Mike McCue, a veteran in the technical industry, sees an opening for a different type of internet where algorithms don't mention the photos. Mr. McCue, the Chief Executive of the internet company Flipboard, challenges the automated grip of social media to our attention, bet that people, not machines, should put together online experiences.
Three decades ago, as vice -president of technology in the groundbreaking technology company Netscape, Mr. McCue helped access to information by democratizing the World Wide Web. He now positions the new surfing browser of his company as part of a growing community of so-called decentralized social media options, in addition to emerging platforms such as Bluesky and Mastodon.
The timing can be coincidental, because online publishers struggle with an old problem and a new threat. For years they are worried that the intermediaries of the internet – huge platforms such as Facebook and Tiktok – have weakened their tires with the people who read or view their material. Now publishers are confronted with another problem: new AI systems that could completely eliminate those fraying left with their audience.
SURF offers a window on a quiet technology movement that reflects the early days of the World Wide Web. With the help of various technical on the internet that is intended to encourage the growth of a new type of social media, Mr. McCue created a potentially path where media companies can build up direct relationships with readers.
In contrast to the current social web, which is dominated by a few large technology companies, the new software protocols may seem a bit incredible for the time being. But they make it possible for internet users to communicate and share information without trusting a single centralized service.
One of the new technical standards is known as ActivityPub. Social media platforms that use the protocol can talk to each other, so that users can communicate seamlessly on different networks – comparable to how E -mail works with different providers.
ActivityPub was formalized in 2018 by the World Wide Web Consortium, an organization for technological standards. The standard initially attracted scarce interest. But Elon Musk's Acquisition of Twitter, now known as X, created an exodus of users and publishers in 2022 who are looking for alternatives.
With Surf Surf, telephone, tablet and personal computer users can put together feeds from different sources in a single dashboard-like display. It will also enable them to publish personally compiled collections of information.
Surf is still being tested privately by Mr. McCue's small company, which is planning to offer the program free later this year. Although the open social movement is still small, the attention has been given every time there is a disturbing event, such as the purchase of Twitter by Mr. Musk.
Decentralized social media received a substantial momentum in 2023 when Meta announced the ActivityPub-Standard for its X-competitor, Threads and later, plans to get in touch with other services based on activity pub. What Mr. McCue calls the “Open Social Web” already has more than 300 million participants, he estimated, and most of them are now meta's threads users.
The shared purpose of leading users from Silo's accelerated with the recent success of Bluesky, which was launched the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in 2023. Although it is built on a rival standard that is known as the AT protocol, a bridge has already been built between the two protocols to make it possible for users of the social media services to connect.
“Everyone has just copied each other's characteristics in walled gardens, but now innovation will be decentralized around the human connection,” said Mr. McCue in an interview.
Mr. McCue, 56, was co-founder of Flipboard as a digital news aggregator in 2010. He made a career to be early to use changes in internet technologies. He started paper software to make it possible to visually display 3D information in web browsers and then sold the company to Netscape for $ 20 million in 1996.
In 1999 he was co-founder of Tellme Networks, a groundbreaking effort to create what was described as a “speech browser” and to make it possible to receive internet information over the phone. That company was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for a rumor $ 800 million.
One of the most important possibilities of the Open Social Web is that it will enable companies to step away from invasive advertisements, Mr. McCue said. He describes the alternative as “contextual” advertising for certain interests instead of individuals. For example, ADS can be placed on webfeeds focused on topics such as backpacking or fashion.
“The idea of creating an audience instead of hunting traffic is something we have investigated,” said Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, a popular news and media website. “Activity pub can facilitate that by making more direct and meaningful involvement with our readers possible.”
In addition to Meta's decision to base Threads on ActivystuPub, news organizations such as Bloomberg and the BBC started experimenting with technology, just like blog platforms such as Medium, WordPress and Ghost.
ActivityPub has also led to a wave of start-up efforts such as Mastodon, a microblog service that now has more than 14 million accounts connected by a network of more than 14,000 host computers, as well as startups such as Pixelfed and Peudube, distributed services that are similar to Instagram and YouTube.
Since a few decades, the dominance of Google has been the search for internet the driving force behind making and distribution of content. But because Google has invested in a generative-AI summary for answers to users' questions, a chance for all types of discovery aids, in addition to chatbots, has made the need for alternatives more urgent.
That is far removed from the very early roots of the World Wide Web in the work of Theodor H. Nelson, who, although a graduate student of Harvard in 1961, noticed that text could move on the first computer monitors and that writing no longer had to be linear. He invented the HyperText concept, which was later assumed as the underlying structure of the World Wide Web. The designers of the new open social web services believe that their alternative is one step back to the original ideals of the internet.
“It goes back to the original principles where the internet started as decentralized,” said Eugen Rochko, the inventor of Mastodon, an open-source social network platform with which users can join independently operated servers while staying connected via a worldwide network.
The transition from centralized to decentralized models requires a cultural shift among both publishers and the public.
“There are important product questions to solve, such as how to deal with discovering moderation and content in a decentralized environment,” said Mike Godwin, a lawyer known for his work on internet rights and digital culture. “But these are the kind of new problems that we need to be confronted with that come up with real innovation.”
Despite these challenges, the enthusiasm among the early adopters reminds some internet pioneers of the first few years of the World Wide Web.
“The energy around Activitypub reminds me of the early days of the web,” said Mr. Nelson in a recent interview, “where everything seemed possible and innovation was around every corner.”
