Scoble says the dream of a common web is gone. We now have pretty web gardens with big high walls around them, often with no way to get your data out much less make it interchangeable. You want one central repository for all your contacts across all platforms? There’s no way to do that now. Scoble says that window of opportunity passed in 2008 and the web is the worse for it. And there’s no way to go back.
The lesson today, four years later, is that the common web is in grave threat, not just from Facebook’s data roach motel but from Apple’s and Amazon’s and, now, Google.
It’s too late. Now, excuse me, while I crawl back into the trunk that Google, Facebook, Amazon have locked me in.