Listening to Anil Dash only serves to affirm my thoughts on how powerful the web and the control the major sites have on people's lives.
It appears the main issue is the internet becoming an economic marketplace.
Links to pages have moved from being 'of interest' to 'of something that will make the linking page page money'. True, personal pages still have the apparent sharing of interesting pages, yet many of those pages have come to the attention of computer users through promotional placement on sites that sell screen space for advertisements.
Start up companies have become businesses that often look to be bought out when they achieve 'enough' success, with 'enough' being the number of figures needed on the cheque to buy the company/application/etc. The issue then becomes what happens to the users' data that was on that company's website. Anil Dash gives the example of wedding photos being lost - unique memories being deleted at the signing off of a company and the sending of a warning email. Personally, if FaceBook was to shutdown tomorrow, I would still have all my photographs... but I wouldn't have all my friends' photos, and I wouldn't have all my photographs ordered into nicely labelled albums with tags, dates and places. We trust the monopolizing internet companies and with this trust they have great power and influence over our internet and real lives!
Ultimately though, we, the users of the internet, will let them manipulate our lives like a spider lures a fly into its web. My FaceBook has changed its layout multiple times over the last six months... sometimes I complain, but only with muttering under my breath and not with an email to a FaceBook admin. Fortunately, I'm happy to report that now my FaceBook has a fantastic look - tabs to the side and a full list of those available to chat when I zoom the screen out a bit; although this is apparently not universal - another interesting fact that internet users do not have a universal experience. Other web pages have become streams too, unlike the initial page design of the social web. Yet, I would argue that this is not an issue for just the internet - it is typical of anything that has become monopolized by or popularized through only a few main institutions. With the majority of sites now becoming streams, including this set of blog posts you now see, there becomes familiarity for users - I haven't read an instruction manual, but I know menu pages are at the top or to the side, whilst the main content is a handy scroll through. The stream has become popular because of the internet becoming a constantly updated, constantly looked at system and people want to be able to access a lot of information quickly.
Yes, Anil Dash raises many interesting points. However, many technology-aware people probably already have an idea of these points.Is there going to be a revolution?
Maybe.
We may grumble when GMail asks you to sign up to Google+, or YouTube blocks your video from showing in a country (it's always Germany) because of the music you added...
Yet, ultimately we will all continue to use the internet.
