Simon is Chief Technology Evangelist at Sun. He’s talking about why social software is taking off now since it consists mainly of technology. Answer: the audience has changed, not the technology. It’s taken ten years for “The network is the computer”® to become the pervasive reality. It’s not enough to be massively connected. It’s also go to be based on shared, open, royalty-free and loosely standards.

We shouldn’t worry about the network’s center or edges. Instead, worry about whether there will be a digital ID scheme that anyone will use. [This is addressed to the presentation I just gave.]

Sun believes that innovation happens elsewhere because you most smart people don’t work for you. Open Source is beta for commercial software. [See correction below.] Ultimately, what matters about OS is that the license and freeness enables a community to come together to define the software for users. We should look past “free” and look into the community-based software model. There’s a big change there in how we develop software and how we own things.

A Sun experiment called MadHatter is going to see if community-based development can build enterprise-class software.

Weblogs have come into existence without working out formats and standards ahead of time. Echo is the beta test for the development of standards in a massively connected world. Now we can get everyone in the room at the same time.

Simon doesn’t worry much about digital ID. When Scott said “You have no privacy. Get over it.” he meant that we’ve given up so much privacy in the real world, why are we worrying about this next step on the Web. But we should worry about the unintended consequences of digital ID.

Q (Dan Gillmor): What are the unitended consequences of weblogging?

A: I know everything bad Dave Winer has ever said about anyone.

Q (Donald Weightman): How are blogs different from bulletin boards, etc.?

A: Only because they’re still developing.

Q (Geoff Cohen): What’s the John the Baptist out there, announcing the next big thing?

A: We haven’t begun to see what will happen when mobility and computing are blended together.

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In the comments section, Simon corrects my paraphrasing:

I think actually I said that open source is the late beta test (release candidate?) of a methodology for software development in a massively connected world, and that necho is an early alpha test for standards development in a massively connected world…

Thanks, Simon.

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