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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
At the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, "Web services" were all the rage. But what will happen when companies get cold feet -- and the lawsuits start?
Apr 29, 2003 | I had really only one motivation to catch up with the rest of the world and purchase a DVD player last year: My kids, who don't watch much broadcast TV, love the occasional prerecorded video, and we got tired of rewinding the tapes and then fast-forwarding over the commercials at the tape's start. "Random access solves that problem," I thought. "Let's just go digital."
So there I am, after I pop in our first DVD, as the FBI warning comes into focus, pressing the Skip Forward key on the DVD control. "Straight to the good parts!"
Only nothing is happening. I pound on the button like a dummy, incredulous. I can't skip forward. The disc, I realize, won't let me.
I discovered, of course, that some recently produced DVDs have locked users out from skipping the legal boilerplate and the ads. It's actually worse than on a VHS tape, where at least you can erase the commercials. (The videotape's "no record" lock is defeated by a simple piece of tape over a hole in plastic; the DVD's bigger lock is digitally encrypted and protected by law.)
DVD is a better format, but the power in the technology is not working for me -- it's serving the commercial interests of the DVD producer. They control the horizontal. They control the vertical. They can tell me what I can skip and what I can't.
And so a simple but important advance in home entertainment technology has been crippled.
This kind of collision -- between technical innovation and the constraints imposed by entrenched interests threatened by change -- is inevitable, and it's happening ever more frequently. Many of the talks at last week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference were haunted by the specter of such conflicts.
The annual conference has become one of the key events geeks attend to tune in to the vibrations of trends on the industry's edges, where legions of software developers, underemployed in the post-bubble recession, are knitting new bits of Net together. They're worried -- rightly so -- that their flights of technological ingenuity are in danger of being grounded by short-sighted laws promoted by well-funded lobbyists.
The most prominent examples of this kind of conflict are found in the entertainment world, where the legal fight over file-sharing continues down the worst-case path as the music industry begins to sue its customers. (When I first wrote about that prospect three years ago I really thought the music companies wouldn't be self-destructive enough to choose this course.) But you can see similar battles looming even in the relatively arcane arena of Web software development.
The O'Reilly conference was a showcase for "Web services" -- that confusing but important label applied to a new generation of easy-to-build, fast-to-deploy software that pulls data from different places across the Internet and recombines it in useful and diverting ways. As the conference host and open-source-oriented publisher Tim O'Reilly pointed out, Web services provide a means for developers to "deconstruct" the static Web pages we know, disassembling them into their component parts and using them to create more dynamic, diverse and personalized information systems. Combined with the ubiquity of portable wireless devices and the spread of easy-to-use publishing tools like weblogs, Web services offer us a new way of understanding the Internet -- as a realm of real-time data that is drawn from widely disparate sources, interwoven with the physical world, and self-organizing as it goes along, all built from the bottom up with little bits of lovingly crafted code rather than imposed by corporate leviathans or structured by government bureaucrats.
It's a seductive vision and one that is beginning to emerge more clearly. When people starting talking about Web services a couple of years back, the phrase was offered as a description for how businesses would communicate with one another, transferring data across disparate systems. But now more general-purpose examples are coming to the fore -- like Dave Sifry's Technorati, which aggregates a "cosmos" of information about every weblog it indexes.
For Web services to gather momentum, holders of stores of data have to be willing to open them up to outside developers. If you want to dictate exactly how your data appears to a user -- maybe you want to sell ads, maybe you don't want to overload your servers, maybe you're just a control freak -- there's no way you're going to let the Web-services developer's script beachcomb your database.
