Big thanks to Patrick Rivera, Jarrod Dicker, Raphael Menezes, and Dan Shipper for their help writing this post. Follow me on Twitter or subscribe to Penguins and Rabbit Holes to hear more thoughts on building public knowledge in the future.
Interoperability is the connecting thread of the future of the social web. It’s the reason Facebook and Twitter are not so secretly working to fundamentally transform their current products. It’s the argument I’ll give for the crypto publishing platform Mirror — where this post is published — being undervalued, despite raising a round at $100M a year after launch. Interoperability is the idea that to succeed in the future, builders will design individual lego pieces rather than entire sculptures.
The world of consumer tech can feel impossible to keep up with at the moment: NFTs, social tokens, crypto wallets, AR/VR, the metaverse. Those terms describe new products and experiences and will continue to change, but interoperability is the core mechanism that brings them together. It will drive the next wave of products, including and especially science where I spend most of my time.
So I’m going to try and make interoperability as cool as a pixelated punk. I want to lay out the steps to a tipping point — where you wake up one day and the internet is almost unrecognizable from how it is now. And to make those steps as concrete as possible in this abstract world, I’ll do it through the lens of Mirror, a company with a vision that makes the opportunity of interoperability obvious.
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In essence, “interoperable” means multiple products or services can make use of the same information.
Take healthcare as an example. If I choose to switch doctors because my current one is a hack, I want my new doctor to have access to all of my medical history. It matters because it fosters competition and allows a more diverse ecosystem to evolve. My doctors should compete based on who can make me healthiest, not who has exclusive access to my data. Healthcare also illustrates the challenge interoperability has faced with privacy, but more on that later.
As Ben Thompson notes in The Web’s Missing Interoperability, interoperability was actually one of the core benefits mentioned at the start of the last wave of consumer tech, what many refer to as Web2.0. But we didn’t get interoperability from the big Web2 giants of Facebook, Twitter, and the like. We got almost the exact opposite — business models built on capturing data, storing it in private databases, and charging advertisers for access to it. We are quick to point the finger at Facebook or Twitter, but blaming them is hardly different than blaming McDonalds for the rise of fast food. The system and especially consumer pressure clearly didn’t create the incentives for interoperable technology to thrive.
More than a decade later at the dawn of Web3, consumer demand for a healthier internet is growing and there are a few important data points that suggest interoperability at scale is finally possible. First, we see that the giants are exploring this space with quite a bit more energy and openness than you might expect. Twitter — via their “BlueSky” project — is very openly researching how to build an open and interoperable standard for social media. Zuckerberg has recently been talking about Facebook becoming "becoming a metaverse company."
The simple reason the social giants even consider such bold new directions is because interoperable graphs are better for creators, and creators are the scarce resource in the quickly arriving next iteration of the internet. The most valuable asset in a world of interoperable data will be the complex business relationships creators establish between their content, other creators, and their audience. Subscribers will be replaced by supporters, angel investors by angel audiences, and collaborators by co-owners. Big tech is many things but dumb isn’t one of them, and the giants realize that tapping into those flows of money is where the trillions will be made in the future.
To be clear, it’s hard to imagine how the transition to interoperability actually happens at these existing giants. While they have been building lots of new features in line with the creator-centric strategy above — tipping, subscriptions, funding for creators, better business tools — only time will tell whether they’ll be able to execute the dramatic shifts they are pretty openly exploring.
The next question after “is it possible?” is “why should we care?” What would happen if Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the rest all opened up their vast databases? What new types of products could we imagine getting as creators and consumers from a more interoperable world? Just a few examples to paint a picture:
Interoperability at scale is possible, and it can enable a healthier and more diverse product ecosystem. As As Jarrod Dicker notes, it remains to be seen whether Web2 will still exist in the future as a parallel to Web3. But it’s clear Web3 is coming, and ultimately whether it is a full replacement will come down to what we as creators and consumers value from our media. So the next step is to take a look at the changing preferences and pressures that are starting to allow interoperability to become mainstream.
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