I’m not sure I’m very good at predicting the Next Big Thing. I mean, when I first heard about Microsoft Windows in 1990, I figured that would be a complete flop*. Yeah. So, there you go.
(* But really, who could blame me?)
Still, I think we can be assured that there will be, at some point, another Next Big Thing. It’s just the actual shape and smell of it that eludes us.
I don’t know if the Metaweb will be the Next Big Thing. But if it isn’t, I think it may be the Next Next Big Thing, or possibly the 3.times(”Next”) Big Thing, or maybe somewhere beyond that. I don’t even know if we’ll call it “the Metaweb”, but at the moment, I don’t know what else to call it.
When I say “Metaweb”, then, what am I talking about? Mainly, I mean a layer of activity and content over the web, interdependent with existing web content. Some possible examples:
- Greasemonkey: Greasemonkey is a moderately well-known Firefox extension that allows you to have user scripts (written in Javascript) run on any given website. Since Javascript can interact with the DOM, this means that users can (and will) do pretty much whatever they want to your web-page: change its layout, remove the ads, change the colors and styles, add functionality, even manipulate content.
The functionality part is especially interesting. For example, for quite awhile I was running a Greasemonkey script which created keyboard shortcuts for the “Previous” and “Next” buttons on O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf site.
Ad removal is no less significant, but I’ll leave that alone for the moment.
- Med.ium, Chatsum, et al. I don’t actually know of any others, but Med.ium and Chatsum are both tools that allow users to chat within and comment on various websites. Users who are on the same website at the same time can comment on it or chat with each other about it.
These have been around for some time (in internet time), and as far as I’ve seen have been pretty slow to catch on, so far. I think the main reason is that they’ve not yet had the critical mass to hit a tipping point. Most often when I used them, I’d find no one else online for conversation. Mind you, I’m just as introverted online as in real life, so maybe that’s just me. I see potential for these type of services to succeed, I’m just not sure they’re there yet. But like anything else, just because these don’t seem to have soared in popularity (like, say, Twitter), doesn’t mean they won’t in the future.
- Hoodwink.d. Hoodwink’d is a little esoteric, and the process of logging in is deliberately obfuscated, leaving people to their own devices. That is, it is purposefully non-mainstream. But as for “what”, it fits the “metaweb” definition exactly; it adds a hidden comment thread on any given page online.
So, that clever blog post or interesting article; it may well have a whole thread of comments on it, hidden from site, unless you know the secret handshake.
- Wibiki. Wibiki allows you to replace ads on websites with other ads — or with whatever you want. I haven’t tried to use this yet, but this also fits exactly into the sort of thing I’m thinking of when I say “metaweb”.
- Shiftspace. Where hoodwink’d is underground, Shiftspace is not. Anyone can easily see and use Shiftspace, which means it may (may) have a larger impact. Because it uses Greasemonkey as a foundation of sorts, it’s still Firefox dependent. Shiftspace allows a variety of tools, and is still evolving. Once enabled, you can create and view a layer over top of any other page on the web. This layer may contain notes, highlighting of text on the page, image swapping, or actual altering of the source code on the page.
Stop and re-read that last sentence, and pause to think about just what that could mean. Picture going to CNN or the New York Times, and being able to summon Shiftspace and suddenly see highlights and commentary over the articles from varying perspectives; you could have the likes of Noam Chomsky (or William F. Buckley, if you prefer) annotating the daily news. This is already done, you might say: blogs, alternative press, new media. Yes, but you still need to hear about it, and actually go visit some other page — what the Metaweb means is that this annotation could take place right over top of nyt.com, and there isn’t a thing they can do to stop it.
Potential for abuse? Sure. This means people could post porn on church websites, or evangelical tracts on porn websites. Your competitor could place text about it’s own products on your catalog page; it could poke holes in your claims and point links to studies that say your products are no good. Of course, you could do the same on their website, and nothing could be done to stop you.
It also means a lot of cool things for people who start using the Metaweb (in whatever form). It mean they could comment on blogs which don’t allow commenting (Seth Godin, Leo Kottke, you can probably think of others). They could comment on moderated forums (Slashdot, Digg, etc) without concern that their comment could be moderated out of existence. You could embed a YouTube video of Obama on Guiliani’s website, and vis versa, of course.
Because a lot of the uses for something like this are potentially subversive, a lot of subversive uses come to mind. I think there is a lot of value that could be added as well — commenting, conversations, user reviews of products and pointing out of over-stated product claims (why create “walmartsucks.com” if you can write your piece directly onto Walmart’s landing page?), opposing viewpoints…
There are still some interesting questions that could be asked:
What are the limitations?
It certainly has them. At the moment, much of what I’m calling the Metaweb relies on Firefox and its extensions. Just like a few sites have chosen to create or use elaborate scripts to redirect Firefox users away from their site (apparently in protest to the AdBlock extension), sites that wished to avoid this sort of thing could implement similar measures.
I don’t think this will work in the long run, because I think that methods like those used by Greasemonkey and Shiftspace could and will eventually be ported to IE, Opera, and other browsers. IE 7 has already begun by allowing user-created “Add ons” similar to Firefox’s extensions. Potentially, Shiftspace or something like it could allow a metaweb space to be viewed identically from various different browsers. At that point, there’s nothing that can be done about it.
But taking a “devil’s advocate” type position, let’s say that a certain browser decides to try to make this sort of thing impossible. Let’s call this browser “Internet Explorer” (for lack of a more likely suspect). All this would do, I expect, would be to fracture the internet. Any company which chose to disallow Firefox, or some other more “open” browser, would simply be declaring their lack of transparency, and their unwillingness to join a larger conversation. Given the continuing rise of social networking, blogs, and other new media, I think that being viewed as a company who eschews the conversation could be seen as A Bad Thing. If you don’t trust us, we may not trust you either.
So yes — currently this is a phenomenon restricted in its platform. I’m not sure it will remain this restricted in the future.
Can it be monetized?
Part of me hates to ask the above question, though I need to pay the mortgage just as well as the next guy. So, having asked it: can it be?
Well, I don’t know why not. People interested in money are nothing if not resourceful, and rest assured that people will think of something. Since it’s totally open, for starters you “could” place an ad, well — anywhere at all. Want to embed your YouTube video on Superbowl.com? You could.
Want to create a more “exclusive” metaweb? You could do that, too, and charge a fee for membership. Give how this has not succeeded (much) historically, I’m not sure that’s a great idea; but it could (and probably will) be attempted.
And of course, like anything else, if it should suddenly take off, businesses will want consultants and experts to help them to understand it (not too hard), take advantage of it (doable), or control it (impossible).
What’s next?
Other than going out and immediately installing Firefox (if you haven’t already), then Greasemonkey, and then Shiftspace (which currently seems like the most accessible, flexible metaweb-type platform), nothing. Just plug in, and get started.
Unless you want to create something new, in which case — please do!
Beyond that, we wait and watch what happens. As I said when I began this post, maybe widespread use of what I’m talking about is still two or three Next Big Things removed from where we are now… however, I do think it’s coming.
Sounds like a glorified means of vandalism, and it will be hard to get the signal from the noise out of that mess.
Perhaps more refined Shiftspacers will emerge out of the chaos and people will be filtered into subscriptions to them.
I can imagine that owners of political blogs or corporate websites that ban you for your expression, and don’t like what you say, will simply prevent all or some of something like Shiftspace from even interacting with them, by banning from the very reading of their website.
This is frequently done to me by http://www.your2ndspace.com — I am banned from there for my critical commentary on the author and his prescriptions for Second Life, so when he sees me evading his control over the discourse by writing critical commentary on my own blog, he bans my IP from even accessing his site even to *read only* — and that way defeats my workarounds on my own blog.
I could see that some sites will merely make themselves Shift Space proof.
For now, the use will be limited to insolent geeks as it is too hard for the average person to access the downloads, work through all the instructions, SVN, blah blah, and get it going.
That means geeks will take over meta-commentary with their own ideology and discourse on top of the existing sites, and only gradually when the UI is made easier will their control be relinquished so that more moderate discourse can begin.
By then, it could be a sea of graffiti. With tendentious and extremist idiocy like the Kill Coke campaign scrawled over every Coke ad, etc.
You’re right; it could be just as you say. But, I’d like to think it would be something more interesting.
Per your note about banning — since by leaving a note on a meta-type layer, you aren’t actually accessing the site that you’re commenting on, they would not be able to ban individual commentators. They’d have to (somehow) ban Shiftspace (or whatever other service) altogether.
I’d hope that if the meta-layer over these sites is adding value — ie, is a conversation, not just “XYZ sucks” — then banning the meta-layer would be held in somewhat low esteem.
But what do I know? I thought Windows would flop. Also, I think a tipping point for the metaweb or meta-layer I describe here could be several years away. For now, there’s not a lot of people there but a few early adopters, alpha geeks, and bleeding edge experimenters.
Thanks for the thoughtful write-up.
There’s definitely still a lot we’re working out with ShiftSpace, especially finding an effective model for filtering content — or, from the other perspective, making it easy for users to find interesting metaweb content. I brought this issue up recently on our discussion list (http://groups.google.com/group/ShiftSpace) and I’d encourage you to join the conversation.
As for browsers, Safari has a plug-in called GreaseKit that does a great job of cloning the Greasemonkey API. We’ve been working to keep our new (heavily refactored) code compatible with GreaseKit, so hopefully our next release will include Safari support.
I’ve also seen a few projects that attempt to replicate GM in Internet Explorer but none seem to have been updated in recent months. There’s one called gm4ie that’s open source licensed and it might be promising if somebody were to give it more attention. There was an offer recently on the Greasemonky list to sponsor development of an IE implementation that includes the DOM sandbox functionality of Firefox.
So Greasemonkey is currently a Firefox-only platform, but hopefully over time it’ll become more widespread. A big part of that will be driven by people creating compelling userscripts. ShiftSpace is mostly just trying to make that process easier for developers who need basic server-side support and also want the social functionality that comes with an integrated platform.
We’ve thought about some of your business model ideas although ShiftSpace, as a platform, will remain non-commercial. But hopefully at some point I’ll be able to make ShiftSpace more of a paying gig.
We are currently funded through grants from arts organizations and we’ve recently launched a commissions program (shameless plug) where we’re re-distributing one of our grants to those who use the platform in interesting ways. There’s two categories for up to $2,000 prizes:
1. Those who build actual tools for ShiftSpace (which we call spaces)
2. Those who create interesting trails, which are just maps of connected shifts (changes to the page).
There’s more info on that at: http://turbulence.org/works/shiftspace/
As for whether or not this becomes a Big Thing will depend a lot on how well we can build a community of hackers to make it all happen. Or whether some other incarnation happens to snag the metaweb market share. But it’s fun to work on in any case!
Thanks Phil,
I was contemplating commenting here, in Hoodwink’d or in ShiftSpace… ;)
This is an interesting review of the current stage of the metaweb. I believe like you that the metaweb is going to happen with or without us. What ShiftSpace is trying to do is to make sure openness is a part of the discussion from the early stage, and is appreciated by users as a necessity for what the metaweb (and the web in that sense) can become.
Some notes. One of the most important things about § (ShiftSpace) is it’s openness not only to content generated through the current spaces (metaweb interfaces) but also to the development of new spaces which we’re currently holding a grant program for.
The metaweb is a huge challenge and §’s approach is that it should be open, developed by a large group of people and very attentive to user feedback.
cheers,
Mushon
Hey, thanks to you both for commenting. Since I’m interested in this sort of thing generally, I’m very interested in what Shiftspace is doing. Hopefully over the next few weeks I’ll get a chance to dig a little deeper into what you’ve been building.
I like the openness; I think that will be an important component of anything that would attempt to build a metaweb. Not simply an API, but an open platform.
I’ve some more thoughts on the whole topic, but it’s getting late. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing what happens with Shiftspace .
It does look interesting - I installed and subscribed to shiftspace, although since I’m playing with FFB1 I can’t use it at the moment :( I think the potential is huge, although there are some concerns, as raised in the comments.
One thing that prevents it from being a free-for-all graffiti layer: when you give it a try in FF2, you’ll see that you can pick and choose which “shifts” you see posted over any web page. In other words, you can pretty easily ignore trolls and vandals within Shiftspace.
Yeah, I had noticed that greasemonkey doesn’t work with FF3 yet, which is why I’m not using it yet. Soon. :)