A recent blog post from startup founder Chad Whitacre re-awakened this debate: in a post on Medium, the publishing platform started by former Twitter CEO Evan Williams, the founder of Gittip described how he responded to an interview request from TechCrunch about his company, which is building an online gift exchange. When Whitacre suggested that the reporter do an “open interview” via Google Hangouts that would be posted on YouTube, the TechCrunch writer declined.

“Me: If you’re not comfortable with streaming/posting the call, I will totally understand. In the future I’ll be sure to let journalists know up front about my open call policy. :-) Let me know one way or another …

TC: Yeh, good luck with that.”

Open interviews add more value

Many — including Sam Biddle at Valleywag — seemed to see the startup founder’s request as bizarre and somewhat ridiculous. But is it? We don’t see it as ridiculous when interviews are broadcast live, or when places like Reddit do the AMAs (Ask Me Anything) interviews. If anything, one could argue that they add value because everyone can see the questions and answers, and decide for themselves which parts of the interview are the most important or relevant. Fact-checking in public can be better.

In the interests of putting my money — or my ego — where my mouth is, I did my own open interview with Whitacre via Google Hangout’s “On Air” feature, which both streams the recording and automatically posts it to YouTube.

Whitacre’s proposition got me thinking about how rarely journalists include either audio recordings of their interviews with sources (as I did in a recent post based on my interview with Planet Money producer Alex Blumberg) or transcripts — even though the technology to do this is well established, and in many cases free. SoundCloud is an easy audio-hosting service, for example, and YouTube does automated transcripts, and there are many other solutions as well.

Not wanting to draw back the curtain

When I asked the question on Twitter, some journalists said they do this routinely and think it should be done more often. Others, however said they don’t think doing this is necessary unless there is some editorial debate about the context of a quote, or a source raises a stink about a story and so the outlet has to prove they were right. And many questioned whether there was any broader value in doing so.

@whit537 That's essentially what I'm getting at. I would rather my competition not be able to study my one-on-one interview methods.—
Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) May 08, 2013

@mathewi 1) Journos sound stupid in interviews, stumbling, asking dumb questions (many times because they're just learning about an issue)—
Mark Coddington (@markcoddington) May 08, 2013

Seeing the media sausage being made

Are media outlets reluctant to do this because they think no one will be interested in the full interview, or because (as Whitacre suggests) they don’t want to lose whatever scoop-like qualities are associated with the story? Does it stem from a fear of being criticized for focusing on specific parts of the interview? Or do they think their interview questions will seem unimpressive, and they don’t want to let readers see the journalism sausage being made? (I confess I was unusually aware of my questions and my appearance while Whitacre and I were talking).

@mathewi That old saw about seeing how the sausage is made?—
King Kaufman (@king_kaufman) May 08, 2013

@mathewi @Dan_Rowinski much like sharing academic data – that's messy and hard to read too. but it's not there for the average reader—
Walt Frick (@wfrick) May 08, 2013

Sources are already going direct

Here are a few things I think we do know: The life-span of a so-called “scoop” has been declining rapidly, and is probably now measured in minutes (possibly seconds) rather than hours — and all the “Breaking news!” headlines and embargoes in the world can’t change that. Meanwhile, the ability of sources like Whitacre to “go direct” and reach an audience is increasing, thanks to blogs and other forms of social media, forums like Reddit, etc. And in many cases a frustration with the way traditional media outlets handle interviews is a driving force behind that desire.

To take just a couple of examples, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton is well known for refusing many traditional interview requests, and asking instead that reporters talk with him via instant message or some other “live” medium. Billionaire media mogul Mark Cuban became notorious at one point for posting transcripts of interviews on his own blog, so that the full context of a discussion would be available for readers to make up their own minds.

@whit537 I could see questions like "why did you focus on this and not that?" from readers. Would have to back up choices more. @mathewi—
Ernie Smith (@ShortFormErnie) May 08, 2013

One of the most common responses to my question was that most readers or listeners would be bored by audio or video or transcripts of full interviews — and that is definitely a risk. And as someone who often takes a long time to get to the point of a question, so is the risk of looking foolish or incompetent. But aren’t those risks that are worth taking if it increases the level of trust that “the people formerly known as the audience” have in us?

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One of the most prominent, Microsoft researcher danah boyd (who spells her name without capital letters), said on Twitter that the takeover was “sad,” and that she doesn’t believe Mendeley can help Elsevier repair the reputation it has developed for being against open access to research — a reputation that is based on the publisher’s support of the failed anti-piracy legislation SOPA, among other things.

Another prominent critic of the acquisition is David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a co-director of the university’s Library Innovation Lab, which played a role in designing the new Digital Public Library of America project. Despite the assurances of executives at Mendeley that it would remain open — including its access API — Weinberger expressed scepticism that the company would be able to resist Elsevier’s attempts to make it more closed (he expanded on this on his blog).

Some of those who responded to the news of the acquisition seemed to see Mendeley’s acceptance of the takeover as a breach of faith, since the company had been such a vocal supporter of the open-access movement — a movement that many saw as directly opposed to the interests of companies like Elsevier. At least one observer compared it to “Haliburton buying Greenpeace,” and others made comparisons to the Empire in the Star Wars movie universe, or the Borg from Star Trek — both evil forces who eventually absorb or destroy the heroes of the story.

Mendeley’s director of academic outreach, William Gunn, responded to many of the critical comments about the acquisition, and said that the company plans to remain as open as possible following the deal:

Elsevier has been the target of a sustained attack from open-access advocates who organized a boycott of the company’s journals, galvanized by Fields Medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers — arguing that its publications are too expensive and keep valuable research locked up in a virtual cartel. One commenter on a news story about the Mendeley acquisition said: “They spent their whole life as a company arguing they were the next big thing in open publishing only to sell out,” while a commenter on a thread at Hacker News about the deal said:

“Mendeley should be ashamed, and you personally should be ashamed for perpetuating this nonsense. Within a year your company will be effectively dismantled and anyone left over who actually cares about open access can start over from scratch. I wish them luck.”

News of the acquisition re-ignited interest in the “mendelete” hashtag on Twitter, which was devoted to criticisms of the deal and the exploration of alternatives such as Zotero. One commenter said: “Was Mendeley more about its values or its services? Some of its biggest supporters have become its shrillest critics #mendelete.” If nothing else, these kinds of responses show just how much work Elsevier has ahead of it when it comes to reassuring academics and others that their commitment to openness is real. As Emily Bell at Columbia University put it:

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

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Although Facebook may look indestructible on the social networking side, with its $70-billion market cap and its billion-plus user base, and Twitter may seem equally dominant in another aspect of the real-time information economy, Borthwick argues in his letter that these big, incumbent platforms “are not as well positioned for the future as you might think.” For one thing, he says the drive to monetize these platforms is pitting the needs of those companies against the interests of their users:

“One of the big stories of 2013 is the rising tide of tension between what the users want to do on a platform and what that platform’s owners want their users to do, in order to expose them to an adequate quantum of advertising. Platforms feel they have to impose controls to get users to do what the users don’t want to do naturally. It is reasonable to expect that some of these platforms will overplay their hands, creating significant opportunities for new social networks to emerge.”

The islands won’t prosper like the oceans

In an era when bandwidth is so readily available, and users have become accustomed to all of their data living somewhere in the cloud — a philosophy that has ironically been encouraged by those same incumbent platforms — Borthwick argues that many users are “ready, willing and able to move” to another network or service if push comes to shove. Having attracted users so rapidly in part by teaching them how “rootless and transient” their relationships can be, he says, some of these companies will ultimately learn how easy it is to lose touch with their user base.

“Platforms are typically trying to control and centralize experiences with the opposing tension being the pull of their users at the edge. As billions more users join these networks over the next few years, the pull of the edge will get even stronger. That pull will make centralized architecture models hard, if not impossible, to execute against. There will be exceptions, but the islands won’t prosper like the oceans.”

Even with a company like Apple, which many would say is the quintessential closed and controlling platform, Borthwick argues there is evidence of how powerful open can be: namely, the response when Apple shut out Google’s map application in favor of its own lower-quality application. The response from users seems to be part of a larger trend in which many are switching from Apple apps and services to Google ones (I wrote about some of my own experiences in that area recently, and why I am considering switching to an Android).

In our interview, Borthwick made it clear that openness does not necessarily equal free, and that some bastions of openness such as Google are only free at certain layers of what he calls the application “stack” — so, for example, Gmail and Google Maps are open, but the search algorithm is not. The Betaworks founder also agreed with Benchmark partner Bill Gurley, who said in a post last year that Google is very good at building “moats” around its core properties by offering free versions of software and services that integrate with them. Android arguably fits that strategy, Borthwick said.

Open systems are more resilient and more valuable

In any case, for Betaworks and its companies and offerings — which include the revived version of Digg and a range of experimental apps like Tapestry, as well as established companies like Chartbeat and Bitly — Borthwick says that open will remain the key to long-term viability and success. And closed platforms such as Facebook (and Twitter, which he argues is becoming more and more closed in an attempt to monetize its user base as quickly as possible) are growing more and more risky:

“It is a core Betaworks conviction that open systems will prove more compelling, more resilient and more valuable to users than closed. Or to say it perhaps a bit more precisely: In a multiplatform world where open and closed systems will always co-exist, the force and power of openness will ensure the existence of a viable ecosystem for application and service builders like betaworks.”

There are plenty of other things worth reading in the letter, including an assessment of the evolution in financing for venture-backed startups (something the company and its seed-stage, incubator-style focus are clearly a part of) as well as the implications of the “contextual internet,” in which apps and services respond more intelligently to what we are doing and where we are doing it. And Borthwick argues that data will be the killer factor for any company that wants to become successful, whether with advertising or any other content. Read the whole thing here.

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In a recent post on my love-hate relationship with Twitter, I discussed how much I appreciate what the network has been able to provide in terms of being a real-time, open and distributed platform for publishing — and what an important role I think that has played in making us more informed about things like the Arab Spring revolutions, for example, thanks to the crowdsourced journalism of people like Andy Carvin of National Public Radio. But I also said that I hate the fact that Twitter is closing down third-party access by other platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, and that its desire to control more of its network seems to suggest that being open and having a good business are mutually exclusive.

Can you be truly open and still build a business?

Wilson, an early backer of Twitter — and someone who has also written a number of posts in defense of the open approach to community-building and the importance of being free — said that he believes being open and building a business can go together. But he added an important caveat: Being open, the Union Square VC said, is something that should come later and be done gradually, not right out of the gate the way Twitter did it. As Wilson puts it in his post:

“It is better to open up slowly, cautiously, and carefully rather than start out wide open and then close up every time an existential threat appears on the horizon… [Twitter] started out completely open, which allowed anyone to build a third party client, grab a huge percentage of Twitter users, and then threaten to take them away from Twitter. That’s not a sustainable relationship.”

This is Twitter’s dilemma in a nutshell: As we and others have pointed out a number of times, virtually all of the network’s power and growth has come from outside the company itself, in a way that is unlike almost any other significant social network. As Sarah Lacy notes in a post about Twitter’s unlikely success, every one of the important elements of the service — from the @ mention feature to the hashtag, and even the retweet — was developed by users, not the company itself. And now those same features are the ones the company is desperately trying to monetize to justify its financial market value.

In many ways, you could argue that even Twitter itself didn’t realize what the network was capable of until these things started to emerge — and I think they only emerged because the company decided to be as open as possible right from the beginning. It had a fully open API that third-party developers could use to do whatever they wanted, right down to creating a Twitter client that essentially competed with the service. As this problem became more and more obvious, the company started acquiring (and in some cases shutting down) other apps and services, and it has been stepping that behavior up recently.

Twitter is trying to turn back the clock

Doing this is probably a financial necessity in many ways — especially since Twitter is trying to justify all the money that it has taken from VCs over the years, as Hunter Walk of YouTube has pointed out — and so it is likely inevitable. And it doesn’t necessarily have to mean that Twitter shuts out third parties altogether, or clamps down on its network to the exclusion of all others: the company’s co-founder and chief product visionary, Jack Dorsey, said in a recent interview that he sees this process as “shepherding” the ecosystem towards a specific goal rather than shutting it down.

But what if the shepherd is herding the flock towards a cliff, or just fattening them up for slaughter? Mike McCue, co-founder of Flipboard — and a former member of the board of directors at Twitter until he resigned last month — told the Telegraph that he is concerned that Twitter is closing down too much and that it risks losing some of the power it used to have. As he puts it:

“Twitter can be incredibly valuable as an open communications mechanism but, if you close too many things down too quickly… you could easily do a lot of damage to that ecosystem. Twitter was created as an open platform, an open communications ecosystem, and I hope it can stay that way. You have to be really careful not to let money get in the way of that.”

So if Fred Wilson is right and Twitter made a mistake by being too open in the beginning, its current evolution is an attempt to turn back the clock or rewrite history — in other words, it is trying to find a way to undo some or all of the things that made it so powerful and fast-growing in the first place, while still hanging on to the value that being open created, so that it can monetize it. Facebook is also trying to monetize a user base that is built on free content, but it started closed and has become (somewhat) more open over time, which is a completely different challenge.

What Twitter is trying to do is a little like Wikipedia — something that has huge social value but is not a very good business — suddenly shutting down or controlling access to its content and inserting ads into everything. Is such a radical transformation even possible, or will the pressure be too great and cause cracks that rip the network apart in the process, or destroy its original value? We are about to find out.

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This is a much more ambitious goal than just cloning Twitter or duplicating some of its features. And while Caldwell has beaten many people’s expectations by even getting funded in the first place, it remains to be seen whether enough users and developers will be willing to pay for the service to make it an effective resource — especially since similar efforts to create an open ecosystem for the social web have mostly failed. Are there enough supporters of an open standard to make a difference, or is the social web doomed to be a world of competing proprietary walled gardens?

App.net wants to be a platform, not just an app

Orian Marx, the creator of New York-based startup Siftee, does a good job in a recent post describing the difference between what the alpha version of App.net looks like now and the broader ambitions of Caldwell and his partners. What you see when you go to the site appears to be a very stripped-down version of Twitter, but with far fewer users and features, and that has led many to dismiss it as a short-lived clone — one that will die because it won’t be able to compete with the kind of network effects Twitter has developed (although Caldwell argues network effects can be a negative as well as a positive). As Marx describes it:

“App.net will combine the simplicity of cloud infrastructure with the power of web frameworks to deliver the best platform for developing social web applications.”

In other words, the alpha is more like a test case or prototype of what could be built by using the platform App.net is trying to construct — one that uses open standards such as PubSubHubbub and ActivityStreams and other protocols that make it easy to distribute information through multiple networks, as well as allowing users to find and “follow” other users, and other things that we associated with Twitter or social networking in general. One comparison would be to Amazon Web Services, which is a collection of tools like the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 that developers and companies can use to build services on top of.

Another way of thinking about what App.net is trying to do is to think about what email used to look like, or (for those who aren’t quite as old) what instant messaging used to be like. There were competing platforms and competing standards, and nothing like an open API or any of the other things we associate with allowing different services to exchange information. Users of CompuServe Mail couldn’t easily send mail to other mail-hosting services, and later on users of ICQ or AOL’s Instant Messenger couldn’t easily chat with users of other competing platforms such as Microsoft’s MSN or Google’s GChat.

As Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures notes in a recent post about the potential benefits of App.net, what the social web lacks is a way of tying together various standards and protocols that allow anyone to integrate or exchange information easily with any other similar service — in the same way that anyone can send email to anyone else on the internet:

“It would a huge benefit to society if we can get with social networking to where we are with email today: it is fundamentally decentralized with nobody controlling who can email whom about what, anyone can use email essentially for free, there are opensource and commercial implementations available and third parties are offering value added services.”

Will the promise of an open platform be enough?

While Twitter has become a powerful information-publishing system and a kind of real-time newswire, it is still a private corporation with its own commercial interests, and as it expands its attempts to control more of its network — in order to monetize it more effectively — it is clamping down on the use of its API in ways that have caused friction with both developers and users. Much of the impetus for Caldwell’s project came from that dissatisfaction, and the feeling that Twitter at some point gave up on its desire to be an information utility and chose to become an advertising-based media entity instead. As one App.net supporter put it:

“[App.net] provides a solid API platform that is less likely to be yanked out from under our feet when the VCs get antsy and want to see a profit or acquisition.”

There have been other efforts to create a kind of open platform for the social web, however, and most have not ended well: one was an attempt to create a public standard for social connections called OpenSocial, which was driven by Google but designed to be an open protocol. Although the project still exists, it made very little headway, and was more or less doomed when Google recently killed off its Social Graph API. Rightly or wrongly, the project was seen as Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook — but its efforts have since been diverted to promoting its own Google+ network (which ironically still doesn’t have a fully open API of its own).

In some ways, Caldwell’s App.net also has similarities to FriendFeed, the federated social network that former Google staffers Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit (one of the original developers of Gmail) created in 2007, which allowed users to pull in messages and updates from multiple networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. FriendFeed was eventually acquired by Facebook in 2009 for $48 million and Taylor became the company’s chief operating technology officer and one of the architects of its market-dominating “open graph platform.”

Will App.net ultimately wind up on the scrap heap along with other attempts to create an open social ecosystem, a victim of the market power of incumbents like Facebook and Twitter and/or the ambivalence of users? Or will it gain enough support to become a real alternative to the walled gardens that currently make up the social web?

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This is something that’s worth thinking about as we see the social web becoming a mainstream phenomenon, with all that implies. The choices we make when it comes to the platforms we use, and the choices those platforms make about how they choose to monetize their networks, will have far-reaching implications.

The story of how Berners-Lee created the web is pretty well-known: how we was working as a researcher at the CERN Institute in Switzerland and decided to try to put the theories of earlier thinkers such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush into practice and developed a series of programs and standards that would allow a scientist in one lab to connect his thoughts or research to information that was located on a computer somewhere else. The result was hypertext markup language, or HTML, as well as the hypertext transport protocol, or HTTP — concepts that most of us barely even think about anymore, as they have become such an integral part of our lives.

A critical feature: No centralized control

It’s interesting to note that the initial response to Berners-Lee’s idea was skepticism, primarily because others in the field wanted all hyperlinks to be approved by a central authority, so that no one would click on a link and find nothing (or something unexpected) at the other end. As a Time magazine feature on Berners-Lee from 2001 described it:

“When Berners-Lee attended hypertext exhibits and asked designers whether they could make their systems worldwide, they often said no, citing this need for a clearinghouse. Finally [he said], ‘I realized that this dangling-link thing may be a problem, but you have to accept it.’”

That willingness to give up some form of centralized control may not seem like a big deal, but I think it was a crucial aspect of what Berners-Lee and CERN did in throwing the development of the web open to anyone, provided they abided by certain minimal standards. And it’s directly related to his other decision, which was not to try to commercialize what he had invented — something he left to people like Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who turned the graphical browser he developed at the University of Illinois into a corporation and launched the initial wave of commercial web companies in the mid-1990s.

As Robert Wright (who did the interview with Berners-Lee for Time magazine in 2001) notes in a recent post at The Atlantic about the anniversary of the web, it would have been fairly easy for Berners-Lee to build on what he had developed and create some kind of commercial entity. In fact, he had a graphical browser/editor before Mosaic or Netscape came along (and the two-way or social web was very much part of Berners-Lee’s initial vision). But he didn’t, and one of the main reasons was that he didn’t want the web to become balkanized, with multiple versions of the browser that wouldn’t be truly interoperable with each other or the open web. As Wright described it in 2001:

“Berners-Lee envisioned competitors springing up, creating incompatible browsers and balkanizing the Web. He thought it better to stay above the fray and try to bring technical harmony.”

What kind of web do we really want?

Reading about Berners-Lee and thinking about the development of the web — and all the ways in which it could have become something very different — made me think about the recent furor over the evolution of Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, and how the nature of those networks is changing as commercial pressures come to the forefront. Twitter in particular is no longer just an open platform for real-time information, with an API that anyone can use to add value to the network. Now it is a commercial media entity with corporate partnerships and advertising relationships that will determine much of its future behavior.

As Hunter Walk of YouTube has pointed out, a big part of the impetus for this change is the massive amount of venture financing Twitter has taken on over the years and its attempts to justify an implied market value of $8 billion or so. Facebook is in a similar situation, since it has gotten billions in venture funding and is now a public company with shareholders and investment bankers to satisfy. Thanks to Berners-Lee, the web has never been a commercial entity, or it probably would have turned into something like AOL or CompuServe.

Even potential competitors to Twitter like App.net, which entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell is trying to develop, are driven by their funding models: Caldwell argues his service would be better because users and developers would pay for it, but others — including blogger-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler — maintain that in order to become successful App.net would eventually have to do many of the same things Twitter is doing and that the only real alternative would be a truly open platform (something blogging pioneer and developer Dave Winer has been talking about for some time).

Berners-Lee has also raised a warning flag before about “walled gardens,” such as the Apple ecosystem and Facebook, which he says threaten the open nature of the web. In the end, the debate about what Twitter and others are doing is about more than just competitive concerns or even capitalism vs. nonprofit models. It’s about what kind of internet we want and what we are prepared to do in order to get it.

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Caldwell — who has since pivoted his startup, called App.net, and is trying to turn it into a user-financed version of Twitter through a Kickstarter-style funding campaign — says in an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that he expected the meeting to be about how his company could work with the social network to benefit both sides, but it turned into something much more threatening. As Caldwell describes it:

“Your executives explained to me that they would hate to have to compete with the ‘interesting product’ I had built, and that since I am a ‘nice guy with a good reputation’ that they wanted to acquire my company to help build App Center.”

Sell it to us, or we will kill it

The obvious implication, Caldwell says, was that Facebook was prepared to destroy the startup venture unless the entrepreneur agreed to sell it: a modern version of the old mob shakedown routine, in which the enforcer says something like “Nice family you got there — be a shame if something was to happen to them.” Or as Caldwell puts it in his letter to Zuckerberg, “Your team doesn’t seem to understand that being ‘good negotiators’ vs implying that you will destroy someone’s business built on your ‘open platform’ are not the same thing.”

Ironically, Caldwell says in his letter that one of the reasons he wanted to develop something on top of Facebook was that the Twitter platform was “even more of a joke than the Facebook platform” when it came to treating outside developers well. Twitter’s moves to close down more of its API — as it did recently by shutting off Instagram’s access to the follower list of Twitter users — have caused widespread criticism from developers, many of whom argue that outside services were a large part of what generated the social value that Twitter is now trying to monetize.

Both Facebook and Twitter have gone through a similar evolution in their relationship with outside developers and third-party services: Just two years ago Twitter held a developers’ conference called Chirp that was aimed at reaching out to companies — in part to smooth over some of the bad blood between the two, a relationship that co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams later admitted had been handled badly. And at almost the exact same time Facebook held a developers conference called f8, where it launched the “open graph” platform that services like Caldwell’s app center (and Zynga’s social games) were built upon.

As the pressure to monetize their networks has increased, however, both have stepped up the control they exert over their platforms — by restricting what outside services can do, by acquiring companies or recreating the features that they offer, and in some cases by making veiled threats of the kind Caldwell describes. As entrepreneur and venture investor Chris Dixon noted on Twitter, this kind of behavior is not really new:

I've heard "sell your company or we'll kill you" many times. Once bigco decides it's strategic, they'll get it one way or another.

—
chris dixon (@cdixon) August 02, 2012

Is platform Darwinism just the way things work?

In fact, there are some obvious similarities between what both Twitter and Facebook are doing and the approach taken by previous technology giants such as Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft was infamous for what was internally called its “embrace, extend and exterminate” strategy, which some say often involved meetings with outside services whose features were then duplicated by the software giant. Apple, of course, is well-known for controlling its platform more tightly than probably any other technology player in recent memory — and for making changes that benefit it, regardless of the impact on others.

In some ways, this kind of process is completely natural and even has some parallels outside technology. For example, Jonathan Glick of Sulia has compared the approach that Twitter and Facebook have taken to the economic doctrine of “mercantilism,” in which states try to control the way their subjects and colonies can trade with outside parties. Not surprisingly, this approach has also been the cause of a number of wars (and the real kind, with guns, rather than the metaphorical kind). And others have called it “API Darwinism,” implying that it’s a form of natural selection that favors the strongest.

So does that make what Facebook and Twitter are doing right, just because it is common behavior? That depends on whether you are an investor or a developer or a user. And even developers themselves can’t seem to agree: In the comments at Hacker News on Caldwell’s post, there are just as many arguing that Facebook’s behavior was completely justified and normal — and that the entrepreneur was naive to expect otherwise — as there are supporting him in being critical of the social network. Meanwhile Google+ head Vic Gundotra is trying to position his network as the friendly alternative.

What both Twitter and Facebook have to be wary of is becoming so controlling and dismissive of their ecosystem and/or their users that they wind up giving their competitors more ammunition and eventually lose their network effects to a newcomer (as Myspace did to Facebook). Apple may have been able to increase its dominance despite taking a strong-handed approach, but if recent history has shown us anything, it is that not everyone can be Apple.

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Twitter needs to become more decentralized and open, says the company’s former chief engineer, or it will eventually wither and die like other “walled garden” approaches to the web. In a blog post, Alex Payne says he quit the company at the height of its success earlier this year because he wanted the service to become an open, distributed communications platform, but the startup’s senior executives were more focused on building a business instead. It’s a critical question that many technology companies have faced: open or closed? Open can fuel more growth, but closed can generate more revenue. As Payne describes it:

Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in a decade, but it was (and, I think, remains) my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized, and that all businesses who build walled gardens will eventually see them torn down.

The former Twitter engineer says he understands the company’s desire — and, in fact, its need — to develop a revenue-generating business rather than pursuing his vision of becoming a decentralized communications network, because “There are precious few case studies in the business textbooks of decentralization yielding substantial, predictable, sustainable profits for a commercial entity.” Although Payne doesn’t mention it, there is likely a considerable amount of pressure building on Twitter to generate revenues, if only because the company has raised over $100 million in financing, and its backers no doubt want to see some return on that investment.

However, the former head of Twitter’s platform team — who left to join a startup called BankSimple — says he’s come to agree with those who see Twitter as having a higher calling: namely, to become a decentralized communications network for the digital age, or what Om has called a messaging bus for the real-time web. We raised the issue of whether there needs to be more than one Twitter in a post earlier this year, in part as a result of the network’s repeated downtime issues, but also because the service has grown to become such a crucial news delivery system for many people. As Payne puts it:

The call for a decentralized Twitter speaks to deeper motives than profit: good engineering and social justice. Done right, a decentralized one-to-many communications mechanism could boast a resilience and efficiency that the current centralized Twitter does not. Decentralization isn’t just a better architecture, it’s an architecture that resists censorship and the corrupting influences of capital and marketing. At the very least, decentralization would make tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as email. Now that would be a triumph of humanity.

Among those who have called for a more open Twitter — or at least for the company to federate and inter-operate with other open services, such as the open-source network Status.net — is programming guru Dave Winer, the original developer of RSS and other web standards, who has written about the need for an open and distributed Twitter-style service and described how the company could integrate its service with others. Some developers of Twitter-based apps, including Jesse Stay of SocialToo, also appear to be thinking about their future, and whether open might be better.

In a way, this is a future that Twitter itself created by opening up its API in the first place, and creating a vibrant ecosystem of clients and services. Doing so undoubtedly accelerated the adoption of Twitter, but it also made the service seem less like a single company’s product and more like a distributed communications network like SMS or email. Now Twitter is trying to pull back some of that ecosystem under its own control, for its own business purposes, and in the process, it’s causing turmoil for developers (although Payne doesn’t show much sympathy for them in his post, saying they also need to decide whether they are building businesses or just fooling around).

The kind of open and decentralized network that Payne and others envision isn’t necessarily incompatible with generating revenue for Twitter the company. It would just have to compete by adding features or functionality to the core service, like everyone else — possibly by analyzing and filtering the data streaming through the network (although if it were truly open, others could do this as well). The core functionality of the network, the sending and receiving of messages, would effectively become a utility.

But the choice to embrace that future is ultimately Twitter’s to make, and for better or worse, it seems to have chosen the path of centralized control. Whether Alex Payne’s prediction about the company’s fate will come true remains to be seen. Twitter isn’t the only social network that is facing pressure to become more open: Facebook has also seen many of the same criticisms about being closed, and there’s been a lot of attention paid to potential open-source alternatives such as Diaspora, which recently released its source code. For more on the debate over “Open vs. Closed,” please see our earlier series of posts on the issue and some of the companies involved.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners

Post and thumbnails courtesy of Flickr user macieklew

In the history of modern media, it’s unlikely that anyone — at least, no one of similar size or scale — has embraced open principles more than Wikipedia. Co-founded by Jimmy Wales, the so-called “open-source encyclopedia” has grown to the point where it now encompasses 3.2 million articles, and is almost certainly far more influential than print-bound predecessors such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Although the site has a team of editors, known internally as “the cabal” (a wink to conspiracy theorists), and occasionally locks down contentious articles, the vast majority of the site is still open to anyone to edit.

As part of our ongoing series on the tension between “open” and “closed” across a range of industries and markets, I spoke to Wales via Skype from London. Our conversation follows, edited for clarity and length.

GigaOM: Where do you stand on the debate between open and closed standards? I’m assuming that given the nature of Wikipedia, you would probably come down on the open side.

Wales: Well, there are benefits and costs to both approaches, and a lot of those are well known at this point — although I do think that today, the open approach still isn’t as well understood as it should be, because it is a newer approach. There’s a big tendency to gravitate towards a closed and proprietary approach too easily, because it’s what [companies] know, it’s what they’re familiar with, and sometimes thinking up your business model in an open context is a lot harder. When you’ve got something closed and top-down and proprietary, you pretty much know what you’re going to do — you’re going to make something and then you’re going to put it in a box and sell it; and the box might be a downloadable box in the modern world, but it’s the same concept. Whereas with the open approach, it’s more about fostering an ecosystem and then making money in various other ways. What I would encourage people to do if they’re looking at doing something is to sort of step back and recognize the downsides of a proprietary approach.

GigaOM: Taking a more or less closed approach doesn’t seem to have hurt Apple — if anything, it seems to have succeeded more than anyone ever imagined, despite being closed. What are your thoughts on that?

Wales: If you look at the emerging competition between iPhone and Android, clearly the iPhone has the early edge, and of course Apple is quite good at what they do, their extreme controlling nature allows them to do certain things quite well. But at the same time, we’re seeing the beginning of a flood of new phones coming out from all kinds of different manufacturers…because of the open nature of the Android platform, and that’s going to pose a very interesting kind of competition. Google, in this instance, ironically, is more playing the Microsoft role here, to Apple’s Apple. One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they’re viewed as proprietary. But the truth is that compared to a lot of other companies, they really embraced a very open set of standards and had a very open platform, and it enabled them to gain dominance.

GigaOM: And what about the open approach when it comes to desktop software? Being open may have helped Microsoft in the early days, but it doesn’t seem to have helped Linux become competitive. Why?

Wales: One of the key pieces there for me is that there are some business models around Linux, but those business models — like Red Hat — have tended to focus on the server market, where certainly in the web-surfing world, the LAMP stack [Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP] is dominant. And it is dominant in that area in part because there emerged business models that made it possible for people to do things in a sustainable way, whereas Linux on the desktop so far hasn’t really generated a business model. If you think about Android, it can be open source, or very nearly open source, and that doesn’t hurt its chances of succeeding simply because Google has a business model around it that has nothing to do with selling the software. They can fund it, they can support it, and it makes business sense for them to do so, in a way that it has never made a lot of business sense for anybody to really spend the money to get Linux on the desktop to that kind of polished state.

GigaOM: So even if you are taking an open approach, you need to have a business model?

Wales: I’m not sure about the term business model, because if you think about Wikipedia, Wikipedia has a business model, but it’s not a business it’s a charity, and its business model — so to speak — is getting people to donate, because they love Wikipedia. So there isn’t a good buzzword for this, but you need a sustainability model; you need a model that brings in enough attention, revenue, whatever resources you need to make something happen in order to actually get it done. And what we’ve seen is that in open-source software, in some areas it’s worked and it’s great — so if you want a fabulous web server, and you want to scale up a web farm, the tools are free, they’re out there, there’s a whole ecosystem of developers, and it makes a lot of economic sense for people to participate in that ecosystem and it works. On the other hand, if you want to get your mom a laptop, I’m still not recommending Linux right now, because there hasn’t been an ecosystem, a sustainability ecosystem around making that happen in a really professional way.

GigaOM: There seems to be a belief that open systems are more free, but that they are also more chaotic and in some cases ugly, and that a closed approach like Apple’s works because it produces a uniform experience and high-quality design.

Wales: There’s definitely a lot of truth to that [but] at the same time, I don’t think it’s the whole story. We don’t have enough data points, really. We have Apple at one extreme and Linux at the other extreme, and Microsoft somewhere in the middle; so at one end you’ve got the highly controlled thing from a very controlling company that is obsessive about design; it’s proprietary, it’s top down, and it’s gorgeous, beautiful, elegant, simple design. And the open source thing is chaotic, hard, difficult, complicated — but also embodies a lot of amazing values, and it’s highly customizable, and really enjoyable if you like tinkering. You can do all kinds of things with it; it’s very powerful. We shouldn’t be too quick to judge the two. We can envision, for example, a proprietary system that is also complicated and difficult, but powerful because of the complicatedness and difficultness. But we can also imagine an open-source process that produces a really simple and clean design — I think probably Firefox is the best example.

GigaOM: And why did you decide that Wikipedia should be built on a completely open approach?

Wales: Nupedia (Wikipedia’s predecessor) was top-down and not very open — it was open source, but in terms of management it was centrally controlled. But it failed, because it wasn’t fun for the people who did it; it didn’t harness the passion of the individuals who were involved in that project. I think it’s fair to say that we couldn’t have built such a huge project with literally thousands of people without taking that kind of open approach — it just wouldn’t function. I suppose with a lot of money and time we could have created a traditional encyclopedia, but couldn’t have done this.

GigaOM: But Wikipedia has added controls to the system through the use of moderators and editors and so on, yes?

Wales: Yes, we’ve had to add some features like that. My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged. It’s a balance that you have to strike, where if you leave it alone then the trolls take over, but if you’re too central and controlling, then you can crush it, and we try to strike that balance.

GigaOM: I’m trying now to imagine what Wikipedia would be like if Steve Jobs ran it.

Wales: It would be interesting — it would probably be prettier, too.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Fabbio and Tony Duarte

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

Simon: Can you briefly outline Opera’s stance on open standards?

Lawson: Of all the browsers currently available, Opera has been around the longest, and has always supported open standards. Note I don’t mean open source; although there are overlaps between the two movements, they’re not the same. You could make an open-source Photoshop clone, for example, but as the Photoshop data format PSD isn’t an open standard, so you couldn’t use it in your clone. We believe that if data is transferred in open, royalty-free formats then it is more future-proof and more manipulable than data that is held in proprietary formats. You’re also protected against being locked into one company’s products — if you don’t like us tomorrow, you can change. I have university essays in a proprietary Tasword format that I can’t open any more as the format was tied to one program, which is now discontinued.

And we put our money where our mouth is: Out of 600 employees, about 25 devote most of their time working on actually making the standards — both the “sexy” standards like HTML5, CSS (our CTO Håkon Wium Lie was co-creator of CSS), SVG, geolocation and widgets, and also the “industry standards” that drive the TV and mobile applications industry, such as CE-HTML, JIL and BONDI.

Simon: The web designers and developers in the WebWorkerDaily audience should all be aware of the benefits of open standards as they use them daily in their work, but why are they important for everyone else? If I’m, say, a copywriter or a lawyer, why should I care?

Lawson: Apart from the future-proofing aspect I explained before, you also have the advantage of portability. An HTML document, for example, will open just about anywhere — PC, Mac, Linux, mobile devices, netbooks etc. Documents authored to W3C standards can work with all the world’s languages, and can be run on mobile devices, TVs and even the much-vaunted web-enabled fridge. There’s also the question of accessibility. Open web standards developed by the W3C have to go through a process to ensure they are accessible — that is, the information contained in documents developed according to the standard can be made available to people with disabilities so, for example, a blind person can hear a description of an image, or a person who can’t use a mouse can navigate a web page using only the keyboard. That accessibility isn’t automatic — the developer has to be professional and take care to use the language correctly — but there is nothing inherently blocking that accessibility. It seems to me that a copywriter would want her purple prose to be available to as many people as possible, and the lawyer would know that in many jurisdictions it’s illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities.

Simon: Opera has been championing support for standards for some time now. Was the decision to support open standards primarily an ideological one, or a commercial one?

Lawson: Both. Our customers (for our embedded browsers, our mobile browsers, etc.) require us to adhere to industry standards, so if we don’t then we don’t get the business. Open standards, as I explained before, ensure the widest possible reach, so it’s sensible to champion them and support them.

Fundamentally (and here’s the ideology) we believe that you should be able to reach any website from any device: a desktop, a phone, an in-car browser, a digital picture frame. It won’t necessarily look exactly the same everywhere (in fact, it shouldn’t — a web page might be easier to read if reformatted to fit a mobile phone screen, for example), but you should be able to access it and interact with it.

Simon: It seems to me that open standards take a long time to develop, due to the amount of wrangling it takes to get agreement from all interested parties in reaching the most acceptable solution. Do you think that open standards hinder or slow the pace of browser innovation (and the web, generally)?

Lawson: It does take a long time to develop open standards. But that standardization process pays off very quickly. Developing a typical web page now is much quicker if you do it to those standards than it was during the dark days of the last Browser War, when you had to develop parallel code bases for IE and Netscape, or choose one of them and lock out people who used the other browser.

As to whether open standards slow the development of the browser — that could be true, if we were selfish. If, for example, you wanted to include some new feature in a browser it is indeed much faster just to develop it and add it in, rather than wait for it to be standardized. But that definitely inhibits the development of the open, interoperable web, and for us that’s much, much more important.

In fact, open standards can speed up browser development. Take, for example, XMLHttpRequest — XHR — the technology that powers Ajax-driven websites that feel as responsive as desktop apps. It was invented by Microsoft. Every other browser vendor saw the value of this technology and spent countless man-hours reverse engineering it to get into their browsers. Now, XHR has been standardized. Any new browser vendor wishing to implement XHR just picks up the spec and implements it, with no need for all that reverse engineering. And because the specification is well-written (disclosure: it was edited by Anne van Kesteren, a colleague of mine at Opera) it can be implemented in a way that is interoperable with existing browsers and websites. Everybody wins.

Simon: There’s new browser war raging at the moment — the major vendors all have pretty good products. Competition in the market is fierce, and seems to be being waged on three fronts: features, speed and standards. What future developments are you looking forward to the most?

Lawson: Personally, I’m excited about HTML5 (so excited, in fact, I’m writing a book about it). HTML is the language that the web
is based on, and it hasn’t been overhauled in a decade. The new version — which already has great support in modern browsers — allows websites to
be even more like desktop applications, encompassing on-the-fly image generation, native video and audio, data storage in the browser and offline applications. Consumers might not know there’s a whole new evolution under the hood, but they will notice new robustness, interoperability and things “just working” — no more messages to download and install new plugins.

Widgets are very exciting, too. You can write an app that behaves like a native app, has access to the file system but is written using web standards, so
can be run on any smartphone with a widget manager (see more at widgets.opera.com)

What browser developments are you looking forward to the most?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

Photo by stock.xchng user beuford00