Web woes?
Social networks such as Facebook have come under fire from the inventor of the worldwide web, Tim Berners-Lee who is concerned they are limiting the web's openness.
In a hefty piece for the Scientific American called Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality, Berners-Lee has gone all ideological and idealistic in time for the web's 20th anniversary.
"The web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles," he wrote.
However, he also warned that the web's very democracy is being challenged by some of its most successful and prominent players seeking to control the flow of information and he laid particular blame on social networks.
He said Facebook, Friendster and LinkedIn offer value by capturing their users' information like their friends and birthday and then they "assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service-but only within their sites."
"Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site's pages are on the web, but your data are not. You can access a web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site," he said.
"Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform-a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space," Berners-Lee added.
He also warned of one social networking site, search engine or browser becoming too dominant and getting a monopoly which could limit innovation and threw his weight behind grassroots firms to maintain the balance against giants that seek to ‘undermine universality'.
Berners-Lee's warning comes at a time where Facebook and Google are scrapping over sharing Gmail user data and the social network is reportedly under pressure to lets others use its social graph. However his scorn is not limited to websites themselves, attacking cable companies that limit internet users' choice in the content they download as well as ISPs that manage internet traffic.
