rePost::Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

On any given day, you’ll find about 30 or 40 of them on an IRC chat channel, and each summer, they come together in the flesh for this two-day mini-conference, known as IndieWebCamp. They hack. They demonstrate. They discuss. They strive to create a new set of tools that can give you greater control over the stuff you post to the net — the photos, the status updates, the blog posts, the comments. “The Indie Web is a community of folks interested in owning their own content — and identity — online,” says Tantek Celik, another developer at the heart of the movement.
They ask questions like: What happens if Yahoo freezes your online account, loses your data, or goes out of business? What happens if you decide to move all your Facebook photos to another site? What if you want to reply to someone on Twitter using Google+? And then they build software that answers these questions.
Paul Fenwick at this summer’s IndieWebCamp. Photo: Aaron Parecki
At this year’s camp, Fitzpatrick and fellow Googler Bret Slatkin showed off Camlistore, an open source alternative to cloud storage services like Google Drive. The aim is to give people software that works like Google Drive — that gives you instant access to your files from any machine — but that doesn’t lock you into the Google way of doing things, and that always plays nicely with other services across the web.
That may seem like an odd undertaking for two people employed by Google. But this is how many Googlers think, harboring the unshakably idealistic view that the needs of the web as a whole are more important even than those of the web company they work for.
The Indie Web movement isn’t about sticking it to Google or Facebook or Twitter. It’s about creating a web that behaves like a single entity. After Fitzpatrick and Slatkin uncloaked their creation, a third Googler, Will Norris, showed off a WordPress plugin that lets you instantly grab posts from the open source blog platform and move them onto Google+, the search giant’s social network.
Many people who work for Google, Facebook and Twitter, Norris says, “live the Indie Web.”
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