The Web Is The Winner That Takes All

Brad Fitzpatrick of Live Journal, memcache, and OpenID fame posted his thoughts on creating an "open social network" for the web.

Sounds awesome. I’ve wanted that for a while now.

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. Nick Irelan

    Fred, I agree that a webwide social network would be interesting, but I am interested in hearing your opinion on the business side of it. Would Union Square invest in something like that?

  2. kid mercury

    hahahaha, just checked out your avatar. good thing the bridge didn’t attack you! although that would’ve been a great last tweet, a memorable one indeed. :)like nick in the comment above mentioned, i’m more interested in hearing about the business side of this — in other words how this creates greater economic wealth for businesses. hopefully brad’s post will lead to some more insight on that.

  3. JoeCascio

    Also read that post. Have been following the user-centric identity related developments for a while now. I think it creates greater opportunities for sites that support it because it makes users much more likely to join due to the elimination of redundant ID and password selection. Plus, if the user approves, it makes all his/her social network connections available to the site, making them “pre-approved”, in a sense. This works because their OpenId URL is their ID and already exists.

  4. Rick Burnes

    What do you think of Dave Winer’s reaction to Brad’s post?I thought Dave’s comments on Twitter were the best part of his podcast. He uses Twitter as an example of the type of network and platform that could solve the identity problems Brad spelled out. Do you agree? You mentioned Twitter’s platform in your announcement post, but focused on the communication functions. How central is the platform to your vision of the business?

    1. site tester

      test