The Internet for future generations from a ‘Father of the Internet’

At the first annual Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco, industry giants gathered to discuss the future of the Internet and our increasingly complicated relationship with it. Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, was a keynote speaker and shared his thoughts with the audience; he stressed the influence that collaborative communication through information subscription could have on how we communicate in the future. As the internet continues to decentralise, the need to free data from files becomes more important than ever.

Continue reading to learn more about how ipushpull enables collaborative communication and allows users to publish or subscribe to sources of data using its platform’s features…

Collaborative communication and  information sharing

Cerf touched upon the need for “collaboration and cooperation [as being] enormously essential towards the creation of the net” and its continued development. The internet processes information and data disjointly and in limited correspondence. This is a problem iPushPull recognised: businesses were not communicating efficiently due to the difficulty of sharing live data between commonly-used applications. Our solution was to create a live Microsoft Excel data-sharing platform that eliminates the need to email files around.

The ability for information to be changed and propagated instantly to other co-editors on a project creates a virtual stream of consciousness as teams work together. Real-time publication of changes to all interested parties improves communication and creates cohesion of content. ipushpull’s live content sharing platform takes edits being made by your coworkers and updates your working data – automatically. Your team’s content will always be available to the whole team and, thanks to the live updates, everyone will always have the latest version.

 “Think about some sort of publish/subscribe system, in which a web page creator can regularly hit a publish command that makes it available for archiving, and various web archives can subscribe to receive updates.”

– Vint Cerf 

Publishing and subscribing to information

At the core of Cerf’s keynote address was the topic of archiving information and web pages on the internet for future generations of users to view. At the centre of this dilemma are questions revolving around privacy and the frequency of archiving content. While most users will agree they don’t want every iteration of their work archived, a happy medium is hard to find.

Cerf proposed some sort of publish/subscribe system wherein a web page creator can regularly hit a publish command that makes their information available for archiving and various users can subscribe to receive live updates. The iPushPull platform’s versioning capabilities allow users to save versions of the live updating data their team is working on whenever they choose. Once their Excel sheet is configured to their liking, they can subscribe to the source data and can version at their own pace/will based on their needs.

The first, but certainly not last of its kind, the Decentralized Web Summit began the conversation of how we share content online and the issues we need to address as communication networks continue to expand.