Hidden treasure

In this post I plan to break every unwritten law of blogging. I acknowledge David Bullard's post and revel in my sweeping statements and lack of point.

As always, I will point you to a link. This is pure gold. I mean who hasn't been swept away by the story's of Treasure Island, or more recently by the Pirates of the Caribbean?

Similar things are true of Google. They found gold, and are defending its location. We all know they are a great source of information, but we don't really know how they find it, we only care where it is. As developers we have recently been major advocates of Google products that we feel more like Google consultants than developers. The rise of web 2.0 website features gives users more power and control over publishing their content. Our only advantage is that we know a fair bit more than our customers. But this wont always be the case.

What has this got to do with hidden treasure? Well, read this. Scobleizer explores the reason for Google's strategy in this particular area of hidden treasure and defence of it. Today I was visiting a friends house who is an architect, who not only uses Sketchup (a Google acquisition) but also trains students in it. I explained how it took me a while to realise that Sketchup was the perfect complementary product to Google Earth. Whereby you could add your house or any other new project in 3d to their predominantly pseudo 2d environment. Brilliant. Just imagine the 3d treasures one will soon be able to find on Google Earth?

So what has this to do with hidden treasure? Nothing, really, its a just a ramble in the blogosphere. And I can do it without conscience or consequence. David Bullard, eat your heart out.

Enter web 3.0

So just as web two point oh is gaining momentum, web three point oh starts to pop into the news and cruely becomes the insiders upper hand in a tech savy conversation.

It is strange living and working in Cape Town asking clients if they have heard of YouTube, and it definitely makes one feel isolated or disoriented when they haven’t. But that's not what this is about.

I am now a new member of Facebook. What a thing. Forget SA Reunited, or Friends Reunited or wherever it was that allowed you to get in touch with others online. Facebook is it. This is just one of the new things that is the start of web 3.0: A consistent online identity.

Since 1996, when I was first requested to register at a website, I have had an "online identity" of some kind. But this information was not always close to the truth. Something that was maybe a mixture of my Mother's maiden name and my first dogs first name. But never my real name. Today, its actually quite tiring filling in forms for web features, but its what we do. The problem is that I've never really lost that paranoia about hitting the signup button without really reading the terms and conditions page. And afterall, what choice do you really have?

Maybe it was the fact that I watched "meeting people is easy" at a young age and heard Thom Yorke say: "You are on at least 300 databases that you don't know about" that made me a little skittish .

Hey, I’m on at least 300 that I do know about. So what's with this constant requirement for my personal data and my relunctancy to hand it over?

I don’t know. But one thing is for sure, your data is already out there, stored and cataloged in some places you know about, and others you don’t. How you manage it is up to you.

This is a question that we will have to answer sooner or later: How much are we willing to give up to the network? Because eventually it will be everyware.

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technorati tags:Paraniod, Andriod, Facebook, Web3, Radiohead, identity, databases