The Future of the Internet is Distributed

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On its own, the launch earlier this week of Mozilla’s new Firefox extension, Ubiquity, is not a turning point in the development of the internet. But in the larger picture of the most exciting internet technologies that have been released over the past few months, I believe it fills out a portrait of what the internet will come to look like over the next few years: In the future, the internet will be distributed.

Not that it isn’t already distributed, of course. It infrastructure always has been. But its content was not always so distributed. If you wanted news, you went to a news website. If you wanted to hear music, you went to one of a variety of music sites. If you wanted to interact with other people, you went to a discussion forum or, more recently, a site like Twitter. But a few recent developments on the net change all that and point to a future of increasingly distributed content.

As I wrote earlier, identi.ca is a new microblogging site that runs on open source software that is not only free but distributed, or “federated”, in that users on different laconi.ca servers can connect to one another.

• OAuth, OpenID and the open social web
• Facebook Connect and Google’s Open Social, carrying over to sites like Ning.com and Yahoo’s mybloglog.com. Contrast with Beacon.

Mole whacking by Rustybuckets

• http://opentape.fm/ as a response to RIAA shutting down http://muxtape.com/
• Ubiquity, subscription to commands across the web, social web of trust for commands. Lawyerist says “Ubiquity will change the way you use the web”.