know, we were in a situation where we were shipping a lot of APIs, right? And identity was fundamental to a lot of those APIs. This is the era of App Engine, which again, if Brad can join us, I'm sure he's got stuff to say, but go ahead. You know, it was this like, you know, moment in which for the first time, I think we were exposing a lot of the technologies, you know, via some services that people

could embed and do more with. And in that path was, you know, how do you exchange authorization and authentication. But that was not the core of it. That wasn't the interesting bit. So I think it was relatively easy for even a big company to say, hey, we're okay working outside the company on those parts because it wasn't a threat to the company at that point. But again, I don't want to oversell what Google contributed there because I think, A, the bulk of the work actually happened outside during that moment. But also, you know, that was not, you know, the most critical. But, I mean, it was, you know, one, hugely validating, you know, that Google, of course, as you said, was, you know, shipping all these APIs would take seriously this format, this protocol, this technology that, you know, came from outside the company. And in addition, would lead to something like the Open Web Foundation being graded to essentially create a legal framework that was this kind of, I mean, we'll get into that in a minute, because I think the legal aspect of this is really misunderstood or at least not appreciated in terms of the hurdles that many companies had to go through in order to, one, use open technologies and two, be able to contribute to those technologies in a way that wasn't either anti-competitive or problematic from a patent and IP,

I don't know. Dick, do you want to talk a little bit more about both your experience? Like, because I'm sure Skip had a lot of patents and IP around this and you worked at Microsoft. What is your take on how those things fit into the mix and, you know, led to either the adoption or lack of adoption for some of these things? Oh, wow. There was a lot on that question, Chris. I mean, just on the patent thing, that's actually why I ended up leaving Microsoft as I had. patent portfolio that I'd built up defensively. And Microsoft looked at buying Skip and decided they would just hire me and pay me lots of money. But part of my employment contract was that if I knowingly let them impringe on any patents,

I'd have to grant them a license. And I didn't want to give them to them free, right? You know, you can't just. Yep. If you want, if you want, I'm pay for them. And so the, I think four weeks into my job, my manager asked me to write a white paper. and I said, well, that mightn't, you know, fringe on some of my path. He said, what do you mean?

I might have friends. What do you mean? What do you mean? I said what my lawyers were supposed to say so that I, you know, was knowingly doing that. And so I got banned, you know, working with my group. And, but then I was allowed to work on open stuff, which was hilarious in some ways that Microsoft was paying me. But the only things I could work on were things where there was no IP. So, you know, go and work on up I became Oahu and JSON Webpack.

token. Yeah, maybe you can speak to some of the competitive, I don't know, like energies and nature of what was going on back then. Because, you know, for me coming up, Microsoft was like my sworn nemesis. You know, it was the evil empire. It was the thing that wanted to shut down the web and was averse in so many ways to openness. And, I mean, it might be valuable to sort of parse out some of what open means and what

effective openness means because I would say both, you know, Zuckerberg has followed the Microsoftian model with openness, you know, to be the platform that all other applications and platforms live upon. And ironically, they're sort of in this place where they are, you know, I guess dependent upon other platforms where there's Apple or Google, etc. And so they kind of find themselves squeezed, which is, of course, why the metaverse is so important to them. But maybe you can, like, take us back again to how interoperability and, you know, formats and technologies, you know, was, was, It felt like a very different kind of conversation back then in this world. And I feel like you've been in this, I guess, soup for so long.

Maybe you can help us to, like, think about the difference between back then and now. Well, a good thing to do would be to wind back a little bit further in time. I remember this time at Skip. Tim O'Reilly was an investor in my board. We had a board meeting in Vancouver. And he had a meeting following that down in Seattle with Jim Olchen, who was running windows at the time. Because there was this big hooperaws, you know, they were battling around open source, Microsoft.

Is that a Canadianism? Probably. I might have just made it up as well. Okay. But there was a hooperism. But there was a big, you know, big coppaw. And so Jim Maltz asked him if he could come by and chat. And I said, oh, I'd love to be going to fly on the wall on that.

And then Tim said he was going to be. having dinner with this guy that, you know, has great wine. I was like, oh, we'll say hi. And then he said that Neil Stephen was going for dinner. And I said, I'll drive you down. But then I became Tim technical assistant in that meeting with Jim. And boy, that was an entertaining meeting of, you know, Jim talking about industrial software. Or Jim Olton talking about industrial software and Tim O'Reilly talking about open source at the same time.

So, you know, as all of you know, Microsoft was very anti-open source. By the time I got there, which was 2009, Microsoft was embracing open source. I remember sitting in a partner meeting at Microsoft, and Steve Bomber calls me out about how Microsoft is being open. So, yeah, we just hired Dickhart, you know, leader in open source, identity, and openness and everything, right? So, you know, that was shifting inside the company by that point in time around how. Microsoft was trying to do.

Well, they didn't really understand the internet or the web or things like that, but they were trying to realize that they needed to interrupt and work with other people to some degree. And, you know, the reason we got involved in OWAT, you know, we worked on OWOP was just, OAWF, one was just too hard to implement for people. Yeah, yeah. and, you know, so myself and Alan Tom from Yahoo. And I'm trying to remember who it was from Google. Do it, do you remember who it was that I worked with at Google?

Was it Brian? Yeah, I think it was Brian. And so both Alan and Brian had been deep insecurity. You know, they had well-worn paths of all the stupid things that could happen and all the mistakes that we made. And really what we did is like what was Microsoft, you know, what was the common pattern between the homegrown solutions that all accompanied that and, and, you know, added a couple of other features. One of the key ones was sort of the refresh token and the idea of scopes. And, you know, that was the basis for what eventually became OAuth too. There was some other part to your question, though, Chris.

Well, no, actually, that's helpful because one of the things that I think is germane about this conversation. and again in this pendulation between kind of open and closed and now we're in this kind of web three moment where there are a lot of ideas that are kind of being reintroduced and reinvented and recreated oftentimes sometimes worse than what we were doing back then.

I think it's worthwhile to understand a little bit about the history, at least as I remember, of Oath 1.0 and 1.0A and what we were trying to solve for back then and just to provide a little color, Oath 1.0 was designed to work in WordPress blogs, which were often hosted in shared hosting environments, in which case they were kind of insecure. And so part of the OAuth-10 protocol with Aaron Lahav, Hammer, who was the author

and the kind of curator of that spec, was to essentially recreate or reinvent SSD, you know, the secure socket layer that keeps most of the Internet secure today. And we did that because of the the nature of self-hosted WordPress. And the DeSto-Project was trying to make it possible for individuals who are hosting their own blogs to be able to do a peer-to-peer connection and to create the peer-to-peer, like, social web. And so what it turned out to be is that it was just far too hard to get, you know, normal website operators to understand crypto.

And so fast forward to OL2. And it was like, well, let's just use SSL that already exists. It's already built in the browser and adopt this new, you know, format. in token to make it much, much simpler. So I think that evolution is important. And I'm not a developer, so I can't speak to some of the nuanced in that. But I think it would be useful for you guys

to talk a little bit about those tensions and about the tradeoffs that we had to make to drive more adoption. Because I think, you know, like, Oath has been a resounding success, I would say, as far as standards goes. Like, everybody uses it. I mean, the fact that it is so much of a force today

and it continues to be maintained and built into most APIs, I think, you know, is a testament to the work that was done back then by a lot of you guys. So I think about three, you know, what can we take away from that? It's important to remember, too, the other context that led to, the thing that led 2.0 is honestly best known for and that led to O lot was people wanted to do mashups, right? They wanted to take information and use it in another place. They wanted to create new experiences, especially now that for the first time they were actually

creating data. Remember, the web used to just be a bunch of static web pages, but people started being able to actually upload information about themselves. And once they'd done that, they would say, I want to see my restaurant reviews on a Google map, or I want to see, you know, they want to bring these things together. And without APIs, the only way they could do that was ask you for your username and password on that other service and then scrape the information out. And that's how all these Antipater. Yes. I didn't forget this, but Facebook grew by asking all their users for their Google

username and password and then, you know, importing their address book or methods like that. And that was just sort of the, you know, it was the best you could do. And, actually, I wouldn't want to do that. That is such an important point. And I think a lot of people, you know, try to build new social networks today. And they're like, oh, I'll just build like a new social network. And it'll be better, you know, in some feature way. But actually, it was the way in which Facebook did hack to get your network,

no matter where it was. And, you know, Plaxo also... I was going to say, wasn't that inspired by Plaxo, unless I'm remembering incorrectly. Well, I mean, there's a Sean Parker kind of like, you know, part of this. Why Sean went to Facebook is he sort of understood the bootstrapping problem. Exactly. But the point being, you know, even back then, you know,

users trusted the sites where they were putting that information in because they wanted the ability to import their contacts and find their friends. But it's obviously a very insecure way of doing things. And so each company had sort of come up with their own, the spoke way of working around that to the extent they offered APIs at all. And there is, you know, so there was obviously the opportunity just to sort of say, let's have one implementation that everybody uses so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over again and it's easier to use.

But I think the bigger opportunity was let's allow for interoperability and data portability so that we can have a lot more flourishing of innovation and try a lot more different ways of consuming that data and producing it and have people who, some people want more filtering or less filtering. And I think that's the way that you really hear the echo in today with all this hand-wringing around the future of Twitter is it's not so much about decentralization as just that we've lost that capacity for really disruptive innovation because all the information is still trapped. And, Twitter, my God, it's what, 18 years old now or 17 years old, something like that, right? And it's 16. Okay, yeah, right, Facebook's 18 or 10.

But, I mean, these are, that's a long time in tech years, right? and the core services really have not changed that much because once they got those network effects in place, I mean, they sort of didn't need to. And you've seen new kinds of networks come up like TikTok and others, but it's not really replacing that core functionality. So I think that's, to me, that's the through line in all of this, was that people wanted interoperability so that there could be innovation. And these standards were in support of that.

But, you know, the industry users weren't demanding it enough. Regulation wasn't demanding it enough. And these, you know, big incumbents realized they didn't have to, basically. I do feel you're like you're kind of an innovation maximalist. And the reason why I would like frame it that way is because we've also seen a lot of other like negative, you know, externalities and things that, you know, have been in a way sort of innovative. Like Cambridge Analytica was, you might say, innovative to an outcome that, of course, some of us might may not have liked. So what is the balancing of that? And actually I want to bring Rabel up here because I think, you know, given that he's building. a decentralized platform, and I understand a little bit more about his politics.

Like, I think I would like to understand from, from Ravel, your perspective, how, I guess, suppressed innovation is making it harder for you to compete or find users or to grow or whatever is that you want to say about this? I mean, it's critical. Like, the reason that all of these platforms say you can have your data, like they let, you know, everything from Tinder to Facebook lets you, you know, request all of your data and download it is because your own data isn't very valuable to them. It's all the metadata and connections, and that's the thing they lock up. And,

you know, initially there was space by which, you know, you could get that social graph out of Facebook and Twitter and all these others. And Twitter didn't lock it down as much as others, but they locked it down. And then they used the address book as a way of, doing all sorts of data mining. And, you know, that, building a new platform in decentralized, like, that is our biggest problem. And, you know,

one of the things we've been working on is, is the cold phone problem? Is that what you mean? Like, yeah, like, how do you find the people? Like, it's all locked down now. And like, it may be email addresses, but that's, you know, or phone numbers, but that's it. And, you know, we've been working on trying to say, okay, are there zero knowledge-proof ways of

creating a service where I could figure out, you know, I'm an app developer. How do I tell one user of my app who else they know on the app without me needing a copy of that data and without people having to give up their privacy? And, you know, you can do it. We just need to figure out a way to get people adopted. And then anybody could build a social app. And right now we have a few gatekeepers and it's a real pain. I don't know.

How do I put my time up? I don't know. Rabel was able to figure that out. Oh, it's if you hit the heart. And then on the very far side, there's a hand that looks like a stop hand. You see that? What do I hit? But the stop actually makes you go.

It does. There's a little heart button in there. I don't know, which app version you have. But if you want to raise your hand, yeah. You hit the heart. And then, yep, you got it. But before you jump in, though, we actually have a special guest speaker who has shown up, Terrell Russell, who built a service, if I recall correctly, called claim ID. And claim ID was an amazing open-dity provider. It was the open identity provider that I used for a while.

And, you know, I would dare say that it might have been the very first link in bio type product before there were links in bios that you needed to link off to some of their service. I don't know. Terrell, are you able to come up and say hello? Yeah, I'm here. Hey. Hey. Welcome in. Hey, thanks. Yeah, we, I think we might have been the first. I think along with some of the code that came from Scott's company from Jan Rain, we were able to stand up an open ID provider. I think we might have been the first one to stand it up outside of, you know, one of the major companies. Do you want to run that for a couple? ran that for a few years and then I worked out that we just, you know, it's a horse race and we had two people. So that wasn't, wasn't viable in the end. But yeah, that's what we did.

Just give us a little bit of introduction about yourself and how you actually came to the social web because, you know, you, if I was it North Carolina? Yeah, still in North Carolina. That's right. Okay. Right. So, you know, like a lot of us were in Silicon Valley. You were not. And so what I'm curious to hear from you, you know, having built claim ID, you know, where did you come into this? Like, why did you think this was exciting? Why would you get involved with Open ID? So we had an interesting question in our library school. It was Fred Stutzman and I just started thinking about identity in terms of from the academic side. How do you own this?

How do you prove it? How do you, you know, kind of keep it with you for life? If you want to do that, how do you hide from it? We had an interesting prompts from one of our professors at the time. He said, you know, we'll just give you some passing grades if you can convince me I can't find you on Google. And it's like, it's an interesting challenge to try and make yourself disappear before there were services to try and, you know, help people who want to pay for that. Right, right. So in terms of thinking about how that works, how it should work, how do we want it to work?

You know, there's definitely kind of an academic side of that question. But then the practicality of it became very interesting. We both could program our way out of a paper bag, so maybe a wet paper bag. And so stood this thing up and started playing with it and met all these people, had some very interesting conversations about protocols that did not yet exist. And basically just happened to be in the room at the time. So ran with it and then watched the NASCAR problem happen,

where every site now has a button. that goes on the login page. And, you know, then watched the, like we were talking about a second ago, you know, the large companies that had manpower and dollars, you know, basically eat the problem because they wanted, they wanted to own the core, right? Like, if you log in and you're branded, you're using that brand on the web, that's the most powerful thing that they can do. I mean, and you see it now with so many, like, Web3 efforts,

and you know, in S and sign in with Ethereum. So a lot of these things are happening again. These conversations are happening again. And there's a desire, of course, to own, whether there's something called name tag. As I said, there's the Ethereum name service, which has some interesting sort of correlates with XRDS Simple,

which was a discovery protocol that was built. I believe on top of Yaddis. Anyways, this is like, we're going to need an acronym Jargon-Soup file for this. Dick, you wanted to come up and say something. Yeah, I was. Now, of course, a few other things that I'd like to command on. But we were talking about the APIs and how, you know, in early days, Facebook and Twitter were platforms.

I remember being at the first Facebook conference, and they were really talking wanting people to build on their platform. You know, on Twitter was the same way, right? And it was an exciting time of APIs and how you could match up and build all kinds of stuff. And tons of innovation could be happening on top of that. I think a lot of that was, you know, people looked at the platform success of Microsoft with, you know, DOS and then Windows, where, you know, by making it easy for people to build things, all kinds of other innovation happened, but they saw that Microsoft made a lot of money. So their view is, we'll be the platform and we'll let other people fill in all the pieces. And as time on, as it turned out, social networks didn't really work well like that. You know, that that wasn't, the money, there was so much bad stuff that could happen with it

because you're actually dealing with people as opposed to, you know, writing software that ran on an operating system. And, you know, all of the platform APIs, you know, over time disappeared. And, you know, really, they, you know, shifted to some identity aspects. Twitter never really figured that part out. You know, but Facebook figured it out with Open ID Connect that you know, you weren't just, connecting your account, but you could log in and that you could have a, you know, people were using the API to have the user connected and then call the API as, as we all know, to figure out, well, which user is this? And, you know, that then became the way around,

how did you know who a user was if they connected their account so that APIs could be made authorizing really a call to find out who was this user? don't don't you feel like sorry this is brian again um that that that's the rug pool that everybody pulled on web 2.0 which was oh we're going to be a platform we're going to be like microsoft we're going to you know uh even like think of you know netscape with plugins and things like that like but in reality Microsoft made their money by taking a vig from every computer that was sold right and they always wanted to do that.

That was their vision for, you know, the information super highway, which became the web or whatever. So in the end, like Facebook, Twitter, all these people rug pulled everybody because they're like, hey, that was part of their, that was part of their sort of get big fast strategy of like, okay, well, we'll have a thousand flowers bloom. But then in the end, the way we're going to make money is we're going to take the big, right? So, like, that's sort of, and I'm not trying to put words in anyone's mouth again, but like, isn't that sort of how Webb 2.0 died was people promised this let a thousand

flowers bloom, but in the end, the way everybody made money was to shut it down and essentially recreate Waldgardens. Yeah, I would agree with that. They essentially just paved over all the grass. You know, you couldn't grow any. anymore. Zinga took off. That was one of the companies that really was based on what you could do

with Facebook, but over time, Facebook cut out more and more of those things so you couldn't sort of ping your friends. But it was also like an adversarial network

or an adversarial effects, right? Just like we're seeing all sorts of bad stuff happening in like the Web 3 crypto land, I mean, throwing sheep at people,

you know, started to overwhelm the news feed. And that was like an endemic problem for Facebook. Right, right. So I don't think of view it so much as a rugpole as opposed to, oh, my, you know, when people, people are building on something interacting with people, right? You know, they, they, it's not all goodness. You know, there's a bunch of badness and abuse. And, you know, the users are sure feeling abused and pulling away from the platform. So they needed to cut the abuse. So it wasn't, it wasn't just money is what you're saying. It was also protecting the product, the experience. Well, which of course is still money. It was all about the money. Right.

Yeah. The model didn't really work when it was people interacting in short contrast to Microsoft that, you know, if you wanted to run software on a PC, you had to have Windows. And, you know, that was a great moneymaker. And, you know, you're just writing software on top of it, as opposed to the whole social aspect, which is super interesting and we're all excited about it. but human nature got in the way and abused it, right? We still see that with the bots in Twitter at this time. Well, I think that that brings us, you know, to an important sort of like inflection point, which is, you know, had we won, and of course that sort of requires us to impact what it would

have meant to have won and why we didn't win, what would things look like today? Well, I think that what we need to do is how do we make the web more accountable? I mean, there's massive amounts of money spent trying to detect bots and eat bots, right? All the, all those aspects. And, you know, I, of course, have an identity lens on everything. And so I view it's really an identity problem of like, like, who is this? And having reputation, right? The aspect on the web of nobody knows you're a dog, but then, of course, nobody knows anything about you.

What's the retribution in a digital world when you misbehave? in the physical world, if you're an asshole, people glare at you, they look at you, you feel bad, you stop doing that. But nobody thinks twice about telling somebody to fuck off or suck their cock or on Twitter. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on these things. Twitter, it's Twitter. It's Twitter. It's Twitter. It's Twitter. I'm just saying what's happening on Twitter.

Exactly. You know, there's no retribution, right? there's no consequences to the action. And so it's really kind of a reputation thing around, like, you know, that there's something bad happens to you in one place. And that now, you know, everything's in a silo. So if you're bad and get bad in one place, well, you kind of turn it up.

And it's hard for people who really know there's not really any binding on it. Go on. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the only place that that doesn't happen is LinkedIn because it's tied to kind of your professional persona, which is sort of that thing that limits people. But I will say the one thing that I wish Twitter that Elon would do, and we all get our one wish, I guess, is lock everybody out of their account, and then everybody has to verify themselves just from day one, right? You can still have your account, but you've got to verify it. I mean, if they go private, no, to worry about, you know, no, no, that's, that's, that's, that's the white man's gambit.

It's been called that, and I believe it honestly, you can't, you can't. have verified people. You'll only get the people who feel safe. Okay. I'm with you at that front. I was going to say something different. I don't buy that. That's a bunch of crap. I think everybody, honestly, right now there's so many people on Twitter that hide behind anonymity. When they don't need to, they're just cowardly. And I don't get the white man gambit, and that's fine, you can call it that. But I just think that's kind of ridiculous. I would much rather, I mean, if you look at LinkedIn, it's not verified, but people aren't doing all kinds of crazy stuff on there.

For, I guess, other reasons, right? I mean, I think to Terrell's point, like, at least I would certainly suggest that not everyone is equally safe, and not everyone actually has the same, you know, privilege or ability to make mistakes in public as everyone else does. So unless we solve that problem, then I do think that it is still very much the enfranchised classes prerogative to behave in a certain way, you know, because we haven't actually created a more egalitarian, inclusive society yet. Now, to your point, Scott, like, I think that you can hide behind anonymity and be, you know, cowardly, and that's true. But that also doesn't mean that just because you can,

that is actually, like, safer for everyone in a way that actually enfranchises more people. Okay, let's get rebel up here. Yeah, what I was going to say is that, like, I don't, I don't, don't think that verifying identities is going to work. There's in part because we saw Friendster lose to MySpace in part because of verified identities and using real names. We saw Google Plus fall apart over real names. I run a Twitter account called Top Photos and it identifies, uses machine learning to identify police officers who don't have their IDs on them in uniform. And it only does police in uniform and it's checked by a lawyer. But I sure as hell don't want my name connected to that Twitter account.

But it's not abusing anyone. It's a, you know, it's a free speech right thing. And there are lots of other cases where people aren't doing abusive or disparate things where they don't want their identity shared, you know, queer people, trans people, anyone in a place of a repressive government. And if Twitter goes and verifies all the accounts, then they're going to be subject to legal orders to give, you know, documentation about who all these people are. And in the U.S., it's not that big a deal. But in some countries, it's a tremendous deal.

And I think that that's one of the kind of almost Tumblr moments that he could do to try and, like, cause mass rebellion. And what does that mean? What do you mean by Tumblr moments? Well, when Verizon, Yahoo Verizon went and said, you know, no longer can you do female presenting nipples and made all these rules. And not only were they cutting back on the amount of porn that was on Tumblr and like sexy photos, but they said it in a way that was also tremendously sexist. And that's sort of when the Tumblr user said, we're going to rebel and, you know, kill your platform by running away. And so Twitter, you know, that could happen to Twitter as much as we all love it. Yeah, I mean, I think what you're raising is actually a very interesting point, right?

And I think one of the reasons why it's for some people so scary to have someone like Elon sort of, you know, in the potential poll position is because he could make certain decisions that many other people would not for fear of either incurring that kind of wrath or alienating, you know, 45% of the user base or. whatever it is. And so on the one hand, his ability to choose and decide something and then make something happen, you know, like sending people to Mars or creating an electric car that actually, you know, people want to buy. Like, those are really positive things that, you know, really hadn't, I think, been done from a commercial sense, you know, prior to his efforts. You know, where you want to drill a hole from L.A. to like San Francisco. Cool. We'll do that. But you're absolutely right. When it comes to these subtle social matters, there is a question as to how directly do you

want to rip the social fabric that exists versus sort of, you know, massage it out or smooth it into sort of a new order that takes place over time. And is, I mean, if you think about the way that a lot of Supreme Court decisions happen, they take generations because they are so meaningful and impactful. Now, maybe that's too slow. But if you go too fast, then there's a whole set of people who are not actually brought along for those changes and it creates huge riffs in society and culture. Now, I want to bring up Ross because Ross is also another sleeper speaker who came up. We've actually had Ross on the show before when he launched the Zoom app platform. They most might remember that.

But, you know, Ross has also been around for quite a while in the whole sort of internet world. And is that a dog's annoying? I had a dog barking. I'm not hearing anyway, I'm hearing things that. Anyways, and funny enough, one little anecdote here. Back in 2005, when I was organizing bar camp, which was this event that then, you know,

I just posted some photos that John took of Social Web Camp, our social web poo, whatever it was, social poo camp. I organized, we organized Bar Camp in Ross's original space in Palo Alto. And so that's how far back we go. Anyways, Russ, I'm sure you've been waiting to say something for a while. I'll raise your thought and please chime in. I was just walking a dog and wanted to listen into

people on my old blog role, right? But I was trying to think about if I was some poor lost soul trying to build on like Web 3, which is a really bad idea that will fail in every conceivable way, like is there some wisdom from the beginning of the Web 2.0 stuff?

And from the conversation, like, I reflect back on O'Reilly E.Tech back in 2003, where a group of people got together and started to create the Social Software Alliance that was looking at RSS with its greatness and forthcomings and started to work on protocols on Adam as a standard. Yeah. Right. And the, and that was great because the approach was at the, the, the energy. at the moment was, you know, standards bodies are going to be too slow, just implement, get a group of people to implement, implement is truth, right? And get agreement around that implementation. And you see a lot of that energy, right? But if I was to say, like, what is, where was the moment where we lost on Web 2.0, when you're talking at this layer versus, you know, the centralized thing that it became, it really what, like imagine this, like back then,

You had great, you had movable type, you had amazing blog platforms, right? Where you had people's, yes, identity, but expression of identity. And the thing that strung it together was RSS and Adam as a way to be able to follow the conversation, right? And maybe- So decentralized syndication formats. And in a weird way, what happened was everybody kind of stayed within their boundaries. Like if I'm making a blog software, my friend is making RSS news readers, I'm not going to encroach in that.

So you had like within movable type, you had backtracks. So you could see replies to your blog posts in a decentralized way. But nobody ever like realized what would be the whole product concept for a truly decentralized way of being able to have all these conversations and content sharing. And then it still would need another mechanism of discovery. But even like with, what was it, Dave, Weiner's thing. I forget the name of the blog software. Web blogs? Yeah.

Web blogs. You still had like what was the. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Which was where I started on it. You still had like this one page that was like the who whose blogs were the most popular, right? Was the very first inkling of like a centralized discovery mechanism. Right. It doesn't take that. It didn't take that much at that time. before the more centralized versions of all of this occurred.

And my little hypothesis is nobody realized like the whole product concept to let me own a site, own my identity, be able to follow all of the conversations and still discover things and people outside of that, you know, the way that I just be following things, right? And, you know, I still, again, like on the Web 3 thing, right, what do we have? There's zero adoption besides speculation that with one exception, which is like the brave browser, which has like 50 million people using it because they don't want ads, right? But there's no fucking use case and there's no orientation towards adoption. And you can create all the protocols you want.

And the truth of implementation is not that you've implemented it in code, but people actually fucking use it. Right? So I don't know if there's a lesson in all that or if I'm helping in the conversation. but well I think I think actually what you're saying is is really useful and part of what I'm also trying to get at you know which is this question you know of had we been successful had we somehow decentralized the social web and you know Twitter and I mean Facebook let's say just as an example or somehow more interoperable you know where you could be a Facebook user I could be a Twitter user and we could actually subscribe to each other and interact with each other's content much like you can do with Mastodon or you can do on planetary social which is, of course, Ravel's thing. I want to bring Doit into this because I think Doit had actually a very sort of supportive point around that,

specifically as relates to, I guess, media and consumption and entertainment and what happens on these enabling technologies that goes way beyond what we are sort of focusing on, which is the tech and the technologies and the formats and all this bullshit that no one cares about. Do it. Tell us going wrong.

Thanks, and I just want to amplify, I think, a point that Ross is making, and it's a point that, like, You know, it's near and dear to all of us, which is we have some really smart people on this call, and we've been doing this for decades now. We've built the protocols. We've standardized those protocols. Like, I don't think there was a technology problem. In fact, you could look at the technology that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and the successful companies use. It was inferior to our open standardized alternatives. Like, that was never the problem. And there is... No, our Betamax was amazing. What the hell, guys? So it's like, we could look at that.

like, oh, yeah, maybe we didn't write the right things. But I don't think that that was what happened. But can I, let me, let me jump in real quick. Isn't that always, hasn't that always been the original sin where it's like in the same way that like the GUI was a simpler layer that over top the command line that made it, oh, I don't have to know anything, right? And in the same way, the web is still open, right? it's just that it's too complicated for people to spin up even their own WordPress site and things like that. So all that these platforms did was make that again sort of dead simple like the GUE did. Is that always what we come back to even when we're talking about Web 3 because frigging Web 3 is still complicated as shit and somebody is going to come around at some point and maybe put a GUI on top of that and make it simple for my mom to do in theory.

is that all it is, is it just taking away, abstracting away all of the complication, is that the thing that we constantly run into with this idea of openness? I mean, it does seem like, you know, the tension, the fundamental tension, and I know the Blue Sky team is working on this,

and so Rabel will help you speak to that in a second, is how do you keep something open and supporting freedom and lots of choice and the ability to take your data with you and go to someplace else and still retain all the nuance and the subtlety that's captured in the metadata, you know, that the viewer or the platform itself knows how to interpret and make sense of. And as you said, Brian, make it easy and available to your mom or to anybody else who, or your dad or whatever, anybody else who wants to use these things and actually doesn't really want the experience of the technology. Like the

taste of the technology in their mouth is what makes them not want to use it. And so things that obscure the technology or make it more pleasurable or exciting, you know, like, I think TikTok is such a, you know, good example of that, where it's like you just open the app and you just slick with your thumb and it's so accessible to so many people and it starts to learn you and gives you a delightful experience. You can give a shit about where that, you know, content comes from. Anyways, so that tension is important. Dick has been, uh, waiting to, to come up for a second. So coming up and say something. Yeah, I'm just going to build off of that and then go into my other time. Perfect. It's, it, you know, having worked on a number of standards, you know, it's hard to get

everybody aligned and agree there's a bunch of different interests, etc. But if you're a single entity, right, you can just decide what you want to do, put it together, iterate, evolve, get feedback. You move really fast. You can build something that works really well. And, you know, that's been proven time and time again. And I think really the decision whether there's a standard on doing it is really do you need interrupt further to be an unlocking value or can you just unlock the value by doing it well yeah and you know so a number of these things like facebook and twitter and tic-tok right they unlock the value by doing it well interrop between different things doesn't deliver the value iterating and doing it really well delivers the value actually so as you're saying that

i'm just sort of reminded you know that apple really was never really part of our conversations to the best of my recollection. And what I found so interesting and what I think is happening, and I'm bringing this up because you raise the point about interoperability. And I think there's a difference between interoperability and decentralized interoperability. Because Apple actually, you know, especially with sign in with Apple, is quite interoperable or pay with Apple and Apple ID. Like they are building these standards and technologies. I'm sure actually you probably know a lot more about this than I do, into the fabric of the web,

but they're also building it into the operating system. And so they are not willing to compromise on the user experience of being able to authenticate with your face or authenticate with your thumb. Things that we talked about years and years ago, but never got to implementation to the level that Apple has. And Apple has enabled billions of users to take advantage of amazing digital identity experiences

within their very closed-down-walled garden. So the fact that they were, I guess, focused on that experience and then layered on interrupt and decentralization of some sort. After they got the experience right, maybe there's a lesson in that. And to this point about Web3, you know, you've got to start with amazing financialized, I guess, transactions. And then layer in, well, it's really hard to do, but then layer in the cryptography or the decentralization or the Web 3 rails. Because you can't just start with the format or the technology and presume that anyone's going to care. unless you're doing things that are either imperiled by the current system or, you know,

illegal or, you know, where you just want more control, you know, from the current gigkeepers because you want to become the next geekkeeper yourself. But I'm sorry to, I'm sorry to butt in. It's not user experience is part of it, right? It's a huge part of it. But it's about distribution, is my point.

Right? Uh-huh. You can't, like, none of these wonderful protocols are going to get anywhere. They're not getting, because the core product fitness and its user experience is shit. It's not really

solving real problems for people or creating delightful experiences enough. And the distribution mechanism is hampered. Yeah. Yeah. Rebel, you want to jump in here? Yeah, I mean, there's a few points.

As we were talking about, like, what the Web 2.0 projects or those early open projects would look like if they hadn't been taken over, the answer is podcasting. Apple came in, embraced the standard, gave people a platform,

never took it over, never built that much on top of it, but was dominant enough to prevent anyone else, ironically enough, say, audio, to dominate that,

and podcasting is stayed open. The, you know, this open protocol versus centralization thing, one, Moxie, who created Signal gave a talk a couple years ago,

where he said, he doesn't believe in decentralization or interoperable protocols because you can't A-B test them and you can't optimize and the innovation is slower. And so, you know, that might be that like optimizing that user experience and sort of polishing off all those edges is harder on these protocols and these open systems, and that's why we lose. But I don't know. But, you know, I really think that podcasting is the one example. that came out of that era

that Spotify is trying now, but it's like a decade later and not succeeding. Yeah. I mean, their reports are actually, or their results, the quarterly results were actually not so bad.

I would say, like, email is also one of those decentralized technologies that sits in the background and is still, you know, hugely, you know,

powerful, popular, and all over the place. We, you know, the messaging space, I think, is a really interesting one

to bring up. especially, you know, given, again, Ravel, what you're working on, and the fact that Twitter early on, thanks to the work of Blaine and you and other folks, was working on a decentralized protocol, which was XMPP. So, yeah, I mean, we tried to better it with XMPB

and had prototypes running. Yeah, and then what happened? Just to echo in on the email comments, right? We think it's open and decentralized, but it doesn't because once again, we had all those bad human behavior of spamming and fishing. Yeah.

And so unless you're one of the big seven or eight providers, it's really hard to send mail. It's better than a duopoly, though, right? Oh, I'm not arguing about it, but it's not like it's wildly. Well, but I think it raises a good point, which is what is a decentralized future that we actually want, right? So if blue sky were to succeed, isn't that we've had a thousand, you know, flowers bloom, and we're looking at sort of like the Macedon universe where there's just tons of servers, you know, Or maybe, I mean, Discord is obviously centralized, but it has the concept of servers as kind of their individual nodes in its own little network. Or is that we have eight, you know, different providers.

And that actually is much better because there's not the concentration of power that there is in, you know, let's say Facebook. Yeah, well, I think that's what it is. When you have a monopoly, right, it cycles innovation. You look at what AT&T did, the telecom, right? And breaking it up open to everything wide open. And so the concern is always if there's one party that has it, they just become rent-seeking, very little interest in innovating, where if you have a marketplace where there's a number of players, they're innovating because they're competing against each other. And, you know, you get a lot of innovation. You know, there's not rent-seeking.

There's not someone just pulling out the control. But I'm going to turn it over to Joe. No, Dick, I'm just picking up exactly where you left up, which is the key difference is that. you reduce the switching costs, which is what enables the innovation, because, you know, social networks in particular have this very high network effect. And so it's not enough to just get one person to switch. You have to get their friends, and then you have to get those people's friends and those people's friends, right? And so you do see these moments, you know, even though Google Plus wasn't successful, Facebook was certainly worried about it while we were building

it. And we had a lot of better features on circles and photos and other things that they then started rapidly copying. And so they ended up improving their product pretty significantly, because for a moment they felt there was a real competitive threat. And then when that went away, that stuff stops getting better at nearly the same rate. You see that across lots of different industries, right? So that's why we know that actual threat of real competition is what drives innovation. That's the whole capitalist approach. And so it's not that ultimately everyone will be running their own servers.

They may actually only be a handful of players that most people are on. But it's the ability for something to start small. And if it's interesting, people can actually move. move to it and it can, you know, rise up and, you know, become a thing that people use. I mean, you know, nobody used Gmail when it first came out, but because of the way email worked, people could try it out. And if they liked it, they could move over and that there was no sort of permission structure there, right? And now maybe everyone uses Gmail, but something else could still come along and conceivably become a new email client of choice.

And we have such lack of imagination. I mean, people think how much different could be social services be, but they could be extremely different. They could be different in terms of the types of content that gets shared, the way it gets discovered and ranked and filtered, the way conversations happen. There's all kinds of opportunity there, and we just won't see it if there isn't this ability to not have to recreate the entire network from the bottom up. I mean, even, you know, now with John in this new creator economy space, and we're not trying to replace social networks, but when creators and fans want to build a deeper relationship,

you know, your mentions is just kind of a cesspool, right? And your inbox gets overwhelmed, and you get 50,000 comments, and you can't. can't sort through them. There's tons of opportunity for innovation just in that niche alone in terms of how do I help filter out the noise and have a longer-term relationship and figure out who my true fans are or what they're interested. That's just one example where APIs are key to innovation. And, you know, what APIs do exist thanks to all this work we did in the early days actually has allowed us to build a lot of cool stuff already. Facebook actually is one of the most open when it comes to APIs. TikTok doesn't have any API, for example. So I think what we've seen is enough to drive a lot of innovation,

but there's still so much more that could be had. And I think that's why. why I continue to be an optimist because we've just, we've seen this movie before. And when it doesn't work, there's all kinds of great things that happen. You don't have to be able to predict the future. You just have to know what the conditions are to sort of let that Darwinian process unfold. Well, and you know, to add to that, I do think obviously like my stupid contribution to this conversation in some way was the hashtag. And it was predicated on the idea of offering kind of generative seedlings out to the

internet or to the web to allow people to build upon that. whether that's a format or a protocol or a standard or a set of libraries that implement some of these ideas and allow other people to sort of carry the water forward even further than you were able to do because you solve something or you figure something out or you figured a pattern that everyone was eventually going to have. I mean, Duwitt spoke to it earlier where a number of larger, you know, companies, namely, you know, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, all realized that they were solving the same problem and their marginal competitive advantage for having their own bespoke authorization protocol

actually wasn't in their own interest. In fact, it was in the industry's interest and in security interest to harmonize and standardize on how to solve that one problem to move the web forward. Like it's been done many, many times on the internet. The internet is made of a series of tubes which are standardized so that you can fit them together to create the plumbing of a great house. That's a metaphor that I probably should never use again. But then the whole thing, I think it's worthwhile to think about how some of those concepts and behaviors and values are worth reiterating in this moment when a lot of people in the Web 3 world are kind of in this scattershot brain space where there is economic incentives and speculation, and that's

driving why they're building and getting into the space. And there's also those who are interested in actually the formats in the technologies and solving some of the technical things that we were unable to solve because we didn't have this decentralized supercomputer, which is the blockchain. So actually, I want to bring that up. Like, one of the things that I want this group specifically to sort of think about is if you had Elon Musk's ear and he's about to buy Twitter and take a private and all the things that we've talked about in terms of decentralization and innovation and letting a thousand flowers bloom, like the guy could just like blow all of his money on this like one shot to save humanity like he's trying to do with taking us to Mars

with blowing up the social web. What is the, with one or two things that you would have him do right now, or perhaps in the next two months, if you could ask him to do one thing. And I'm going to start actually with John, because we haven't heard from him in a hot minute. Well, thank you. Yeah, I don't know if he'll actually pull it off, but if he does, I would love to see clean sweep eliminating all of the bots. And so how might you go about do that? Because I do know that Twitter is working on professional accounts as well as labeling automated accounts.

So if you were to imagine, let's say there's just like an EMP in the matrix that wipes out all the squitties and they just like fall to the floor and they die. And then slowly there's an application process for applying to run a bot on Twitter. First of all, would you allow that? And secondly, what might that look like? Yeah, and I would say it's somewhat ironic, if not hypocritical of me to say this, given that I've spent the last few years helping create some of the most interesting thoughts to do conversational AI on Facebook Messenger. So I think there are use cases where automated engagement is actually useful for all parties, especially if it's done in a way that's transparent. but I also have long believed that Twitter, with its ad-supported model, has happily turned a blind eye to easily detectable bot accounts that are convenient for them in terms of presenting a reachable audience to brands, but which would be fairly simple. I will say that whether it's the crypto bots or just other, you know, very obvious and obnoxious.

Like, I don't know if it's just like an arms race and the pace in which these things are created is so fast. And in the early days, they look like new users and so it's really hard to tell them apart. Or if, as you say, like, Twitter actively is turning a blind diet to some of them for some reason. I mean, the latest one has been that verified accounts seem to either getting hacked or something. And they start spewing, you know, this, like, shilling stuff. and how is it that the verification system has been so corrupted to enable bots to behave like that? Like, that is fundamental root rot from the core. Yeah, and I also think, like, they never, ever figured out what they were really doing with verification.

So, I mean, and they tried to restart that program many times. Yeah. But I don't think Elon Musk knows what he's in for. I think a lot of people agree with that. But that's why we have this panel here so we can send this podcast and then we'll have some ideas. They said that about the electric car. Yeah, true.

Going to space. Which were technical and regimes. It drives me crazy about Twitter. It's from the beginning of Twitter. I don't know how many people were complaining about how hard Twitter was. I mean, I can remember, you know, seeing folks like, I mean, you know, Blaine were on this. I'd say it too.

You know, he was up on stage talking about, you know, Twitter and scaling Twitter. and while it's down, and we're sitting in the audience going, hey, Blaine, you should probably get offstage and go fix it. But I feel like every problem on Twitter has always been, oh, it's so hard you don't understand. But at the end of the day, I never felt like there was a really, really strong leadership there either because let's remember that, and I don't want to rewrite history or, you know, tell it wrong.

But there was a lot of infighting, and I don't feel like there was strong leadership. And, you know, Jack was there, but was also, you know, running a whole other company for a good, chunk of that thing. So, I don't know. I mean, I'm excited. I'm rooting for Elon and, you know, what do I'm doing? Yeah, get rid of the bots and verify people, truly verify people. That's, you know, what I would risk for. Anyway, I mean, given that, you know, a number of us have been on the Open ID Foundation and have worked on identity standards. Scott, you know,

if you had to give him a specific directive, what form of identity verification would you recommend that he pursue. But that's like way above my pay grade. I mean, all I know is that, is that there's got to be something better than what they're doing. And I think to Rabel's point that he mentioned in the back channel, that bots are okay, but bots pretending to be people are not okay.

And I think that's an important distinction. And I think, you know, that's going back to the sort of root rob that you talk about is so critical. Now, how do you verify that? I mean, look, how do you make autonomous cars go? Okay, well, I can't tell you, but there are a lot of really smart people who work on that problem. Yeah. So we have another sleeper cell who's come into the conversation,

who many of us on the stage know and are quite familiar with. Kevin Marks, do you want to quickly introduce yourself? Tell us what you were doing back in the 2007-2008 time period, and then please join the conversation. Hi there. I'm not sure if the mic's working because my headset just switched off. Good. Okay. Well, back then, we were all trying to build distributing social networks and the different systems that we had there.

You know, I'd been working at Technoradi indexing blogs and so on, and 2007 I joined Google. What Technorati was, for those of us who, you know, weren't born. Well, back in the day, basically in Technoradi, was app replies for the web. What we did was we index blogs and told you one link to another. We were hooked into the blogging system

so that we got updates within a few seconds of the blogs being posted. We would index them then and then we ping the people who that posted link to. So effectively we were constructing outreplies for the web across different blogging systems. And we just, we did 2007, I left February 2007

and we just started crawling Twitter at that point. But then shortly after that technology, I sort of scaled back the crawling by about two orders of magnitude and stopped calling everything. But at that point, at that point, the idea was we'll crawl everything on the web and connect everyone up. And part of that effort was also,

we worked with Terms-Tech there and a bunch of people outside. We worked on a microformist as a way of marking up the web to say, This is what the meaning in the web is, and also this is how things are connected together. It's very important that I think people understand that effort and that initiative. So there were two parts of the microformats initiative. One was to kind of use the scientific method and to go and to explore and to document what already existed.

How were people marking up web pages? What were the types of objects that you find in a web page, like a recipe, for example, that you found in lots of blogs? and could you identify the specific metadata or actual data data in the page and add it to the way in which you created your HTML so that you can syndicate new types of content or experiences beyond just blog posts themselves. You could go much deeper and richer. Okay, continue. Right. That was simply like 10 or not have been pulling feeds and using what was around in RSS adding. And then we started going to web pages as well because the feeds were kind of Tumk A version of the posts.

And then the follow up and that was to try and define these structures and then define common ways of marketing up so we could pull those and get these rich data out, as you say, get recipes out and things like that. But get personal profiles, the actual structure of the post. Tags was a big one, which we did by linking with Relic was tag. And also the other part was the XFN project, which was. Yeah, yes, like the fend. Putting a bunch of

REL values on the links to say this link is actually at the free. This was, yeah, it's like, I want to make a point. The social graph back then was a type of graph structure. You know, the graph structure or the graph itself, the nodes, like were websites or web pages. Those web pages represented people.

And so I was link to you, Kevin, and say, well, equals friend. And if you linked back to my page and said, well, equals friend, that was a bi-directional link. that added an edge to that graph. And you could start to build that. That was the whole vision for the decentralized web was you had these open public nodes

that represented people, and they were cross-linking to each other, and that that was how we were going to build the federated social web. And then the other identity part of that was you were doing with Ray equals me to say this profile is also my microphone. Equivalencies.

Yeah. So the whole link in bio thing, like claim ID was a RealmMe provider. Yeah. But also, but the other thing is that all the sites sort of embrace this and build it in as well. The other part of that was that Twitter did have all these markup on it because the

engineers were like, yeah, we can have that. And Facebook had it and so on. And then the iteration of that was then we started working on sort of trying to converge those a bit more. And that was where we got into portable contacts with Joe and

activity streams, which was a sort of large group of business, that you were very involved with as well, which was trying to structure this stuff up. And then the other use of that was that at Google, Bradfisbeth, the crawler that would construct basically an API that crawl all these rail knee lengths and rail thread links and so on, and would feed that map for you. It's sort of hooked into the crawler to do that, which was a sort of a step beyond what we've done in technology because it was pulling a lot more of the web. So there was, yes.

There was a lot of effort in power now where we were all sort of putting in the same direction. So Ravel just brought this up in our back channel. He sort of pointed out how activity streams, you know, which was our effort to add more kind of information, more hints to an atom feed so that you could specify the actor and the verb and the object. So you could go beyond just blog posts. You could say, you know, Chris posted a photo or things like that, and then you could start to syndicate news feeds. That was the whole premise behind it, actually gave us activity pub. An activity pub now is part of Macedon.

So the things that we did start and were worked on, you know, way back in the day are still present and are still among us. And I think that's why it's so important for this group to be able to, you know, think about what worked, what didn't work. Why were we too early, frankly? And what lessons do we have to bring to what's going on now? Because like the world has changed, things around us has changed. but also there's about to be a big change, I think, you know, to this, to the Twitter platform

specifically. All right. So we've, we got a wrap soon. Dick, let's get you up here. And then maybe we'll do like a lightning round. I'll have to think about a question. Anyways, Dick, go for it. Well, I was going to go into your question around what should Elon do.

Yes. Keep going on that. Yeah. So verification is available now, right? They've opened it up again. But you got to meet some magic criteria that's not really clear what it is. I went and tried to verify my account, and I guess I'm just not special enough. So one of the things that I would say is, like, open up verification.

And building on the rel equals me, right, you know, we're not out there having to edit all the different links. It's fairly straightforward. You can link your LinkedIn account and your Twitter account, your Facebook account. Twitter could allow you to link a bunch of other accounts as part of that whole verification that these are all me. Or other people who know, this is really who, you know, this is Dick and all these different places. while I'm building upon the same rel.me technology. The other thing

that is... What's that? Mastodon already supports that. That is building to Mastodon there as well. Sure, but they don't have as many users, but you know, it's a distribution of that they have that.

Right. Yeah. It's confirmation of that being valuable. But they also need to open up the namespace. You know, there's all these handles have been squatted on and stuff like that, I think they need to clean that up because there's all these debt accounts that could be more useful and have a richer experience, you know,

that's sort of orthogonal to these other parts. And I also think they should lead the way on exporting, you know, reputation signals, right? That if you have been a good participant and haven't been banned or done anything bad on Twitter, that that's something that you can take out of Twitter and bring to other sites. Portable reputation never seemed to take off, though, for some reason, right? Which part?

Portable reputation. I mean, like, all the, if people go back and look at your 2006 talk on identity, you know, your iconic talk, you know, you talked a lot about the different facets of identity and about credentials. And so you could know something like an attribute about a person, or you could know who they are specifically, you know, unto themselves. And reputation or your behavior over time, your reputability, never became something that was portable. And that would have been like an amazing opportunity, I would think.

Yeah. And I think there's in my work with flow, I've been talking to a number of players that love this idea, particularly in some of the dynamic markets where anybody signing up for Airbnb is starting, they have a cold start, right? They're not able to bring any reputation, right? And that's a big challenge on how do you deal with abuse? And so myself, I think if we can have portable reputation of some kind, we can start to minimize some of the abuse. Are you working in that with Hello? And are you doing that with NFTs, if you are? Yes and no.

I mean, NFTs, I think, are going to evolve a bit. And so, you know, if you squint and think about where might the world be in three years, you know, you might be calling your reputation an NFT. So potentially that's the same thing. The other point that I want to made out is people are saying, like, well, we need to add verification. I do think we need to open up the verification because it helps prevent, you know, impersonation, identity theft and things like that. But verification clearly doesn't, you know, stop. Prevent bad actors.

Trump. Trump. You can be an accurate account and get verified. That was a verified account. And, you know, we'll be, we can all judge as to what kind of. what kind of actor that was. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I figured out the lightning round.

Actually, Ryan figured out the lightning round. We're going to wrap this up. Basically, your thoughts will Twitter be better or worse in two years? And I don't want a long answer just yes or no. Are you guys ready? Okay, guys are ready. Here we go. I'm going to go in the order that I see here.

That's not a yes, no question. You have to choose, Scott. You have to make a project. I'm starting with you. Yes or no? Wooder is better or worse? It'll be better. Okay, great. John? Better.

Great. Dick. Much better. Amazing. Do it. Better. Joseph. I think that'll be better. I've been optimist, though. Yeah, I know you are, so I expected that. Rabel?

I mean, if I had to choose one, I'm better, honestly. Ross? I'm an optimist, but I'd say worse. Okay. Okay. Great. You're also a contrarian. Kevin. I say worse.

I've extrapolating for the way it's been going. Okay. Ryan. Yeah, I was going to say. I'm shocked that everybody said better. I don't know that I expected everyone to say worse, but I thought it would be more mixed. And I would, I think worse. Okay.

Well, I am hoping that it's going to be better. And so I choose to believe that it will be better. And I think this group is a group of optimists. And I think we are people who built a lot of the foundations. of the social web because we are optimist and because we are not so pessimistic about humanity and how shitty it often is. And that's a whole different ballgame and different Twitter space that we're not going to get into now. So thank you, thank you everyone for being here for hanging out with us. Guys, thanks for getting back together, the old social web TV gang.

We will probably have you on for other conversations in the future. This was amazing. Love you all. And thanks to this will be on the tech meme right home podcast feed on Saturday. And I also want to thank all of you for coming on. And for so long, almost two hours. Thank you so much, everybody. You can get Monica next time as well. Okay. Totally.

All right, guys. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Brian. All right. Yeah. Bye, guys.