September 7th, 2007
Shuck You! The Net is full of oysters and shuckers. Which are you?
One message waiting in my inbox this week when I came home from vacation was from Broadband Mechanics founder Marc Canter who invited me to co-sign a Bill of Rights for the Social Web. I signed it. The general idea is that the social Web isn’t about sites who have a right to guard our personal data as though it’s theirs. It should be about sites that enable data connectivity in such a way that the data that’s pertinent to my metaverse is something that I always have access to on my terms (eg: don’t make me use some proprietary Web form to contact a friend) and am free to syndicate or move.
I was reminded of how 5g.com’s Zude.com makes it possible to paste entire Web sites into one interface without those Web sites losing their functionality. Zude’s tagline is “Be free.” For example, over on Zude, you can see how I’ve pasted my Twitter feed, my home page on Flickr, and my ZDNet blog all into one page. I even cleaned it up by starting them in a “folded” view so all you see is my custom title bar (nothing prevents me from laying the page out so the sites start in full view).
But the fourth window on that page claims to be my home page on FaceBook. Only it’s not. It’s where my FaceBook page would have been had FaceBook not gone to the lengths it has to break sites like Zude with a technique known as framebusting. Framebusting is what prevents undesired “syndication” of Web pages. Zude’s CTO Steve Repetti says he can beat framebusting techniques but isn’t so sure about the beating the copyright infringement lawsuit that could follow.
The idea that Zude or any other buster of the framebusters would be sued for copyright infringement so long as they weren’t interfering with the original site’s operation (particularly a social Web site) seems wrong to me. On the other hand, as an executive editor at a media company, I can see how sites with advertisements on them wouldn’t want their pages to be redisplayed on other sites with additional advertising that wasn’t within their control. There must be a happy middle ground somewhere.
Anyway, between people signing Bills of Rights for the Social Web, sites like Zude, innovators like Adrian Holovaty who, if no API exists to get at a site’s data, will create one through something he calls ScrapePI (pronounced scrape-p-i) and the people on the other side of the debate who like to control data and keep users inside of their walled gardens, I realized that the Web is full of oysters and shuckers.
The oysters like to keep themselves pretty tightly shut. Occasionally, they let something in. But letting something other than waste out is an even more rare occurrence. Then, there are the shuckers. They’ll don steel mesh gloves and pull out whatever weapon it takes to pry the oysters open. Their motto should be “Shuck You.” Maybe something catchy like that can bring about change sooner rather than later.
