“I also wonder - is a centralised pipe the ‘way of the internet’. Should we be looking for a ‘distributed method’ where we cross reference our content in a feed, pointing at it in the different location rather than distributing it from a single source.”

This is a question I struggled with for a while myself - I’m a strong believer in the ’small pieces, loosely joined’ philosophy. But what I came to realize is that there is no contradiction here because the web is being effectively being turned inside out. The old model was of a distributed audience browsing to centralized portals/pages. So new model is of distributed apps browsing (centralized) people. This model recognizes the pre-eminence of the individual and the very nature of what makes social software work.

The old web, the ‘wide’ web was a library, a static reference to ‘dead’ (archived) words. The new web, the ‘live’ web is a nervous system for the global mind. And human beings are the nodes.