The people-centric web

According to ArcticStartup, the web is at a new crossroad where it is dominated by “dynamic, portable friend lists and non-brand-mediated identities that can be used across a range of standards-compliant websites.” This, according to the article, is in contrast to the “document-centric web dominated by static pages” to which we have grown accustomed. In the people-centric/real-time web “relevant information and friends’ activities are starting to come to users via distributed push publishing.”

ArcticStartup proposed the following key enablers of the people-centric/real-time web:

Portable profiles – hosting your identity in one place and bringing your profile and friends with you to other sites. Examples are Webfinger, OpenID, Portable Contacts, and OAuth
Distributed push publishing – asynchronous standards such as PubSubHubbub and rssCloud
Synchronized conversation threads – facilities to allow users to participate on the same conversation threads across multiple interfaces and services
Ability to use existing accounts to sign in and sign up for a service – Plaxo is given as an example of this
Sharing information and activities from one site – data, identities, relationships, and activities flowing between sites as atomic units of data exported as streams of activity
Setting up your own domain and profile – identities independent of web brands facilitated by free services such as Chi.mp and hi.im