Tim Berners-Lee recently posted an open letter on the web, announcing the launch of Solid, a new technology platform that he and his team at MIT have been working on for the past few years, to the wider online community. Like a lot of people these days, he’s not too happy about the way our personal data is being controlled and exploited by providers of online services, but when the father of the web is telling you how it’s not gone the way he intended, you may want to prick up your ears even if you personally have no problem with the way things are. Not only that, but when he says he’s come up with something that we can use to set things right, it’s probably worth checking out.

We’ve all seen the headlines that result when a company with a business model based on aggregating and monetising personal data gets negligent or unscrupulous with the data in its possession, but these incidents are really just symptoms of a more fundamental issue concerning the architecture of basically every popular online social application out there. Even if we imagine a perfect world of ideal application providers that are completely open and honest about how they use your data and never suffer any security breaches, the fact remains that they, not you, control the data you’ve given them. You still own it, yes, but they control it.

Why is this an important distinction? The answer has to do with the coupling of your data with the specific services you’re using: you can’t have one without the other. As a result, your data is broken up into pieces that are kept in separate bins, one for each service, even when it would be really to helpful to have it all in the same place. If you want to use several services that all use the same data, you have to upload it to each one separately, and that’s assuming that you have or can get the data in a reusable format, which isn’t always the case. It would make a lot more sense to have just a single copy of the data and permit the services to access that – within privacy parameters that you have complete control of – and it would be even better if you could move your data to a different location without breaking all those services that depend on it.

Sound good? Well, the people behind Solid apparently want you to be able to do just that. Their proposed solution is based on decoupling data from applications and storing it in units called PODs (short for personal online data store). Applications built on the Solid platform can access the data in your POD if you give them permission to do so, but they don’t control the data, so they can’t impose any artificial restrictions on how you use, combine and reuse data from different sources. The end-users of Solid are thus empowered to make the best possible use of their data while retaining full control of what data they disclose and to whom, which is very much what I’m aiming for in my own research; I can easily see collaborative knowledge discovery as an app implemented on Solid or some similar platform.

So that’s the theory, anyway. What about reality? I can’t claim to have examined the platform in great depth, but at least on the surface, there are a number of things that I like about it. It’s built on established W3C specifications in what looks like a rather elegant way where linked data technologies are used to identify data resources and to represent semantic links between them – for example, between a photo published by one user and a comment on the photo posted by another. Besides your data, your POD also holds your identity that you use to access various resources, somewhat like you can now use your Google or Facebook credentials to log in to other vendors’ services, but without the dependence on a specific service to authenticate your identity. Of course, you still need to get your Solid POD from somewhere, but you’re free to choose whichever provider suits you best, or even to set up your own Solid server if you have the motivation and the means.

Whether Solid will catch on as a platform for a new class of social web apps is not just a matter of whether it is technically up to the challenge, though. The point of social media is very much to have everyone in your social network using the same applications, so the early adopters won’t have much of an impact if their friends decide that it’s just so much more convenient to keep using the apps where they already have all their connections and content rather than to switch platforms and build everything up all over again – which, of course, is precisely the sort of thinking the providers of those apps are counting on and actively reinforcing. People like me may give Solid a go out of sheer curiosity, but I suspect that the majority can’t be bothered unless there are Solid apps available that let them do things they really want to do but haven’t been able to before. Taking control of your own data is a noble principle for sure, but is it enough to attract a critical mass of users?

Then there’s the question of how the Solid ecosystem will work from a business perspective. The supply of interesting applications is going to be quite limited unless there’s money to be made by developing them, and presumably the revenue-generation models of centralised social apps can’t be simply dropped in a decentralised environment such as Solid without any modifications. We pretty much take it for granted now that we can “pay” for certain kinds of services through the act of using them and generating data for the service provider to use as raw material for services that the provider’s actual customers will pay good money for, but would – and should – this work if the provider could no longer control the data? On the other hand, would we be willing to pay for these services in cash rather than data, now that we’ve grown so used to getting them for “free”? Then again, there was a time when it was not at all clear how some of today’s multi-billion-dollar companies were ever going to turn a profit, so maybe we just need the right sort of minds to take an interest for these things to get figured out.

It’s also worth noting that Solid is by no means the only project aiming to make the web less centralised and more collaborative. There is a substantial community of researchers and developers working on solutions to various problems in this area, as evidenced by the fact that Solid is but one of dozens of projects showcased at the recent DWeb Summit in San Francisco, so it may well turn out that even if Solid itself won’t take off, some other similar thing will. I won’t be betting any money on any of the contenders just yet, but I probably will get myself a Solid POD to play with so I can get a better idea of what you can do with it.