This is the speech I gave in Montreal at Webcom-Montreal ‘09 on “How to build the Open Mesh” (’09 edition.) This speech was the first time I pitched our virtuous circle we’re building in Cleveland. The circle starts at about 25:00 minutes in……
This new improved edition includes details on our Digital City project in Northern Ohio and an expansion of my proposal for dashboard outlines as a shared table for distributed - everything. I also have updated just about every page and I’ve pretty much closed up the content of the book.
This will become the ‘insider’s original guide’ and I’ll now start a new book entitled “How to build a Digital City” which I’ll use as a textbook for a class (of the same name) I’ll be teaching in Northern Ohio.
Enjoy!
How does the news of today (Memorial Day) connect together?
Years ago I developed several ideas for connecting the open web to broadcast television. It’s great to see that Twitter will be used for these kind of ideas. I’m hoping that scavenger hunts get real, sort of like a hybrid Great Race-Trivia quiz between meatspace and cyberspace. I worked on an early hybrid TV-web portal system for NOW.com in 1999.
Meanwhile monetization will remain elusive until brands fully accept the inevitability that they each must maintain their own platforms. Speaking of Intel, NVidia is coming out into the big leagues - as we speak.
While AT&T has decided to continue to support multiple mobile platforms. Now I wonder if they’ll try and connect them all together?
Its also nice to see freemium kind of business models - being taken seriously - finally! I believe I was talking about that before Fred Wilson and 2006 - BTW. I’ll have to go back and find my posts………..
But first - gotta finish this new business plan………….
Working hard on getting this right. I think I’m getting the definition of WHAT the Open Mesh is - down:
Intro
This manifesto is for practitioners and marketeers who need to know how to enable the ‘open mesh’ of the future.
By open mesh I mean that every user will have their own personal mashup of on-line inter-connected social media services (social networks, etc.) and on-going conversations which will interact with eCommerce, web services, legacy systems and all of the BigCo platforms: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace. eg. we are the Open Mesh.
Each user’s Open Mesh takes their own context and puts it in relationship to everyone else’s context.
This intermixed, chaotic world is inter-connected by open standards to proprietary platforms which support a hungry world of independent software developers - who wish to live off the BigCo platforms, like some modern day plankton or parasites.
The open mesh is an inter-connection of our open web and static published content or media endpoints (such as blogs or media uploads) intertwined between BigCo platforms and small independent software applications and services.
Each vendor and developer will put in the wires and plugs to mesh their own product or service into the open mesh in their own way. There are a myriad of technologies, techniques and approaches being slung around - and all of them will work.
There won’t be one sure solution, standard or way of implementing distributed friending, access controls, dataportability or interoperability. So please don’t look for that one answer in this manifesto.
There won’t be one way, but it will all happen - for sure. Each of us is contributing to the open distributed web of the future - in our own way.
So in other words - there really isn’t one succinct, clear definition of what an open mesh is. By definition it has to ebb, morph and adapt, just like the realities of our distributed world are not set in stone.
It used to be when I flew into SF, they pilot would say “to your left is the Golden Gate bridge”. When we landed he’d say “welcome to SF and to all of you who live here - welcome home.”
All could I could think of was moving to SF. Now it’s been 21 years and I’m ready to leave.
I’ve been running a virtual company for so long, it won’t matter where my body is residing. And the Open Stack is effectively ensconsed and happening - so I don’t need to show up at every meeting.
So maybe it’s Cleveland, maybe Boca Raton. But I’ll always love my time here in SF, even if the state is $27B in the hole. And that’s just for this year.
Meanwhile here are a few things we can’t get in SF:
Cvapcicci (Slovenian sausage) and Ajvar:
Serious Vlamses Frites:
And the best damn Belgium waffle I ever had:
This is what I’ll be presenting this afternoon in Kotrijk, Belgium at Multi-mania.be.
We’ll be forming a new company - Digital City Mechanics - to build system’s like this.
This is what I presented this morning:
I was kept so busy yesterday I wasn’t even allowed to blog!
ShoutOut to the most important people in the world - the mother’s who repropagate the race.
Loic LeMeur is rocking - and grokking it - in more than one way!@%$#%$#&
See how this works? TinyURL creates a market, the VCs swarm in and fund up bit.ly and now everyone will have their own URL shorterner. This is how our industry works. No innovation, just copying the sure thing.
Indeed Facebook is growing up - just having to account for all their humor keeps things sober.
Speaking of growing up - you always know when someone is maturing when they start thinking about families. Facebook now has constructs for families!
yes indeed Android means = Chrome, Apps, Gmail, Maps, Search, Reader, iGoogle - all for free.
Good question Nick: “What’s next for facebook - what will they announce at f8?”
Coolio! Senate vote data in XML form! Where are the APIs?
NextStop, SugarSync, Ning Apps, ZenDesk, Zimbra Desktop, Kachingle, BIGOmaha,
Marc's Voice copyright 2001-2009 Marc Canter
Creative Commons Share Alike
