Ruben’s Blog| ruben.verborgh.org
Never mind the data economy. Data is unfit to form a proper marketplace: copyable goods cause an infinite supply that leaves a deeply confused demand. Meaningful trade only happens when two sides believe and expect they both stand to gain from every exchange. With data, it feels like some are always giving and others always taking. Is that because a broken marketplace makes trade fundamentally impossible? Yes. But this post is not a plea for giving up; it’s a focused manifesto for doing bet...| ruben.verborgh.org
Today’s websites and apps are built to compensate for an absence of trust, rather than to support its growth. Customers and companies both understand that human handshakes no longer scale in the digital age, and surrender to their replacement by a tap of the finger on a button labeled I accept. While every handshake comes with an expectation of honesty, this button never did: we know we are lying the moment we touch it, as does the author of the legalese no one expects anyone to read. Navig...| ruben.verborgh.org
Data without context is meaningless; data without trust is useless. 2017-12-18 is nothing but a string—until it becomes a birthdate, a wedding, or the moment a security camera registered you. Handling such highly personal data requires trust. When your personal data is shared with someone, you must be able to trust that they will only use it in the way you agreed to. When someone receives your data, they must be able to trust that it is correct and that they are allowed to use it for the in...| ruben.verborgh.org
Who decides what your Solid pod looks like? For a long time, the answer has been the first one who writes, decides. That is, the first app to sculpt documents and containers in your pod determines where other apps need to look for data. Unfortunately, this creates an undesired dependency between apps, which now have to agree amongst each other on how to store things. Yet Solid promises apps that will seamlessly and independently reuse data in order to provide us with better and safer experien...| ruben.verborgh.org
Web services emerged in the late 1990s as a way to access specific pieces of remote functionality, building on the standards-driven stability brought by the universal protocol that HTTP was readily becoming. Interestingly, the Web itself has drastically changed since. During an era of unprecedented centralization, almost all of our data relocated to remote systems, which appointed Web APIs as the exclusive gateways to our digital assets. While the legal and socio-economic limitations of such ...| ruben.verborgh.org