Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson's quest for personal liberation. The inventor's hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.
Group items tagged
The Curse of Xanadu - 0 views
Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up - 0 views
-
Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you're sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can't see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.
-
Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple's iPod.
-
This is exactly why I have always been reluctant to use Facebook. It´s the same reason I don´t have an ipod. I cannot stand the thought that my content or media will be confined to one place. It seems Facebook starts closed and is slowly opening, whereas this article suggests starting open and then slowly closing might be better (perhaps not closing at all). The one thing Facebook has been successful with is getting people to use it. However, I submit there is something wrong when it´s most discerning users still are not comfortable with it.
-
-
We would like to place an open call to the web-programming community to solve this problem. We need a new framework based on open standards. Think of it as a structure that links individual sites and makes explicit social relationships, a way of defining micro social networks within the larger network of the web.
-
This is very similar to the ideas I have been having about what the quorum online would look like. All of these services suffer the fate of trying to be the end-all service. The one and only greatest. This is fragmenting us and keeping us from meeting up online. I want to collaborate with people but it seems like most of the time I first have to convince them to use the tool/service I am using to collaborate with, or I have to submit and use theirs. Our conversations can´t even begin until we´ve hashed out these meta-conversations (conversations about how best to have conversations). It all becomes incredibly taxing, and so we are just left fragmented.
-
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page