Aggregation

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Aggregation

I guess there’s always going to be a tension between centralized and decentralized systems, perhaps just a pendulum swinging between them over time. The particular iteration of this that I’m referring to is the one between centralized web communities like Twitter and Facebook vs. decentralized web communities united or consolidated by web search and things like shared bookmarks and rss feeds. The arguments pro and con are pretty old but centralized systems tend to be:

• Beautifully integrated.
• Real time.
• Consistent.
• Subject to abuse by the proprietor (human nature being what it currently is and all).

Having one guy (whomever’s in charge) calling the shots for a critical system like this where the interests of the proprietor and the customers are inevitably ultimately at odds (proprietor wants more of your money and has leverage) is not healthy long term. Obviously innovation requires that those with new ideas sometimes need to get going with a proprietary system but more often than not, the proprietor when successful is reluctant to give up any control. New innovation too, can sometimes benefit from the autocratic abilities of the centralized system proprietor but the potential lock-in, arbitrariness, privacy and commercial abuse are simply big negatives to overcome.

Loosely coupled systems with choices of aggregators are generally much more desirable. There’s just very little consumer risk of vendor abuse and tradeoffs in quality or innovation are typically pretty modest. Now Google is currently our dominant aggregator but their advantage is not the result of lock-in. Barriers to entry for competitors are not trivial but certainly not insurmountable either.

Real-time systems like Twitter, various chat iterations and voip are more resistant to decentralization because of the tight coupling required (I guess). But we would still be much better off if they would standardize and decentralize. Isn’t it weird that I can all any phone in the world from my phone but I can only voip from Skype to Skype?

Even though I happen to be typing this on a Windows PC, I know that there’s nothing Microsoft can do that would really screw me over – my apps and data are all portable. Somewhat sadly, I’m just taking a path of least resistance. Anyway, go with the loosely coupled system (like the web) because sooner or later, the proprietor of the centralized system will do something you really won’t like.

Hence, splrblog is a standards compliant blog that is aggregated by various search engines, produces standard rss feeds and can send it’s posts to various systems rather easily. The only thing I haven’t done yet is open source the source code which I’m open to (given the right partners) though all the blog data is standard and open.Type or select a template.