SXSW 2012 - Breaking Down Walls, a Decentralised Social Web?

Breaking Down Walls, a Decentralised Social Web?
Event	Interactive 2012
Format	Panel
Organizer	Gavin Bell – gavinbell.com
Speakers	Tom Coates – product club Gavin Bell – gavinbell.com Blaine Cook – independent Evan Prodromou – StatusNet, Inc. David Recordon – Facebook
Description	The web is founded on open, decentralised principles. This means anyone can build a site that can link to any other, without any need for proprietary technology. No one owns e-mail, usenet or http, but social services like Facebook and Twitter are—for the most part—silo'd businesses with their own networks and proprietary APIs. You can join them together in code, but they're not in any way 'interoperable'. This panel will explore why large and centralized seems to dominate, whether it's a bug or a feature. We'll take a critical eye at new attempts at building distributed social web products like Diaspora. We won't be focusing on the technical specifications as much as the end user experience and the business models that could support them. If a distributed service wouldn't be fun, easy to use or profitable, then is there really any point in building one...?
Questions Answered	What are the benefits or costs of decentralised/federalised social services? Where is the business model to support these decentralised models? Does the decentralised social web make for a good experience? Can you safely build a business or a user experience on someone else's API? where are the new distributed social web products, or is this idea out of date?
Level	Advanced
Supporting Material	This google plus conversation gives a good sense of the arguments to be had https://plus.google.com/113651174506128852447/posts/LNPaSy5tdAQ
Category	Design / Development
Tags	distributed, social web, user experience

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Breaking Down Walls, a Decentralised Social Web?