28/03/2015
The best thing to happen to the human race in the last 50 years is an open protocol!
The best thing to happen to the human race in the last 50 years is an open protocol.
Because the best thing to happen to the human race in the last 50 years is the Internet and the Internet is an open protocol.
Why aren't we talking more about open protocols? Why aren't we getting up in the morning and creating more open protocols? Why aren't we trying to make more of these "best" things happen for the human race?
Why do so few of us even know what an open protocol is? Why are we not being told? Why are open protocols not being taught as the number one subject in our schools? Why, when we have a great idea, do we instantly say, "I'll make a website and bring loads of people to my website and get them all to interact"? Why don't we say, "I'll create an open protocol and thereby foster the creation of a whole ecosystem of applications and devices all talking to each other and assisting humans to be more efficient and have more time for fun in their lives"? Why is there so little funding for creating open protocols? Hmm?
You see, the Internet isn't magic and it didn't get created by magic nor chance. There's a clear reason why it works. It was designed to do the job it does – it was engineered into existence. There was a goal. There was a vision. And people set to work to build that vision. They brought it to reality with intention. It was created from thought. And we can do this too. Again and again. We can create more efficiency, more interoperability and more harmony in all sectors of our lives and work. We can build glue so that systems can work with each other (and are more interoperable) no matter what the application, operating system, device or manufacturer. And what do we do with all the time left over from us all being more efficient? We can have more fun, of course!
Open protocols enable us to have more control over our lives because we can't be locked into any one vendor. Email is an open protocol. The Internet (as in TCP/IP) is an open protocol. The Web (as in HTTP and HTML) is an open protocol. MIDI is an open protocol. And there are loads of other open protocols that we use every day. But Facebook and Twitter are not open protocols – they are closed systems that lock us in. But we can do way better than this. We can create open protocols that have exactly the same functionality as the closed systems that we love and use so much.
What would happen if we could just friend/connect to our friends/contacts just once and didn't have to use a third party website to do that? What would happen if we could find *all* the people offering services and things that we want rather than just who is connected to the same service, website or mailing list? What would happen if we could manage *all* of our newsletter subscriptions in one place? What would happen if we only ever had to enter our personal information once and then just point people/websites to it – rather than having to keep entering the same old information time and time again? What would happen if we had a list (in one place) of all the people/websites that had access to our personal information and we were able to remove certain privileges at will, instantly? What would happen if all computing was "user centric" rather than being "service centric"? What would happen if all our data that we create was owned by us and was portable between any service provider we choose? How much time could we all save? How much could that reduce hassle that we have in our lives? How much more secure could we be? How much more freedom would this give us?
Let's create more open protocols and let's get industry to support and use more open protocols.
