Ben Werdmuller

Tag: Data control

  • The IndieWeb as a minimum viable social web ecosystem

    I wrote a post as a submission for the W3C’s upcoming Workshop on Social Standards: The Future of Business. Although there have been significant advances in the field over the last five years, there remains a need to prove the business value of decentralized web technologies. There are so many opportunities for companies online that […]

  • Making billions of dollars from the federated social web

    Diaspora was pretty exciting. A Kickstarter campaign that promised it all: a platform created “for everyone to have full control over their data and to empower people in to become responsible, secure, and social Internet dwellers”. They raised over $200,000, which at the time was the largest Kickstarter funding round ever. Neat! Yesterday, Diaspora announced […]

  • You can’t empower users by targeting ads

    Scott Hanselman has a great take on platforms and ownership on the web: Why doesn’t someone make a free or cheap social network for the people? Why can’t I control my content? Why can’t I export everything I’ve written? […] All these questions are asked about social networks we don’t control and of companies who […]

  • Occupy Facebook: innovation in the era of social protest

    Wired reports that a group involved in the Occupy movement is working on its own decentralized social networking platform: “I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the […]