The internet is a big onion 🧅. It’s made of layers slowly but surely stacked at every new iteration. The layers are themselves more or less (de)centralized. But what is decentralization? I would frame it as the absence of a single point of…| ouvre-boite.com
The Graph is a very ambitious and powerful web3 project. It is an indexing protocol for querying data from networks like EVM blockchains (Ethereum), or IPFS. Anyone can build and publish open APIs, called subgraphs, making data easily…| ouvre-boite.com
Crypto had a bad rep. There are many reasons why, but i also think it’s misunderstood, both by its critics (haters?) and fans (cultists?). The misunderstandings often comes from half-truths used as marketing material in order to promote the…| ouvre-boite.com
The arrival of Elon Musk as Twitter’s new CEO has been a watershed moment in the history of Twitter. The company became private again, he fired thousands of employees and thousands more have decided to quite after the first few days of…| ouvre-boite.com
Rather than write about web3 again, I want to write about web1: the 90's. At that time, I used something called Communicator. You can think of it as a suite of internet clients and applications. Of course, it had Navigator, a web browser, but also a Messenger for emails, a news client, and even a push system.| ouvre-boite.com
The H in HTTP and HTML is for Hypertext. Hypertext is text with “references” to other documents, usually about the same topic. It creates a network of related content that Google’s PageRank algorithm leverages to sort results on search…| ouvre-boite.com
Blockchains are forever. Once a transaction gets mined, it’s stored permanently. The NFT that you purchased is in your wallet until you, and nobody else, sends it to someone else. Actually, even when you send it to someone else, its public…| ouvre-boite.com
Before 2008, I was a banker. I worked for BNP Paribas, one of the largest banks in the world. When the so called “sub-prime” crisis exploded in our faces, one thing became clear: we’d built a financial system which was not rooted in reality…| ouvre-boite.com
SEO has a bad rep. Yet, it is an incredibly powerful tool that can drive web traffic like no other channel. It is also one of the few areas where a deep knowledge of the Open Web stacks is required to have a tremendous impact. You cannot do…| ouvre-boite.com
If you’ve read Yuval Noah Harari, you know Homo Sapiens’ most unique characteristic is their ability to collaborate at scale, through space and time. This is arguably what lead us to colonize all five continents and bend nature to fit our…| ouvre-boite.com
Or, an attempt at convincing my friends who care about open source software that blockchain and smart contracts are the future of our work. 10 years ago, I was starting my previous company, Superfeedr. For those but familiar with it, it’s a…| ouvre-boite.com
Want more context? read this first (3 minute read): 20 years I wrote how I believe blockchain and distributed ledger technologies may be the next once-every-20-year paradigm change. These waves have an extraordinary impact precisely because…| ouvre-boite.com
Every tech company under the sun (Californian or otherwise) is betting their future on Artificial Intelligence. Google for example, invests in hardware (Tensor Processing Units), software and even algorithms like AlphaZero. Facebook, Amazon…| ouvre-boite.com
In 2017 the Blockchain world bloomed with many token offerings. The general idea behind these is that innovative networks could get some kind of seed money by selling initial tokens to investors. These Utility Tokens are designed to be…| ouvre-boite.com
If you’ve even remotely ever played with open source software you are very familiar with the idea of forking. The base principle is that for some kind of open source software, anyone is free to alter that code in however way they see fit…| ouvre-boite.com
The blockchain is a decentralized database whose data can be trusted because it is the sum of other previously recorded transactions. That data can then be used as an input for all sort of transactions (called smart contracts). Yet, one of…| ouvre-boite.com
I won’t travel by plane, because when they crash, a lot of people die. I’d much rather drive my own car. There is absolutely no doubt that plane crashes are spectacular and awfully painful. Yet, when comparing to other means of…| ouvre-boite.com
If it happened, it will be remembered and found again. The “right to forget” battle is lost. The next one is the “duty to forgive”. Every year that passes confirms what we’ve collectively known for a long time now: the technologies we use…| ouvre-boite.com
Today’s web is very different from what it was 8 years ago. We’ve said it several times: publishing and consuming content are new frontiers for most of the web giants like Facebook, Google or Apple. We consume the web from mobile devices…| ouvre-boite.com
In the late 80’s my dad brought a MacPlus from work. Before that, I think I had played with a Minitel, but without being authorized to connect to the phone network. Later, in the mid 90’s, my mom bought a Performa 6200. It came with a…| ouvre-boite.com
The encryption debate is fascinating. The arguments on both ends are sound. I tend to side more with Apple on this because I think that the current technical answers from the FBI-side are not satisfactory: a door is a door for everyone. Yet…| ouvre-boite.com
8 years ago, I started building what is now Superfeedr. It was the early days of Twitter and Facebook, blogs were still in their early adopter’s phase and the big chat networks were AIM, Y! Messenger. Google Talk was gaining in popularity…| ouvre-boite.com
It’s probably obvious to everyone, but when we perform online searches, we’re looking at the past. Published in the past This is probably the most obvious factor: for search engines to display results, they have to know about them… which…| ouvre-boite.com
To us, web developers, the web browser is a very complex application which implements countless protocols and specs to display content from an incredible amount of different websites. Its very nature is to be decoupled from the content it…| ouvre-boite.com
Hello World| ouvre-boite.com
This post is the text version of a talk I’ve been giving at several conferences (and I plan to give it a couple more times). I have spent many years observing and building things on the web and this is one of the main trends I’ve been…| ouvre-boite.com
In the very last couple years, messaging has been one of the eldorados of the web: whether it’s Snapchat, Whatsapp, Kik, or even Twitter, there has been no shortage of new messaging apps. Put aside that they’re all closed silos which limit…| ouvre-boite.com
The future of digital identity should not be determined by one company In a pretty long post my friend Chris Messina shares his disapointment with Google+. I’ve always had these weird feelings about Google+, and I think Chris words reflect…| ouvre-boite.com
As you probably be know by now I’m a very strong open web advocate. I also believe strongly that software is eating the world and that old organisations and artificial barriers are being violently disrupted by the web and its very nature of…| ouvre-boite.com
This piece was initially published on Medium. I’m resharing here, for when Medium will go away… These days, two-factor-auth is the new black. Yet, it’s not always practical, kind of disturbing and not very fun. Let me try to propose a fun…| ouvre-boite.com
This piece was initially published on Medium. I’m resharing here, for when Medium will go away… We all know that RSS and openness are key to the web’s resilience and independence, yet the RSS ecosystem is still shrinking. It’s because of us…| ouvre-boite.com
This piece was initially published on Svbtle. I’m resharing here, for when Medium will go away… It’s fascinating to see patterns appear on the web, and to see how quickly they propagate. You probably remember the clickable-top-left logo…| ouvre-boite.com
How Google’s engineering arrogance often sweats through some of their most popular products and breaks the web. I am lucky enough to have founded two amazing web companies with lots of users. Superfeedr is clearly geared toward nerds, but…| ouvre-boite.com
The free web curse must come to an end. There is a price on everything we use and consume, why wouldn’t that be true for the web. I have had this discussion over and over with a lot of people in our industry: a lot of what we see as…| ouvre-boite.com
This is not a dumb question, but we’re dumb to not answer it! The tech crowd is often very arrogant. Sometimes, we’re so arrogant that we expect everyone to understand (and care) about technical details. We do that so much that we use…| ouvre-boite.com
The debate around web3 and NFT is raging. Unfortunately, too often, it’s just engagement farming. Still, I see a regular criticism that (and I hope I rephrase correctly) goes like this: The web is already too “capitalistic” why would adding…| ouvre-boite.com
Let’s start with a little caveat: web3 is many things to many different people, exactly like web 2.0 was. Web 2.0 is also very different now from what it was meant to be and web3 could follow down a similar path. What’s interesting though…| ouvre-boite.com