Among all the current trends that are presently shaping the future of the Internet – the copyright revolution, the redefinition of cybercriminality, the dilemma of privacy on social networks, to name a few- there is one that has been underestimated and should be thoroughly reconsidered: the revolution of content. The ongoing euphoria towards social networks (Mark Zuckerberg has just become Time Magazine’s 2010 Man Of The Year) and the recent global trauma caused by Cablegate have played against the exposure of other major trends of New Media that really deserves equal attention.

The revolution of content is clearly one of those.

There is much to say about it but the case of Google speaks volume about the discomfort and concern characterizing the debate about how mass info is and will be apprehended by the system.

The One Trillionth Page Syndrom: When Quantity Prevails Over Quality

In 2008, Google announced it had indexed its one-trillionth page, and that was not going to stop. The new record indexation was presented as a positive evolution, the rationale behind it being that each new page indexed was a new step towards progress . However, though they presented the indexation of their trillionth page as a success, Google engineers themselves realized how monstrous the web had become.

In fact, in its blog, the web search giant claimed its engineers “stopped in awe” when they realized how big the web had become, after the index hit the trillion mark, with the web growing by several billion every day.

« This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States,” Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj wrote in the blog.

Going a step further, the same engineers also recognized that the number of pages they had indexed and keep indexing is probably not the best yardstick by which the progress of the Internet should be measured. The idea is quite simple: indexing new pages does not reflect any improvement since that is an intrinsic characteristic of the system where pages- with no regard to the quality of their content- add up mechanically.

« So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don’t know; we don’t have time to look at them all. Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite — for example, web calendars may have a “next day” link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a new page. »

So, why has Google boasted about that indexation if among the best engineers working for the company, some overtly expressed their concern about it claiming the link between quality and quantity was not proven at all? As Vinton Gray Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet and the inventor of the  TCP/IP Protocal put it once in a famous metaphore, the good news about the Internet is that “the kid is growing” and the bad news about the Internet is that the “kid is growing”.

At the same time that the Internet grows, it Achilles’ Heel gets more exposed too. Therefore, the fact that the Internet is growing is neither good news, nor bad news. That’s purely factual. But what is inauspicious is to realize that the creator has lost control over its creature and that is threatening quality on the web.

“Ninety-five percent of the universe is stuff we don’t understand,” Cerf told WebProNews anchor Abby Prince Johnson.

Is the dice cast? Has the breakpoint been reached already or is it still possible to regain control on content?

To answer this question, the study of how access to music (songs and tunes being the content) has evolved since the far-west style of the democratization of the access shed some light and should certainly be set as an example of what should be done in the future to perpetuate good content and avoid poor ones in other fields.

How Music Content Has Survived The Napster Era:  learning from our mistakes.

I remember the 1998-2002 period when, at that time, the big thing for teenangers and more generally Internet users was the possibility through peer-to-peer opportunities and pirate interfaces to download tons  of music for free. I was impressed.

That was a revolution. It seemed like a new era of freedom had started. Music choices would never be burdenned by economic constraints anymore. I fully took advantage of it, and so did everyone around me.

However, what first seemed to be an incredible step further for the democratization of arts & cultures soon became a nightmare for the music lover I had always been. People would see music quantitatively.  A sentence I still remember hearing over and over again was: “how many tunes do you have?” or “how many weeks of music do you have?” That was the idea, the more music you had the cooler you were.

It didn’t  matter if you could realistically think of  hearing all that music in your lifetime. It didn’t matter if you could list all the music you had. All that mattered was “how many”. And what had to happen just happened.

After a few months,  people around me started to have wild music libraries with hundreds of thousands of untamed playlists . A non-negligible portion of those tunes had not been properly downloaded and became amputated songs. Another significant number of those were untitled or just labeled “song 1”, “title 7”.

Not to mention the poor-quality of almost all the songs, due to the alteration caused by peer-to-peer liaisons. What is more, it was not surprising to find in one’s own library unknown songs that had nonetheless been downloaded.

This era of disillusioned freedom should have given the alert to a system where quantity and easy access started to prevail over quality and selectivity. Artists were not powerful enough to have the tide reversed but collectively, with the help of their majors, they started the change.  Governments followed suit.

Through huge media campaigns and legal packages, it indeed started to change. People realized how detrimental to music incommensurate and illegal downloading could be, and eventually came to the idea that having all the music one wants in a legal framework provided the payment of a small fee had, at least, three major positive consequences: first, it would protect the music industry which, in turn would keep producing talents; second, the downloaded music would be of high-quality and third, it would force them to really select what they really want.

First-In First-Out, The music industry was definitely the very first place where content were threatened and then rescued.

Offering someone free water at home for one’s lifetime should not be an incentive to leave the tap open 24/7. Free water doesn’t mean drinking water and people should underdstand that it is always better to pay a small charge for clean and drinking water rathen than have it for free at any quality.

Especially Google’s Street View has attracted criticism and caused headlines such as “Google’s also Watching when You’re Skinny Dipping” and “Google Knows More about Us than the KGB, Stasi or Gestapo.”

But what is it about Europe’s biggest economy that makes it particularly skeptical about online privacy?

“In Germany, the individual right for privacy has always been valued greatly because of the experiences with the Third Reich and the former DDR,” explains Christoph Schepers who is external lecturer in German culture and communications at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark.

According to Schepers, the political system in Germany is largely structured to secure the rights of the citizens, “If citizens believe that their civil rights are being violated they can easily complain to the constitutional court,” he says.

“Likewise, if citizens’ privacy appears threatened, NGOs or the political opposition will likely take the matter to court,” he says.

Although Google agreed to blur faces, house numbers and license plates before taking pictures, Street View is largely considered an invasion of privacy, as many Germans oppose having their homes photographed without permission.

After accusations of being too passive the German government is now pushing for a higher level of data protection, which could mean stricter rules for collection of user data and forcing companies to delete individual information upon request from citizens.

However, critics question whether the proposal is going far enough. The question remains just how far “enough” is and how the government will meet the demands of citizens while avoiding a reputation of limiting online businesses.

Kept under wraps until today (the release of their beta version), Rockmelt is a Mountain View start-up that Andreesen invested in and advises. The idea is that it is built entirely around social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, making a more social browser.

According to the RockMelt blog:

RockMelt does more than just navigate Web pages. It makes it easy for you to do the things you do every single day on the Web: share and keep up with your friends, stay up-to-date on news and information, and search. And of course, RockMelt is fast, secure, and stable because it’s built on Chromium, the open source project behind Google’s Chrome browser. It’s your browser – re-imagined and built for how you use the Web.

After poking around a bit, it seems that the browser looks and feels similar to that of Chrome, which makes sense since Google’s model is their foundation (it even has the Incognito mode). Along the edges of the browser are your Facebook friends and Twitter and RSS feeds, allowing you to chat, message, or check status updates regardless of what site you’re currently on. These are updated in the background and utilize a “push notifications” function that informs you of the messages and updates that are piling up back there. The browser utilizes the company’s cloud service to provide the feed pushing, allowing for faster updates and surfing. Basically, if you’re familiar with these social networking sites, it seems pretty easy to understand and use.

[YOUTUBE] RockMelt: Your browser. Re-imagined.

In addition to being a sharing and networking platform, Rockmelt boasts of its improved ease and speedy search capabilities, its ability to personalize and back up information by the Cloud system (it’s the first browser you log into, unlocking your personal world at any computer you use), and it’s “rock solid” foundation, being built on at a secure and stable core.

You can sign up for your beta version, follow them on Twitter or like them on Facebook.

Besides the wild beauty of antique Habana, the marvellous white-sand beaches of Cayo Largo, the static colonial touch of Trinidad and the “revolucion” spirit surrounding Cienfuegos, « el pueblo recolucionario », what strikes you when you travel in the largest island of the Caribbean is the almost total absence of the internet.

No matter where you are in Cuba -in a provincial pueblo or in Downtown Habana- looking for a decent Internet connexion is as difficult as looking for a 54 Ford in New York City.

However, if you wake up early and pull yourself together, you may find a place where they “offer” Internet access. When you’re a tourist, you can go to hotels. Not all of them have those services but some do.

Now, what happens when you find the right place and want to get started ?   Like any other usual western tourist, you want to quickly check your e-mails, send a sweet message for a friend’s birthday, update your facebook status to “Having so much fun in Cuba!” and, just in case, have a look to the details of your return flight.

Could you reasonably do that? Well, unless you have ten hours to spend there and a lot of money to lavish, you won’t be able to do that.  Connections are so slow, and the Internet costs you $8 an hour.

With no exaggeration, I’d say that you’d use a quarter of that hour to open gmail, another quarter to write and send ¾ e-mails. With the remaining half-hour, if it’s your day of luck and the connection does not crash all of a sudden, you may open the New York Times and probably read two articles before the final countdown appearing on the bottom-right corner of your screen kindly lets you know you have 59 seconds left to skim through your third article.

An hour had passed, $8 gone, and you only did what you normally do in 10 minutes. Stay calm and keep walking. You’re in Cuba.

That being said, my trip to Cuba was an amazing opportunity to compare the two systems – the Free West and The Tropical Communism- through the prism of Digital Age, Web 2.0 and Social Networks.

It is so different and so similar at the same time.

Social networks perfectly function in Cuba, only they do not happen on the Internet. The best example I can come up with relates to finding places where to stay when my friend and I would arrive in new cities. In New York City, Paris or London, you do things on the net, you book and tell your cab the address before showing the hotel receptionist your e-booking reservation. And if you want to go further, you go to some travel forums beforehand to ask for advice or ask your friends whether they know of someone able to put you up.

In Cuba, it’s different, but as efficient.

You talk to the first guy you meet on the street about the best way to find a place to stay (think of a forum on the net), and that guy send you to another person who knows somebody who has a “casa particular” (think of links that redirect you to the right person).

If the casa is free, you just stay there, if not, the owner of the casa (who you added as friend…ring a bell?) would call all his friends (think of creating an event on facebook) until someone has a free room for you (it works like craigslist).

Well, some would say you have to give those guys propinas (tips), but is the Internet connection your use from your Manhattan home free for you?

Some others would contend that the guy you ask for the room may take advantage of the situation and try to sell you postcards of the Che or fake cigars, but aren’t you all the time exposed to adds and scams on the Internet?

I know my point here is debatable, but I sincerely never had the impression that Cubans were missing a lot of things because they could not really access the Internet.

The capacity human beings have to adapt to any context is formidable. The famous example when it comes to Cuba relates to their cars: how can these guys still manage to have 70-year-old cars still function? Well, when you know that you can’t have a new one, you find a way to make the old one works…

The same applies to social networks. They make do with what they have, their tactility, smartness and resourcefulness.

Cubans are much more than poor victims of a repressive and dictatorial regime, they are some sort of pre-modernity geniuses who always find their find through resourcefulness, smartness and tactility.

Are you overwhelmed by the tons of information that are now available to us? Are you tired of reading from different sources? Don’t worry: Qwiki is here.

Qwiki is a new way to receive information through the Internet. As Google or Wikipedia, you can introduce any search you want, and you will surely find an answer. The difference with those is that, instead of receiving thousands of links to the websites including your search as it is the case of Google, or a written explanation of your search as it gives you Wikipedia, Qwiki will offer you an “information experience”.

What does it mean? It means that information becomes an experience that I can hear and watch. Qwiki selects data sets from different sources such as Google, Wikipedia, Googlemaps or blogs, and creates a summary of facts that is presented to the user in a friendly and attractive way. As in a TV documentary, you will be able to learn about everything by watching a selection of images, maps, and graphs while a nice voice will explain you the facts of your search.

You can do a search about a city, a historical fact, a concept, a celebrity or even about yourself. Qwiki will automatically gather and organize the most relevant and available data sets and will bring back to you as a short film.

Moreover, Qwiki can wake you up and tell you everything you need to know about yourself and your life in the mornings. A friendly voice will tell you: “Good morning Marta. Today is a sunny day in New York City. The current weather is 70 degrees and it is not expected to change during the day. Don’t forget that you have a call conference at 11AM with Professor Hammer and you will meet your boyfriend for lunch at Columbus Circle”.

If you don’t believe me, take a look to this video:

Google said in its press release they expect to foster the democratic values among nations different from the US through this donation. For me, this is more a naive wish than a realistic objective of the relatively small donation to innovative, entrepreneurial journos.

Making a very quick and informal analysis of the state of the democracies around the world, we can realize that the challenges they face are enormous, and the benefits of innovative journalism in some of them is rather marginal. Let’s make no mistake, the role of a free press is vital for a functional democracy, it serves as government’s watchdog, and helps engage citizenship in important decision making processes withing the nations. However, journalism is also usually one of the most affected sectors when democratic normality is disrupted in a country.

Let’s think about Latin America. According to Transparency International, the most corrupt and less democratic countries in the region are Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, Ecuador and Paraguay.

What can Google do to fight Fidel and Raul Castro’s totalitarian regime? Can Google, or an army of innovative journalists bring change in Venezuela? Something that the local media moguls haven’t been able to do? What is the power of digital media in the recovery of Haiti, who is facing a cholera epidemic right now, after the earthquake? Will Ecuador be a more stable democracy with a strong press? Ecuatorians have had 10 presidents in the las 12 years.

It is my opinion that democracy is one thing, development is other, and a healthy free press is other, and although the are highly interconnected, it is impossible to foster democracy and bring development by solely supporting the media. Media objective should be first and foremost to inform people, to bring accurate and reliable information to the public.

If we start adding roles to the media, sooner than later we will disappointed of its results.

Back in August the consulting firm Accenture released findings of an Open Source Software Report they conducted with 300 public and private firms in the US, UK and Ireland. Their conclusions weren’t necessarily surprising to those who’ve been involved in Open Source over the years:

• 50% of respondents are fully committed to open source
• 65% say they have documented strategy for implementing open source while the other third say they’re working on it
• 78% cite quality of the software as a key driver
• 71% say reliability is a a key factor
• 70% say security is a key factor

All this is well and good. It demonstrates that companies and organizations are finally recognizing the advantages of Open Source Software and, more importantly, are growing comfortable enough with it to adopt Open Source solutions for mission critical endeavors.

This ranges from the Obama administration using Drupal for the White House Web site, to Brazil’s adoption of Linux and OpenOffice across governmental agencies.

Better, the Open Source ethos of transparency, peer production and collaboration has made its way outside of the software world and into industries of all sorts. As I outline in the presentation above, organizations such as the Tropical Disease Initiative, Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative and the Institute for OneWorld Health are bringing Open Source techniques to biological and biomedical research.

Architecture for Humanity, an 11-year-old organization focussing the skills of architects and designers on humanitarian issues, has also embraced an open model. Countless other examples of peer production and open sharing now exist.

Oddly — or perhaps not considering America’s schizophrenic relationship with copyright — as Open Source increasingly moves into the mainstream an oppositional movement is forming against it. As the Guardian and others noted in February 2010, “an influential lobby group is asking the US government to basically consider open source as the equivalent of piracy – or even worse.”

It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software.

What’s Special 301? It’s a report that examines the “adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights” around the planet – effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism.

Yes, Open Source is disruptive to proprietary models and there are those that will dismiss and demean it. And when that doesn’t work, they will fight it. In another context, Chris Anderson famously equated Microsoft’s reaction to the Open Source Linux Operating System with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

Even those supporting Open Source find time to fight each other. In August, Oracle sued Google over Google’s use of Java in the Service Development Kit for its Open Source Android Operating System. This one’s a bit of a head scratcher as Java itself is an Open Source programming language licensed under the GNU General Public License.

A higher resolution video of the presentation above can be downloaded below. I also recommend visiting Focus and viewing the Open Source “poster” they’ve put together. It gives a great overview of the history and industries Open Source Software is affecting.

Download this Screencast

• Ethos of Open Source: Resolution: 720×450. Size: 112 MB. Format: QuickTime.
• Ethos of Open Source: Size: 17 MB. Format: PDF.

No other expression best applies to what happened to me while I was  reading one of this week’s class readings: Social Media Can Open Door to Philantropy’s Future, by Larry Blumenthal.

In his Op-Ed, Larry Blumenthal describes a workshop he led for staff from a variety of foundations to convince them that there were no such thing as Social Media. To him, engaging with Social media is tantamount to fostering collaboration, openness, transparency, timeliness, sharing work in progress, embracing and learning from failure. In this respect, the author believes, any person claiming that Social Media does not seem relevant to his or her work is–to say the least– totally wrong!

Little by little, Blumenthal’s arguments started to convince me…I was seduced. Actually, I believe i wanted to be convinced.

Such an easy thing:all I had to do was to  keep reading his piece to the end and say to myself “He is so right! I should not be concerned anymore with spending hours a day on facebook/twitter/flickr and youtube while studying at the same time, that is actually good for me! This is a better way to stay informed! This is a tool that can help me do what I am already doing, only more effectively”

But that couldn’t unfold this way and that is exactly what happened: It didn’t unfold this way…Just like rain brought itself to a week-end that had started with the sun, my friend Yoel’s message had to distract my attention from Blumenthal’s mess.And not in a insignificant way.

I open Yoel message. It was entitled “Reda, you’ll love that!”. Let’s have a look at the message’s body. Nothing but a link.

Ok, I click on the link. “The Top Ten Ways Workers Waste Time Online”. Funny coincidence, isn’t it?

I scroll down and discover a list of ten things allegedly making people waste time online and lose productivity, especially when they are working. All that Blulmenthal’s Social Media Improvement Thing was supposed to avoid.

The website looks really serious.After quickly scrolling down to have a general sense of what that page was all about, I started to read it from the beginning. The verdict just killed my enthusiasm:

Number 1: Social Networks – 1.24 hr/week

“Social networking has come to dominate Internet use.  Nucleus Research, an IT research firm, found that 77% of employees who have access to Facebook from work check it at least once a day.  Of course, other large and fast-growing social media sites such as Twitter also contribute to the loss in productivity.”

It’s amazing what can happen nowadays within a 24 hour span. For example, a rumor could be launched that Facebook is developing its own mobile phone (causing an uproar among the Internet world), that rumor could be quickly countered by official Facebook representatives (resulting in some mass-Tweeting & reblogging), and Facebook’s denial could be harshly scrutinized by many (via blogs, Tweets, & somewhat funnily, Facebook statuses).

The original rumor stated that Facebook was working on its own phone. Now, no one is thinking that Facebook is actually building the hardwares of a phone. More than likely, they are pulling a Google and outsourcing the hardware manufacturing as they work on creating an operating system. A “Facebook phone” would deeply integrate and sync contacts as well as allow full access to the Website’s features (which the iPhone app does not offer).

After this news leaked, Facebook released its only public statement to Mashable, claiming that they are “not building a phone” but that current projects do include “everything from an HTML5 version of the site to apps on major platforms to full Connect support with SDKs to deeper integrations with some manufacturers.”

All is fine, but it’s that last piece — “deeper integrations” — that have people still buzzing. Some claim that Facebook’s denial is just a spin and that they are still working on a phone; others are trying to speculate other possibilities.

Without jumping too far ahead, let’s lay down some facts:

• The developers working on Facebook’s mobile projects include the chief architects of Firefox and creator of the Facebook iPhone app, Joe Hewitt, and the chief architect of Google’s Chrome OS, Matthew Papakipos. Are they really just working on some bonus features for the iPhone? Seems unlikely but hey, we never know.
• Facebook currently lacks a successful revenue model and are searching for a way to capitalize on their audience beyond the ad platform.
• Facebook’s statement was that they are not building a phone. Again, no one thinks that Facebook has any manufacturing plants.
• Google used the same denial just before they released the Nexus One.
• But this Facebook phone fiasco and the Google incident are two different situations.
• Facebook is working more closely with existing platforms — Mashable suggested a “mobile initiative that integrates social contacts and ads based on used data…This platform could operate inside Android and iPhone apps.”
• CNET claims that Facebook has “reached out to hardware manufacturers and carriers seeking input on a potential Facebook-branded phone.” Hm.

So what is Facebook doing? And what does this mean for the trajectory of technology? What about privacy?

Let’s hope they’re not creating their own branded phone. Regardless of whether they are or are not, and despite the “likes” and dislikes of having such device, we would think that they would have learned from Google’s phone flop, right?

Pawns via Creative Commons/Flickr.

“It’s overwhelming, fantastic, and like all technological marvels,” says Damon Horowitz, “just a little bit amusing.”

Just a week ago Google bought Horowitz’s social search start-up Aardvark for a reported $50 million. The price is one the company co-founder will neither confirm nor deny. What he will allude to though is that now that they’re under the Google umbrella, Aardvark-style “social search” will attempt to integrate across the company’s ever expanding offerings.

If you’re familiar with Aardvark let your imagination run for a moment and consider how the platform can turbo-boost Google Buzz which was also, and perhaps serendipitously, released last week.

If you’re not familiar with Aardvark — and since it only launched a public beta last October, there’s no reason you should be — a basic primer runs something like this.

Aarvark is a free service that lets those of us puzzled about life’s quandaries ask our social network for answers to our questions. These range from the mundane, “Anyone have a tailor they trust to alter suits near the 1 line in Manhattan?,” to the possibly profound, “How would you figure out how many cats there are in the US that are named Gary?”

More often than not, a response comes within a few minutes.

“We think of Aardvark like a contact who should be available everywhere, through your existing communication channels,” says Horowitz.

Limits of AI

Damon Horowitz explains Artificial Intelligence’s inherent limits and how humans and machines can play nice together — TEDx SoMa 2010.

Questions can be asked through Vark.com, mobile apps, email or instant messenger and the beauty of it all is that responses are contextual. Answers are, after all, coming from people within your social graph. The benefit of social search is the human touch, real responses from real people.

“Aardvark is great when you want to get an answer from a person right away, and you don’t want to try to hunt through a bunch of web pages yourself,” Horowitz explains. “Often we don’t want static information from the web, but a personal answer to our specific question — we want someone to hear our question, understand our context, and share their relevant experience.”

By connecting into existing social circles such as those we have via Facebook and Twitter, Aardvark scans our social graph for those who have similar backgrounds, sensibilities and interests. Send Aardvark a question and the service surveys our first circle of connections and then friends of friends.

Like Twitter, Aardvark should be thought of as a utility rather than a Web application or destination site. Whether it’s Aardvark that succeeds or another company like it, giving people the ability to leverage their social graph to intelligently ask and answer questions across any connected device will increasingly become part of the Internet’s plumbing.

Aardvark’s leveraging of the vast amounts of social, geographic and overall data sloshing through the Web and reconstructing it into a useful utility demonstrates an overall shift in the Internet’s evolution. There’s even a name being promoted to describe the trend. It’s called the Synaptic Web.

In His Own Words

Khris Loux explains the Synaptic Web at the Defrag Conference 2009.

“The Synaptic Web is a set of observations about how the Web is forming,” says Khris Loux, CEO of Echo and proponent of the concept. “As the speed, flexibility and complexity of connections on the Web increase exponentially, the Internet is increasingly beginning to resemble a biological analog; the human brain.”

The metaphor here is that all our information and actions are pings firing across the Internet much like synapses firing in a brain. A single ping doesn’t do much in an of itself but multiply to scale with the billions and billions of social actions people are committing online and you have the beginnings of a pulsating, thinking ecosystem.

Microsoft’s Photosynth is a Synaptic Web example, says Loux. By taking the discrete photos taken by the crowd, combining them with geographic data and mixing them through — and analyzing them with — very smart code, whole new images and ways to explore spaces are created.

“Photosynth,” Loux explains, “is clear proof that patterns exist and meaning can be discerned without the need for active coordination between users.”

What he’s talking about is a meta-web, a place that isn’t so much sites and HTML pages but instead human connections augmented by the machine.

Horowitz has worked on these problems for a while now. His background is in Artificial Intelligence and philosophy. What he concluded though is that trying to get the machine to think and act like a human is a bit of a fool’s errand. Instead, we should be harnessing the machine to increase connections between people and leverage human intelligence.

“Machines do well at processing large quantities of information — they are great at fast indexing, numerical analysis, pattern recognition and such,” says Horowitz. “Humans deal well with context — they are naturally adept at understanding other humans, at sharing subjective experiences, thinking through ideas, and helping each other out.

When the Web was born some twenty years ago, it was a publishing mechanism. If you learned some HTML you could put up a page and broadcast your thoughts. Everyone became a publisher.

When the Web was reborn as Web 2.0, everyone became a commentator. The read/write Web has been a participatory experience. You write, I comment. You post, we share.

Facebook built an empire on this read/write model and while it and Twitter are now part of social media vernacular, Aardvark — despite its aquisition by Google — is still under the radar.

This is a shame. Where else can you get answers to life’s questions in under five minutes, a claim Aardvark legitimately makes.

“I know this ‘we sit on top of all your other social information online’ approach isn’t yet a fully established paradigm,” Horowitz says, “but I think everything is moving that way.”

The change is tectonic and while tectonic change comes imperceptibly at first, Internet time moves quite fast. Five years ago seems ancient in the Web world, just as five years from now 2010 will appear quite quaint.

About Aardvark and the Synaptic Web

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.