[benwerd]

This. This is the web I care about. The principles that keep me doing what I do for a living. I love this web, and how it works.

But the thing is, I love the web we have now, too. I love the interconnectedness and the fact that you don't need to be technical to find, share and create amazing stuff. You just have to have imagination and humanity.

So, let's go back. Let's take the web we've got today, and let's consciously retrofit it with the plumbing we had back then. Let's take the services we all work on and stick in those APIs. Let's make it all work better together, so that the sum of all the web applications is far more than all the web applications separately.

Think about the back-end services we all value: Stripe. Twilio. AWS. What unites all of them is that they're incredibly simple to develop with, and to connect into other applications. That's why Twitter succeeded in the beginning, too: because its API was simple enough that people could build apps for the nascent mobile app ecosystem. This is good for all of our products, as well as for the web's health as a platform.

It's not hard. That's the beauty of it: all these APIs and standards are simple to build and simple to use. That's why they survived. All that has to happen is an understanding that being closed is not a better way to serve your users or run a tech business.