Parker Writesand stuff

I spent the better part of the day today reading/watching/thinking about stuff by the ever-awesome Merlin Mann. If you’re a fan of his work, you’ll see where I’m coming from when I say that I decided that I had better do something generative and fulfilling before the day ends, so here I am at 3am scribbling some half-baked thoughts in to my browser window.

Because I’m interested in playing an active role in creating an awesome college experience for myself, I often think back to my idealistic 12th-grade vision of my future small-school liberal arts education. Probably the biggest part of that vision was intellectually stimulating late-night conversations in dormitory hallways.

And recently, especially tonight, I’m thinking that I don’t just want to have “intellectually stimulating” conversations with my peers; I want to read words and watch lectures by people who have/had really great ideas about morality and creativity and personal fulfillment and everything else that is inspiring and potentially life-changing. Then, I want people—students, profs, both—to hold my feet to the fire and say this to me:

You’ve encountered this inspiring idea, and you’ve taken some time to reflect on it alone or through conversation. Armed with this new knowledge, how are you going to live your life differently starting right now?

Then I want them to hold me to it. I want them to check in with me and to give me unsolicited feedback when I’m talking the talk without walking the walk (or worse, ceasing to talk the talk when I realize how hard it is to walk the walk). I want them to encourage me to write on my blog about my personal goals and convictions so that they are fully articulated and I am publicly accountable.

Then I want to do the same for my peers. I want to be surrounded by purposeful personal growth.

This is in response to Tim O’Reilly’s piece on the O’Reilly Radar: My Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy. O’Reilly’s thesis is simple:

The essence of my argument is that there’s enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be exploring the boundary conditions

In his essay it quickly becomes clear that O’Reilly presupposes that the only/best way to provide web services is through centralized servers owned and operated by private (and probably large) companies. I think that this is really super extremely wrong.

O’Reilly writes, “We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone.” But you could imagine a service where you hosted all of the map code and data on your own computer—maybe a machine sitting under your bed at home, or maybe your cellphone itself (hey, they’re getting faster and faster). This mapping software gains no benefit from any sort of network—it’s purely Software as a Service (SaaS).

Of course, the network service doesn’t have to be SaaS to benefit from thinking outside the box of centralization. This is what Diaspora* and a few other projects are hoping to prove. If the network is decentralized, you don’t have one primary party that can access all of the data, so you have more privacy. See also email, where your messages go directly to the email provider of the person receiving them. Sure, we can all choose to give up on the decentralized internet and use gmail (guilty), but if we decide that we really care about controlling who sees our messages, we can still choose to host our own mailservers (plus there’s always end-to-end encryption). No one person is controlling this information flow—we just agreed on a protocol and then moved on.

I don’t doubt that there are some examples of services where the very nature of the service means that information from a huge number of people makes it better, and thus some amount of centralization (or at least reporting back to mother ship) makes sense. Recommendation engines, especially ones that use machine learning algorithms, are a clear example (think Pandora, Grooveshark, Netflix). However, this class of services is only one slice of the social web, and facebook does not lie within this slice.