What is being said is something on the lines of there being no URL so to speak. So when you type facebook.com what is it the reason that got you to type that? Most probably being able to see "pics from the party last night".

Now imagine if the pics were distributed on Facebook, Flickr and Picasa along with a few tweets that I had made and pics added via TwitPic. Do you still think Facebook.com is what you should type?

Now think of a setup where the thing to be typed is "username: pics of the part last night /twitter facebook flickr picasa"

Gone is the idea of any advertisement and revenue model based on the content's location/web page.

Hm? Those pics (and their backup) would consume disk space and bandwidth. Obviously the huge majority of ppl prefers to see some ads instead of paying the cloud expenses.

Facebook screws over developers because they can. Expect more of it. From lots of other vendors.

The reason they screw developers and consumers over is because of the way we access the internet, using a browser, an URL, and a single-site "visit" metaphor. We are programmers, though. We are free to redefine how we access the internet any time we like. We have created our own prison.

We can do better than this.

I agree with you that this doesn't seem to be leading us towards a great utopia.

The problem isn't just programmers creating their own prison though - it's about business models. How do we create this seamless brand-free info sphere and still get paid?

I agree it is a tough question.

But it is a different question than "how did we get here?" which is the question I answered.

If we don't know how we got here, or what the nature of the problem is, how can we ever expect to solve it?

History is a slippery beast. We only understand the past in terms of what we know in the present. To change the future, we have to build it now. If we spend our time trying understand the past before we act, time will have moved on without us.

I don't understand. How can a company that doesn't intermediate the web browsing experience screw developers over if they are free to add a new site to the Web at will? You don't need a relationship with Facebook to run a web site.

We can and we are creating a new open platform built entirely on open technologies so it can never become yet another walled garden.

IkoniqueOS

Be your own Google.