Solid

The Solid protocol is something that I've been interested in for a few years and have a "pod" kicking around. For my personal use I'm somewhat working my way up to adopting it - it is built on top of a foundation of relatively complex technologies which make perfect sense given the purpose of the project within the universal context of the web...but my local needs are much smaller and I have the skillset to start with more direct and simple approaches. This is a similar concern to some of the related Linked Data efforts in that I'm drawn to it but there's a lot to unpack and a lot of dots to connect to realize the net value.

Professionally I've become increasingly aware of the promise of this model given the heighted sensitivity around privacy and the relatively fundamental proposition that defining mechanisms by you are able to apply value to user-owned data avoids a large number of traps and provides a somewhat natural mechanism for "decoupling" of service providers.

I'm also somewhat unsure of how much inertia the project carries - it is certainly likely to not get a lot of help from the large players that benefit from controlling data silos and some of the projects seem dated and/or stale. It certainly has some prominent names attached and seems to at least get some periodic mentions but while the model is conceptually very appealing and seemingly aligned with an active zeitgeist there may also be a long route for something pragmatic to materialize and that incarnation may be markedly different.

I'll certainly continue to explore it with a mix of optimism and the recognition that the Semantic Web still feels largely unrealized (or perhaps seemingly just recreated repeatedly in smaller less mature forms but that's still a cause to be wary).