Data POV versus Software POV

How could you describe the web in a one word by it’s benefit for us?

You probably think about information. It’s the most obvious definition of the web.

I ask you to think about the web from a different angle: software. The web means the rise of distributed systems.

Of course people, collaboration, as well as devices are important. But here I mean a medium: is it a software or a data used within software?

You will be surprised the most respected people in the field focus on data as well.

Even the web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee, got it wrong.

The web became popular due to online apps. In the 2000s, we saw dotcom bubble as attempt to make an online version of everything. Some hyped ideas, as online Yellow Pages valued at 300 million dollars. Some obvious ones, like “online shopping”, which then turned into the Amazon of the online shopping.

But uncle Tim didn’t see the web apps; he saw information reaching globality. In the late 1990s he proposed a semantic web to structurize data for machines and humans. In the early 2000s it went niche. Today it’s handled by a few masochists in the W3C, while no one cares. It’s not me bashing them; it’s how they call themselves, and I respect self-honesty.

You might know the most popular publisher, or at least you may have encountered the distinguishable book covers.

The founder’s name is Tim O’Reilly. He popularized web2 as the next evolution of web. In a nutshell, web2 is read and write; user-made content on platforms. It’s wrong, what he describes is the real-time applications when you don’t have to reload page to see updates.

Just like semantic web, web2 got widespread due to its popularizer. After all, its done by the most popular publisher, he has network to brilliant people, and millions of programmers as his audience.

Tim O’Reilly couldn’t think of dynamic pages. Data POV futurists couldn’t think it will be getting more dynamic as the rise of WebSockets.

Web2 popularizers respect Sir Berners-Lee just like me, so his semantic web was labelled as web3. But that web3 is not known today. Today this history is known by a few deeply insightful people, like Siri’s author, who worked on Web Ontology before.

The Ethereum authors didn’t have insights about the web. They were just programmers who grew up on O’Reilly’s books, familiar with his Web2, but not about semantic web attempt. Thus reinvented Web 3.0.

I encountered it in 2017, when I was a marketing and event organizing intern in Shanghai. Blockchain evangelists preaching about Web 3.0 gave me cognitive dissonance. I kept silent until now, since I was afraid to seem pedantic for correcting them. Blockchain’s Web 3.0 follows the data POV, just like previous generations.

In a nutshell it’s read-write-own data. It’s just a common idea. Web3 became popular through Ethereum to sell a dream, a potential, in short its just a buzzword. Uncle Tim, the creator of the web, was working on read-write-own data in parallel. Users don’t care about his Solid project he launched in 2010s.

Now, new software uses the data POV to differentiate itself. Telegram and Signal as privacy-first. Open source as self-hosted, to own your data. They reach a few percent of global population like me who care about it, but it’s not disruptive to the status quo of tech giants. Despite Sir Tim, or Uncle O’Reilly, or tech bros of crypto, many brilliant thinkers bash the same paradigm and create the similar apps, similar projects and lots of visionary words.

Today, we live in a stagnated world, with the repeated overpromised disruptions, but nothing close to be next web or mobile devices.

No one predicted the web trajectory

No founders, no futurists could predict the modern web with its clouds, open-source as core, even crazy new ideas as sharing.

So, let’s look at the web history from the software point of view, as the rise of distributed systems. And it will make you understand the trajectory correctly, potentially even current trends behind the AI hype.

Why do you need to download Office Word, when Google Docs does it online? Why do you need a hard drive or USB, when you can use DropBox? Slowly, it’s now software as a service, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service. Or in general, the cloud.

Why did you need to rent a DVD to watch a movie at home, when you can just stream it online?

Who in dotcom era could predict the crazy idea of sharing your house (Airbnb) or cars (Uber), or a scooter in a downtown.

Who from early 2000s predicted the evolution of development and the rise of open source? Today, its a whole new ecosystem that is skipped behind data POV. Awareness about their sustainability for a thankless job done by programmers, is a very recent phenomenon. OpenCollective launched in 2015, Tidelift (acquired) in 2017, GitHub adding the Sponsor feature in 2019. And many more popping up today in 2020s, we just entered its era.

Can the web3 authors predict whats the trend going on right now? No. But with the software point of view you could see it. The web is moving now to “edge computing”, more power to browsers for faster programs, aka web assembly, 3D graphics. People now talk about offline-working web apps. Imagine: a web page in your browser that works without a connection. Your Google Docs work like that now.

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Now, how could you describe the web in a one word by it’s benefit for us? Is it still information or distributed systems?

With the software POV, you can see the root cause of data problems, enshittification, techno-feudalism, walled garden, vendor lock-ins correctly.

I’m working on a subscription-based collaboration tool between users and open source developers. Open-source builds a decentralized ecosystem, while users can request what they want directly. Over time, this ecosystem refactors software by decoupling its user interface from the logic, so UX designers can apply their own UI to open-source apps. Right now there are no UX designers talking to the developer community at all.

The goal is to bring back that good old web vibe, without reviving ugly styles of the 90s.

I realized it’s harder than I thought; it’s hard to explain. Simply, when everyone focused on data POV, it makes it hard for me to explain to people. We need to do it globally, together, we need to have a common language to understand my words. That’s why, I’m writing about software point of view and I invite you to think about tech world from this perspective. The core medium of computer is software, not data, the core medium of web is the distributed systems, not information.

With the software POV, you can even see new possibility that doesn’t exist yet. That opens up a possible revolution.

It’s even possible to find a real use case for the blockchains, and correct the metaverse, and how to use AI that doesn’t FOMO people. I wrote my extensive research on https://ara.foundation/ara.pdf whitepaper, if its interesting. But there are other things thats missing and possible things to make the web world better for us.

I hope below potentials will help you to identify potentials.

There is a lack of an open ecosystem; tech giants have a few apps that work together via vendor lockins, at least sharing the same account, but open-source software are siloed.

Let’s fix it by collaboration between OSS maintainers. If you know Godot and Blender’s core maintainers, be their matchmaker to make automated workflow.

Game Engines such as Godot, lack the easy workflow with publishing and clouds. What if you could publish your game onto Itch.io or other free, open-source platforms right within your computer?

If you maintain an open-source project, how about to organize a meetup about your domain: gamedev, or project management or CRM, on which category your app belongs too? Gather together with other maintainers. Discuss, and set together an API and shared data models for seamless workflows between your projects. With the seamless integration, your app gets more recognition, you get network with other people who share the same values as you, and potentially you set the the standard protocols that might be used by millions of other devs. We don’t need consortiums led by FAANG or industry seniors to have standard protocols.

If you want to found a new startup, how about focus on the software ownership? Another potential is a personalization of the software.

Where is the App Store for OSS? Why I need to use the google or browser Awesome lists on github for it?

There are other ideas too, I’m sure I don’t know all possibilities that opens up with the software POV.

I’m sure about one thing, open-source community, can revolutionize the software by collaborating together.