The Internet and Social Media

FUTO is developing a vision for social media and the future of publishing online.

The web was created to allow anyone to publish ideas and art. In the 1990s everything was posted by creators on their own website. Indexers like Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and Google would help people find their work. It was a much more level playing field with fierce competition amongst the indexers to help consumers find creations and creators were the ultimate arbiters of how their work was treated.

Since then corporate greed has yielded data silos where content is crowd sourced and then indexed by the owner of the silo, with little respect for the creators from whom the content was taken. This has happened with all forms of creation: Videos, microposts (Twitter), comments, blogs, podcasts, music, games, software (App Stores and Github). Even Wikipedia edits are a special case of this. To varying degrees, a creator cedes ownership of their creation to the silo the moment they post it.

FUTO endeavors to create infrastructure for creators to have their content hosted by someone else but the creator retains full ownership. We will aggressively assault the legacy silos who abuse their creators with both PR and tools that work to break the silos. We have the opportunity to have a huge impact by having an almost pathological focus on respecting creators. We want creators to feel like they are publishing to the world, and we want multiple indexers competing with each other to do a good job connecting consumers to creators and their content.