Social networks - what's next?
This article is a flight of unbridled fantasy with a claim to analytics on the theme “where are we going with Piglet”.
Within the framework of this discourse, significant simplifications, exaggerations, predictions that are speculative in nature and intuitive sensations are inevitable. You are warned.
When the Internet was still a baby, it was a mess of technology, often mutually incompatible. With the beginning of standardization, TCP / IP and everything that followed, the Internet, as a child, spoke its first words, stepped over the oceans and spread throughout the world. As a teenager, he raised the WWW and so became the most massive source and repository of information in the history of mankind. The maturity of the Internet came with the paradigm of "user centricity" and Web 2.0, which brought the Internet to the verge of becoming a collective mind.
')
And now we are standing on this face and leaning forward.
If you look at it from a less romantic position, it seems that the interaction between humanity and the Internet has undergone several gradual paradigm shifts. Such a change occurs every time the availability of the Web reaches a new level.
For example, as soon as access to the Web was commercialized, anyone could go online and the Internet ceased to be the realm of academically boring science; this caused an increase in the number of users. As soon as the Internet spread throughout the world, people were able to communicate with each other, regardless of geographic location (and it was much cheaper than telegrams and phone calls); this caused an increase in availability. As soon as a significant number of Internet users felt the need to enter their creative efforts without being at the same time technical experts, the telecommunications market provided such an opportunity. As soon as broadband access became massively accessible to the public, the Internet exploded with multimedia features never seen before in the Netscape era, GIFok and dial-up modems.
The shifts thus continued up to the most recent, which I dare to call the "coming of surrogates," and here's why. We are already getting used to cloud technologies, the sudden arrival of touch interfaces for everything, smart homes and glasses, autopilot in cars, more and more miniature and more and more powerful netbooks and tablets and in general all these newfangled things. But all this wide range of technological wonders is busy serving users who spend more and more time in - yes! - Social networks.
Social Networks - this is not only the edge, aspect or side of a variety of services on the Internet. No, now it is the heart rate that is heard behind everything. How many attempts were there to invent something that would be on every web page? Now it is - a neat row of buttons "share via ..." or even "login with ...". The audience of Social Networks has reached a billion and is increasing, and will surely exceed the numbers that are hard to achieve even for radio and television on their best days. Governments use Social Networks and people listen to news from their leaders and repost them almost instantly. In Social Networks, there are wars, crimes are being committed, investigations are being conducted, lives are being lost, relationships are being established, hearts are being broken, prayers and sermons are being heard, students are learning, and so on.
In general, it is difficult to imagine what aspect of daily life does NOT occur in Social Networks, except for physiological needs, of course. How did we manage to build a full-fledged parallel reality and voluntarily settle among its surrogates? The answer seems complicated, but I simplify it this way: it became possible due to the recent paradigm shift, which brought into use a whole class of wearable and compact devices with Internet access, powerful enough to support all the interaction functions in Social Networks and web technologies available for their desktop brothers and laptops. Let me remind you, it has been only 10 years since mobile developers suffered from WML decks.
People in public transport talk less with each other or pay attention to the world around them, but more and more they check what appeared on their favorite channel, wall or news feed. But even if they notice something interesting from what is happening, it is often just a reason to record the event on video and send it to online reality faster than other witnesses. Psychiatrists begin to suspect job seekers of antisocial behavior if they do not have profiles on Social Networks, and employers are even willing to believe it.
The creator and owner of one of the largest Social Networks was recently fired for refusing to provide the authorities with information about the uprising activists who used his network to create support groups and information.
Something frightening is happening in this world, if IT enterprises reach such a global strategic importance. Imagine what happens if Google, Wikipedia or Facebook go off for one day?
Enough is enough. All this may sound as if I was going to complain about the “days of bygone and unreachables” that are a thing of the past because of the Social Networks. No, change is driving evolution. However, for evolution to lead to highly competitive solutions, it is important for it to move without limits and without control, as natural selection in the wild.
Now it's time to draw some parallels. Remember how peer-to-peer file sharing networks entered into the daily life of the Internet? Initially there was Napster. The famous pioneer of file sharing, closed by court decision, because at that time no one really cared about the survival of the network and suspected the importance of decentralization in the future. The eDonkey2000 network is disabled and its owners are fined $ 10M for the same legal and technical reasons.
Without addressing the moral aspects of file sharing (yet, the tools do not commit offenses by themselves), all this was made possible by the architectural features of the peer-to-peer networks of the time. The legacy of “client-server” architecture lives to this day, bringing unified points of control and failure to most modern network solutions.
However, the peer-to-peer community turned out to be fast learning and easy to innovate. By the time of the legal attack on The Pirate Bay, file-sharing technologies made a leap forward, eliminating the need for network management infrastructure and introducing resiliency methods that allow the network to function even when a significant number of its nodes are monitored and disabled. The eDonkey network has become less dependent on central index servers — Overnet and distributed servers have appeared. Gnutella networks were already originally developed according to the scheme of bushes and leaves, in principle, without index servers. The Kademlia network principle on distributed hash tables has received a number of applications in other peer-to-peer solutions.
The general trend is that in order to ensure the stability, durability, scalability and resiliency of the services required by a peer-to-peer network project, it should not have an obvious point of control and failure. In other words, there should in principle be no global “Off” button.
And how many modern Social Networks do without such a button? None. The reasons are quite understandable - the amount of resources and labor required to develop, implement and maintain something of the scale of Facebook or Twitter requires the same serious investments, forcing each popular Social Network to be a commercial enterprise.
Judgments about whether it is good or not are beyond the scope of this discourse, and, in general, would resemble ancient disputes between supporters of free and proprietary software, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Now, seeing the picture as a whole, one can suggest a path to the fog of the future. Sooner or later, Social Networks as a closed commercial product will meet with their alternatives. For starters, these alternatives will be frail and awkward. But the first versions of the Linux kernel were also frail and clumsy, and now only 7% of Internet web servers do not work on it.
There will be attempts to close and ban them, legally or technically. In order to survive, the basic principle of the architecture of future Social Networks must include something like a peer-to-peer distributed fault-tolerant mesh of interchangeable nodes. This principle was tested in practice, showed confidence and perspective - you can see this by checking how much global Internet traffic takes, for example, BitTorrent.
I do not deliberately delve into the technical details. We do not know what opportunities the future mobile, desktop, cloud, and any platforms that have not yet been invented can demonstrate. Today, the idea of placing several FullHD movies on a prototype amateur peer-to-peer network may seem ridiculous, because, unlike them, mainstream Social Networks can handle this very easily. But still, Torrent-TV is already on the verge of implementation, and dial-up modems are a thing of the past only ten years ago.
Developers of such Social Networks would be able to use the best aspects of the solutions that exist today - BitCoin security, Skype reliability, BitTorrent performance, and so on. The widespread adoption of IPv6 will help solve network connectivity problems caused by the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and crutches such as NAT and VPN.
I would like to see this unborn child of the Information Epoch not only as another “network in the network”, but as the biggest paradigm shift bringing Social Networks not into the role of alternative reality for escapists, but as a tool for shaping humanity and its future in the first truly distributed digital self-governing society.
Resistance is futile.
PS I read this article . The author, IMHO, is somewhat more pathetic, categorical and arrogant than it should be. And nothing goes deeper into the technical details. But it is good that the idea is in the air.
Within the framework of this discourse, significant simplifications, exaggerations, predictions that are speculative in nature and intuitive sensations are inevitable. You are warned.
When the Internet was still a baby, it was a mess of technology, often mutually incompatible. With the beginning of standardization, TCP / IP and everything that followed, the Internet, as a child, spoke its first words, stepped over the oceans and spread throughout the world. As a teenager, he raised the WWW and so became the most massive source and repository of information in the history of mankind. The maturity of the Internet came with the paradigm of "user centricity" and Web 2.0, which brought the Internet to the verge of becoming a collective mind.
')
And now we are standing on this face and leaning forward.
If you look at it from a less romantic position, it seems that the interaction between humanity and the Internet has undergone several gradual paradigm shifts. Such a change occurs every time the availability of the Web reaches a new level.
For example, as soon as access to the Web was commercialized, anyone could go online and the Internet ceased to be the realm of academically boring science; this caused an increase in the number of users. As soon as the Internet spread throughout the world, people were able to communicate with each other, regardless of geographic location (and it was much cheaper than telegrams and phone calls); this caused an increase in availability. As soon as a significant number of Internet users felt the need to enter their creative efforts without being at the same time technical experts, the telecommunications market provided such an opportunity. As soon as broadband access became massively accessible to the public, the Internet exploded with multimedia features never seen before in the Netscape era, GIFok and dial-up modems.
The shifts thus continued up to the most recent, which I dare to call the "coming of surrogates," and here's why. We are already getting used to cloud technologies, the sudden arrival of touch interfaces for everything, smart homes and glasses, autopilot in cars, more and more miniature and more and more powerful netbooks and tablets and in general all these newfangled things. But all this wide range of technological wonders is busy serving users who spend more and more time in - yes! - Social networks.
Social Networks - this is not only the edge, aspect or side of a variety of services on the Internet. No, now it is the heart rate that is heard behind everything. How many attempts were there to invent something that would be on every web page? Now it is - a neat row of buttons "share via ..." or even "login with ...". The audience of Social Networks has reached a billion and is increasing, and will surely exceed the numbers that are hard to achieve even for radio and television on their best days. Governments use Social Networks and people listen to news from their leaders and repost them almost instantly. In Social Networks, there are wars, crimes are being committed, investigations are being conducted, lives are being lost, relationships are being established, hearts are being broken, prayers and sermons are being heard, students are learning, and so on.
In general, it is difficult to imagine what aspect of daily life does NOT occur in Social Networks, except for physiological needs, of course. How did we manage to build a full-fledged parallel reality and voluntarily settle among its surrogates? The answer seems complicated, but I simplify it this way: it became possible due to the recent paradigm shift, which brought into use a whole class of wearable and compact devices with Internet access, powerful enough to support all the interaction functions in Social Networks and web technologies available for their desktop brothers and laptops. Let me remind you, it has been only 10 years since mobile developers suffered from WML decks.
People in public transport talk less with each other or pay attention to the world around them, but more and more they check what appeared on their favorite channel, wall or news feed. But even if they notice something interesting from what is happening, it is often just a reason to record the event on video and send it to online reality faster than other witnesses. Psychiatrists begin to suspect job seekers of antisocial behavior if they do not have profiles on Social Networks, and employers are even willing to believe it.
The creator and owner of one of the largest Social Networks was recently fired for refusing to provide the authorities with information about the uprising activists who used his network to create support groups and information.
Something frightening is happening in this world, if IT enterprises reach such a global strategic importance. Imagine what happens if Google, Wikipedia or Facebook go off for one day?
Enough is enough. All this may sound as if I was going to complain about the “days of bygone and unreachables” that are a thing of the past because of the Social Networks. No, change is driving evolution. However, for evolution to lead to highly competitive solutions, it is important for it to move without limits and without control, as natural selection in the wild.
Now it's time to draw some parallels. Remember how peer-to-peer file sharing networks entered into the daily life of the Internet? Initially there was Napster. The famous pioneer of file sharing, closed by court decision, because at that time no one really cared about the survival of the network and suspected the importance of decentralization in the future. The eDonkey2000 network is disabled and its owners are fined $ 10M for the same legal and technical reasons.
Without addressing the moral aspects of file sharing (yet, the tools do not commit offenses by themselves), all this was made possible by the architectural features of the peer-to-peer networks of the time. The legacy of “client-server” architecture lives to this day, bringing unified points of control and failure to most modern network solutions.
However, the peer-to-peer community turned out to be fast learning and easy to innovate. By the time of the legal attack on The Pirate Bay, file-sharing technologies made a leap forward, eliminating the need for network management infrastructure and introducing resiliency methods that allow the network to function even when a significant number of its nodes are monitored and disabled. The eDonkey network has become less dependent on central index servers — Overnet and distributed servers have appeared. Gnutella networks were already originally developed according to the scheme of bushes and leaves, in principle, without index servers. The Kademlia network principle on distributed hash tables has received a number of applications in other peer-to-peer solutions.
The general trend is that in order to ensure the stability, durability, scalability and resiliency of the services required by a peer-to-peer network project, it should not have an obvious point of control and failure. In other words, there should in principle be no global “Off” button.
And how many modern Social Networks do without such a button? None. The reasons are quite understandable - the amount of resources and labor required to develop, implement and maintain something of the scale of Facebook or Twitter requires the same serious investments, forcing each popular Social Network to be a commercial enterprise.
Judgments about whether it is good or not are beyond the scope of this discourse, and, in general, would resemble ancient disputes between supporters of free and proprietary software, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Now, seeing the picture as a whole, one can suggest a path to the fog of the future. Sooner or later, Social Networks as a closed commercial product will meet with their alternatives. For starters, these alternatives will be frail and awkward. But the first versions of the Linux kernel were also frail and clumsy, and now only 7% of Internet web servers do not work on it.
There will be attempts to close and ban them, legally or technically. In order to survive, the basic principle of the architecture of future Social Networks must include something like a peer-to-peer distributed fault-tolerant mesh of interchangeable nodes. This principle was tested in practice, showed confidence and perspective - you can see this by checking how much global Internet traffic takes, for example, BitTorrent.
I do not deliberately delve into the technical details. We do not know what opportunities the future mobile, desktop, cloud, and any platforms that have not yet been invented can demonstrate. Today, the idea of placing several FullHD movies on a prototype amateur peer-to-peer network may seem ridiculous, because, unlike them, mainstream Social Networks can handle this very easily. But still, Torrent-TV is already on the verge of implementation, and dial-up modems are a thing of the past only ten years ago.
Developers of such Social Networks would be able to use the best aspects of the solutions that exist today - BitCoin security, Skype reliability, BitTorrent performance, and so on. The widespread adoption of IPv6 will help solve network connectivity problems caused by the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and crutches such as NAT and VPN.
I would like to see this unborn child of the Information Epoch not only as another “network in the network”, but as the biggest paradigm shift bringing Social Networks not into the role of alternative reality for escapists, but as a tool for shaping humanity and its future in the first truly distributed digital self-governing society.
Resistance is futile.
PS I read this article . The author, IMHO, is somewhat more pathetic, categorical and arrogant than it should be. And nothing goes deeper into the technical details. But it is good that the idea is in the air.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/225909/
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