SotSW June 2008: uptake

i think the key chain of events inhibiting massive adoption is:

* consumers/99%-majority follow the path of least friction (ie they dont write XSLT to manage blog posts, nwalsh style). which is whatever google or facebeook setup to work with one or two mouseclicks

* the consumer data-web isnt really a cloud or web, its a few big datacenters (google, facebook). for whatever reason, the dev-bloggers at these places like calling their datacenters 'clouds' 

-> since these massive-HTTP computing/servicing clusters these are new and demanding, custom stuff was rolled (amazon dynamo, google bigtable)

--> that stuff isnt RDF. (the few companies using RDF or something vastly similar (metaweb/twine) havent hit any sort of user critical mass for takeoff. theyre just better paid nwalshes)



theres plenty of places the web hasnt evolved yet:

- filling in all the gaps between plain text and highly-structured heirarchical/OWLy data, and the realtime group/mob evolution/sharing/emergence of such info (twitter is just plain text, plus its centralized)

- where the 'Google Health' plan is 'just let us handle everything' my vision is a mobile device that has a mini-backup cloud among other devices i own (with some perhaps readonly or even unreadable without my key redundancy on those of people i trust) and if i want my doctor to have data, i can send triples over bluetooth when we're in the office together.. 

these kind of scenarios are more likely to benefit from a commonly agreed model like RDF, than the huge one-off proprietary foundations built up by amazon or google

so i think the future is bright

Received on Tuesday, 1 July 2008 09:30:07 UTC