That seemed to work out pretty well, all things considered, given Google’s $180-billion market cap. And Mike Masnick’s post at Techdirt about a Vanity Fair retrospective reminded me that it isn’t just Google: the Internet itself didn’t have a business model when it first started — and that fact, ironically, is what arguably made it so valuable that hundreds of companies are making billions of dollars from it now. As the Vanity Fair article makes fairly clear, the CERN research center came close to filing a patent on the Web and trying to control it, something that would undoubtedly have been a disaster (as one commenter at Techdirt notes, the creator of the Gopher protocol chose that path).

Whether as a result of persuasive argument from Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues, or simply because CERN couldn’t see the commercial applications of such a system — or because the research center was about research — the early building blocks of the Web remained open, and thereby helped to create a platform whose value is effectively unmeasurable, but is certainly well into the billions of dollars. The same goes for AT&T, which literally didn’t see the value of a packet-switching system, and thereby missed an opportunity to be involved at ground level in the development of the Internet. Thank God for that.

Some choice quotes:

– “I get credit for a lot of things I didn’t do. I just did a little piece on packet switching and I get blamed for the whole goddamned Internet, you know?” (Paul Baran, who developed packet switching and later invented the airport metal detector)

– “The culture was one of: You find a good scientist. Fund him. Leave him alone. Don’t over-manage.” (Leonard Kleinrock, networking pioneer)

– “I went over to Charlie Herzfeld’s office and told him about it. And he pretty much instantly made a budget change within his agency and took a million dollars away from one of his other offices and gave it to me to get started. It took about 20 minutes.” (Robert Taylor recalls when he got the idea for Arpanet)

– “The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. They pretty much had a monopoly in all communications.” (Paul Baran)

– “They said, There’s no business there, and why should we waste our time until we can see that there’s a business opportunity?” (Bob Kahn, co-developer of the TCP and IP protocols)

– “So on October 29, 1969, at 10:30 in the evening, you will find in a log, a notebook log that I have in my office at U.C.L.A., an entry which says, “Talked to SRI host to host.” If you want to be, shall I say, poetic about it, the September event was when the infant Internet took its first breath.” (Leonard Kleinrock)

– “It became very important that the world have one protocol, so they could all talk to each other. And Bob Kahn really pushed that process. And Vint. And it wasn’t licensed. They proved to the world that making something free as a driver would make a huge difference in making it a standard.” (Larry Roberts)

– “Whether it was instant messaging or chat rooms, which we launched in 1985, or message boards, it was always the community that was front and center. Everything else—commerce and entertainment and financial services—was secondary. We thought community trumped content.” (America Online founder Steve Case)

– “I’d rather not talk about it — sorry.” (Robert Morris, who launched the first Internet “worm” in 1988 while at Cornell)

– “I didn’t want yet another one of these stupid things that doesn’t tell you anything. In the end Tim said, Why don’t we temporarily call it the World Wide Web? It just says what it is.” (Robert Cailliau remembers the invention of the Web)

– “When Al Gore says that he created the Internet, he means that he funded these four national supercomputing centers. Federal funding was critical. I tease my libertarian friends—they all think the Internet is the greatest thing. And I’m like, Yeah, thanks to government funding.” (Marc Andreessen, who developed the first Web browser)

It will be interesting to see what kinds of mashups programmers will be able to come up with using maps, or images, or other services. It reminds me of the experiments that the Washington Post conducted a few years ago as part of a project called Mashington Post (a great name) or what became known as Post Remix. That was mostly aimed at different interfaces to the news, including a tag cloud, but it was still pretty cool — but just as it got going the paper seemed to lose interest and as far as I can tell none of the ideas went anywhere.

Part of me is also eager to see whether the Times can stick to its guns once the data free-for-all begins, or whether it will try to clamp down on what can be done with its API.

This is a point that Fred Wilson of A VC and others have also made, and one Fred says was originally brought home to him by a comment Umair Haque of Bubblegeneration made. “I don’t think it’s the data that’s so valuable,” he said. “It’s the flow of the data through the service.” In his post, Mark Ury compares this to an electric-power generation system, which uses dams to take advantage of water flow in order to generate power. The water never stops, it’s only momentarily delayed — and while it’s being delayed, you can make use of it. As he puts it:

The real opportunity in flow constraint, though, is putting capacity to use and amplifying the effect. Data is like a river: you can dam it and generate electricity. That’s what Google did with search. They created a machine that, as we pass through it on our way to find something, harnesses our collective energy and turns our data flow into the most powerful asset of this generation.

As Mark notes, services that try to restrict the flow of data too much wind up either having issues with control or ownership debates, and in many cases the data — just like water — routes itself around the obstruction and finds a new path (i.e., a new service that isn’t as restrictive). That’s a balance that a site like Facebook is continually trying to strike: not strict enough to cause people to take their data flow elsewhere, but just restrictive enough to allow Facebook to make use of the data before letting it move on. Tim O’Reilly has described Web 2.0 as any application or service that tends to get better the more people use it.

Update:

If you’re like me and have a hard time remembering how you got to a certain page, Gabe “Techmeme” Rivera has posted a comment with a tip: right-click the page and check “page info” and you can see the referring page (unfortunately it doesn’t help me in this case because I’ve already closed the tab).

It’s true that the site has agreed to open up its API and allow other providers such as Yahoo and Twitter to extract user data with the OAuth standard. But we’re still talking about data that resides on MySpace’s servers and therefore effectively — according to the terms of use agreement that members sign when they register — belongs to the social network. It’s nice that they are letting you use it elsewhere, but as Stacy Higginbotham at GigaOm points out, they still get to choose which services can play, since they have to agree to MySpace’s terms of service in order to get access to the API. And what if something happens and your account gets deleted for some reason?

Don’t get me wrong — it’s good that MySpace is opening up. And I think it’s great that being the first one to adopt any kind of open standard or interoperability seems to be turning into a competitive advantage. But this is very much about MySpace wanting to become the central storage point for peoples’ data, and then doling out whatever information it wants to the services that it wants to play ball with. Even the praise from the Data Portability Project seems rather faint: it says that it hopes MySpace will someday “evolve toward becoming a compliant implementation” of the project’s best practices. I hope so too.

Update:

Ben Metcalfe, who acted as an advisor to MySpace and is also a co-founder of the Data Portability group, has posted a comment here in which he corrects some misunderstandings of mine about the nature of what MySpace is doing. In particular, he says that the launch partners are not getting any kind of special deal, but were only chosen in order to “have someone to test and debug the implementation with and also have the ability to demonstrate the complete value proposition end-to-end.” Thanks for clarifying things, Ben.

“It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source, distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API.”

Why do people want to disintermediate Twitter? Dave Winer says it’s because he doesn’t like the idea of that stream of content disappearing somehow when the service is down (or when Twitter goes under), and compares the service to the Web pages that were created during the early days of the Web. Marc Canter, another cantankerous early Web guy, says Twitter needs to be decentralized and standardized because it’s as important as the DNS system behind the Internet.

Now I’m as big a fan of Twitter as the next guy — and maybe more so. But is this social network for the attention-deficit crowd, which 90 per cent of the world has never heard of, really as important as the DNS system, and so important that it can’t be left in the hands of one company? I think that’s more than a leap of logic — it’s like a double-backflip half-gainer of logic. It has to be flattering that people see Twitter as so crucial that it needs that kind of protection, but it still seems kind of… well, loopy.

It’s not that I’m not in favour of distributed apps, because I am. And if there’s a way to create a system that Twitter also plugs into, then that might be not a bad way to proceed — because as Steve O’Hear notes, anything that comes next has to respect what came before. Fred Stutzman says he doesn’t think it will work. Cindy Aleo-Carreira at Profy says that the disintermediation move is one of the downsides of the “build it and then figure out a business later” model. I think she has a point. I’d love to hear what Ev Williams thinks.