jr conlin's ink stained banana

John Battelle recently pondered:

But the question stayed with me – What is the essence of "the Web," or "The Internet"? Does Apple's approach to the world we've built together over these past 15 years qualify as part of the Web? i've argued in the past that it does not. But perhaps i'm being too dismissive. Perhaps, after 15 years of noise, and dirt, and half steps, perhaps we all really want the Web packaged and delivered to us in neat Apps, ready for consumption.

It's an interesting question, but one that's a bit too narrowly focused. In truth, Apple is merely trying to do the same thing that Facebook and AOL have tried to do. They want to be the Internet.

Not part of it, they want to be it.

Sure, they may use bits of it, and may even duplicate things that look a lot like stuff you see on the web, but ultimately, they don't want you anywhere near the web. They want you where they can control you, feed you what they want, when they want it. They want you dependent on them because that's where all your friends/peers/celebrities are. This may sound hyperbolic, but it pretty much lays out exactly the way things were before the web.

Consider the pre-web days of Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie and the like. The web was a dirty place you had to work at to get to. If you were lucky, you might have gotten a way to send an email to someone on another service, but again, you usually had to work at it. That's because you were worth more to them playing in their sandboxes than you were playing somewhere else (even when you were ponying up bucks to use them).

It's still true today. Facebook doesn't want you wandering off, so they've either duplicated things you might want elsewhere or made it so that the only place you can get things is on their service. That's not how the web is supposed to work, and is a huge step backwards. Thing is, most folks don't care. i've said that i consider Facebook a "roach motel of information". Stuff goes in easily, but never comes out. Open Graph is merely taking that one more step, and i have no doubt what-so-ever that it's Facebook's goal to sweeten "search" results with folks that swallowed the blue pill. (It does mean that search results are going to be heavily gamed in facebook by commercial interests rather than academic ones, but that's not important to facebook.)

i'm fairly sure Apple is playing a similar game, only their's is App based. Apps, that only run on their OS on their devices, under their strict control. They introduce things that work in that world alone and discourage you from going elsewhere. (Heck, a great example is the fact that the only supported emulator for iPhone developers only runs on Apple equipment. It's not possible to release a VM image folks could use?)

i'm also fairly certain that any company that reaches a particular level of user engagement will pull the same sort of crap. Google has to a certain extent with the development of Docs, Base, and similar things, but i will admit they're being a bit better than many in also allowing you to take your data and leave.

Ultimately, the web is open, and as such, can't do things like cut off facebook or other groups that don't want to play fair. That's not what the web is. Still, it's the open web's responsibility to do the same thing that it did when folks were using Prodigy, GEnie and Compuserve. Make the open web so much more compelling than what's available in the closed web.

Right now, we're not doing a really good job of it.

We need to fix that.