Douglas Purdy

Dewitt Clinton (who I am running into more these days) posted an article (“People love Apps”) asserting that Web apps will be the dominant application model in the mobile space (as they have in the PC market).

There’s still a functionality gap right now, but there is no technical reason that mobile web apps won’t catch up. And when they do, all the advantages of being able to target multiple platforms with one codebase, all the advantages of sharing a single stack between desktop web and the mobile web, and all the advantages of HTML5 itself, will push the balance back in favor of the web.

Incidentally, the browser is already my most-used app on my Android device, but I may be an early adopter / leading indicator rather than the norm.)

Native mobile apps may be bigger and better than mobile web apps today, but they won’t be tomorrow.

Mark my words.

We’ve seen this all before.

I mostly agree with DeWitt; it is very difficult for native platforms to stay ahead of the “Web platform” (such as it is) over the long term.

But the operative phase in the above is “long term”…

One of the key factors at play between native and Web platforms is access to new hardware capabilities.

The Web platform catches up eventually (note all the mobile hardware device support in “HTML5″), but the native platform will always have “first mover advantage” to give developers access to these capabilities.

In short, the most innovative apps leveraging new hardware will be written to the native platform.

Of course, a device vendor could adopt the Web platform as their native platform (read WebOS), but apps written to this platform are not really a Web app as defined by Dewitt or as I would define it (Web app ~= works on > 1 OS && > 1 browser).

Also note, that you even see Palm creating a native platform layer for developers (mainly for games).

When Apple releases the iPhone 5 with the iNeuron connector kit, I envision the following sequence playing out:

1. Apple releases the “Cocoa Thought” framework that you can program in Objective-C
2. In 6-12 months, Apple will have Javascript/HTML extensions that work in Safari only
3. In N months, some of the other mobile browser vendors support a variant of #2
4. In N+24 months, the W3C, IETF or some other standards body agree on some variant of #3
5. The neuron interface is now part of the “Web platform”

Net:  Hardware matters.  Native apps will support new hardware sooner.  Ergo, native apps will continue to be important.

I do think that the most apps will be Web apps, but native apps are like waves cresting over that vast ocean.

We all wear masks.

We wear a mask at work.  A mask that tells people we are serious, intelligent and worth whatever we are being paid (or more).

We wear a different mask when having drinks with our friends.  A mask where we want to be carefree, free from the weight of the mask worn at work.

We wear a different mask when we are all alone with our partner(s)/spouse(s).  A mask where we can sometime share our deepest desires and fears (and often a mask where we cannot).

We even wear a mask when we talk to ourselves.  The mask that says we are simultaneously both the greatest and worst person that has ever lived (the subject for a much longer post).

When I read about privacy on social networks, I can typically unwind the issue to really be about what projections of self (a mask) that the network supports.

Most only support a few masks (public and/or friends) and often poorly.  This causes people to “under share”, use a different network for that mask, or just opt-out completely.

An interesting observation is that these masks are often (roughly) organized in a subset/superset relationship.

This observation could help make this problem more tractable, although I do believe that a network needs to enable the same level of control that I have today — essentially the ability to construct a mask for each individual in the network.

I could spend several years talking about why these masks exist in the first place (religious, cultural, biological, etc.), but social networks like Facebook or Robert Scoble are not going to make them go away.

What we need is a social network that understands these masks and supports them in a first class way.

The first one that does will become the essessial platform (a utility) for the next generation of applications.

[Update:  This is a marketing picture.  It is how we talk to customer about SQL Server.  If you understand that SQL Server is more than a database engine, this marketing picture has served its purpose.]

I have been meaning to write this post since reading Dave Winer’s post titled “Where is Twitter’s WordPress?”.

I have thought about tackling this subject from a couple of different approaches (some of which involve Joseph “Property is Theft!” Proudhon), but in the absence of a better idea, I am going right up the middle.

As a principle, I will assert that I “own” my data.  I own my contact/friends list.  I own my tweets or whatever we are calling the quanta of microbloging.  I own the blog posts I write.  I own my feed list.  I own the pictures I take.  I generally own my media (music, etc.).  I certainly own the metadata for my media (ratings, etc.).  In short, if I have produced it or purchased it (not licenced), I own it (as a first principle).

Now I am sure that an attorney (I know a few that I may get email from on a post like this) will explain that I may not actually “own” my data that is hosted on a third-party site depending on the contract that I enter into when I agreed to join.

I will sipulate to that.

That said, I will forcefully assert that I do “own” most of the things stored on my home LAN (I can think of things I licence, however) and on my hosted server on which this blog resides (modulo licenced software, etc.)

So I have to ask the a few questions…

Why do we have what I will refer to as a “data architecture” for the much of the consumer aspects of the Web that relies on third-party sites to house data that each of us already owns?

Why does the system that effectively allow these third-party sites to do whatever they please with our data?

Why don’t we have an system that is based on the fundemental principle that you own your data?

Why don’t we have a system that would enable you to control how your data is shared and used, while also allowing you to reap the benefits of a federation of users across Web also sharing similar data (on their terms)?

We could build such a system with all the basic infrastructure we have in place today (although I could think of some new MIME types I would want to introduce).

My question is why haven’t we?

And like all things, that question reduces to “Why haven’t I?”

More to come on this topic, I promise…