New Paradigm Emerging

Steve Gillmor’s latest show Newsgang Live has two conversations going on. One is the presidential race, in particular the rise of Barack Obama, and the other revolves around what Bruce Lerner observes is the growing pervasiveness of “propellorhead technology” as it stretches into the mainstream.

This is not just “Web 2.0″ gaining wider acceptance, as one might be tempted to characterize it.

The platforms have emerged already, Steve contends, though they might still be in their infancy and subject to maturation. These platforms are RSS, Twitter, Facebook , iPhone and the like. They are all disruptive in their own way because they become part of our DNA.

Like the web before them, it becomes difficult to imagine how we would cope without the tools, despite the ironical fashion in which they simultaneously cause our overload.

But the emerging concept of a unified web identity(e.g. OpenID and inames) coupled with the Web OS (e.g. Silverlight, Ajax, Google Office) and the looming VRM revolution, leads one to believe that the coming years will be more innovative than even Cluetrain imagined.

If it sounds a bit nebulous, well, that makes sense. I think it’s no accident that the concepts of non-particular Social Change and non-particular Social Technology have intersected so beautifully in the Newsgang Live episodes. In fact, one has to wonder if Gillmor knew exactly what he was doing.

Obama is just a symbol of the emerging desires of a nation. Twitter is the web corollary.

It fulfilled the blogosphere’s desire for an central identity system. We just couldn’t wait for protocols and open-standards to catch up with what we needed now.

What’s missing is the decentralization that we love and still sorely want. That’s why the periodic downtime of Twitter causes the Blogosphere to erupt with negative passion. The same thing happens in the enterprise when the Exchange server goes down. It’s just unacceptable.

Dave Winer wants a backup. The XMPP advocates claim that they’ve had the system in place for years, but Jabber has never produced a (really popular) way to manage the social system beyond IM buddies, which tend to be more personal contacts than Bloggers or Twitter friends.

We need to have a “squelch,” or else we’d all still be using Usenet or email lists, which both still maintain active users. Before that, there was Ham Radio.

Perhaps more importantly, we need unity across all these wonderful services.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to envision unified communication. Achieving it has been more elusive.

One of the more interesting projects I’ve come across is Social.IM. Yanda Erlich gave a nice description of where the service wants to go on a recent Newgang Live. Of particular importance is the desire for Social.IM to work across other social networks, not only Facebook, which is now the case.

In that way, it’s similar to the aspirations for the humble designs of Gangbuster. Abstract out the services we love into one unified client, not to replace them, to but to increase their pervasiveness.

For a service to do this, it needs to be open source, to eliminate silo lock-in, as well as retain a carbon-copy of our gestures and “prosumption,” a term Doc Searl’s came up with to identify the fact that we produce and consume. It is the very nature of the web.

The need for open source is two-fold. One, that we might never lose our data, which becomes our real identity. Two, is to eliminate our reliance on any one service, in the case that it is down, or changes it’s nature in ways we did not anticipate(e.g. Google reader).

I may have recently coined a term (at least Google implies that), when I implied to Steve that the “cloudosphere” is the one service we really want. And every service needs a client.

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