[jasonkester]

One of the cool things about the first web was that it was so simple that you could essentially do anything with it. It was originally meant to help people publish their research papers, and now here we are 20 years later doing all this stuff that the original authors never intended.

That's the good thing about it.

This guy's proposal is all about formalizing a bunch of things that we do on the web today. But there's no reason to assume that 20 years from now we'll be compiling lists of our friends online and authorizing random strangers to follow the 140-character random thoughts that pop into our head. Or shortening URLs or any of the thousands of other things we do online every day that the guys at CERN never expected us to do in 1990.

As such, the only thing this "new web" can possibly do is get stale. As a thought experiment, imagine we'd built it in 2004, and it was all about helping people create Blogs. Or we built it in 1999, so it could help you "optimize the internet" by installing spyware on your computer. Worse still, imagine the original creators put in a bunch of codified methodology to publish and critique research papers, thus making it better suited for the task it was originally intended. What exactly would we be doing with that extraneous functionality today?

So yeah, it's cool that we need a fresh start and all. Just make sure it's capable of expanding beyond the silly OpenID/oauth issues that bother us today.