The magic of hypertext was the ability to suddenly make a glorious, if somewhat unstructured, whole from a mountain of disconnected data. And so we end up with the web, and the ability to lose hours bouncing in to Wikipedia and ending up God knows where.

This is a much nicer approach than the old world, with its disconnected computers and systems, each man being but an island. However, I can't but notice a nasty slide back to this world, only this time we'll be stranded on different platforms.

The much-hyped 'Web 2.0' is the worst offender. Google Reader for instance - fantastic application, but your data ends up in a silo. Newsgator have a better idea here with the ability to synchronise data, but lack a Linux client and have but a rather basic web client. And the social networking sites take this to extremes - I have a presence on the web. Here. Why, should I want to join MySpace (heaven forfend) or Facebook (which seems suddenly very trendy), do I need to create another one?

Would a true networking site not allow me to draw my disparate services together: mix in my homepage feeds with my LinkedIn profile, my IMAP e-mail and my Flickr photos? Let me manage my contacts via iSync and track down my friends via this data source? Let me read my news via the best tool, whether I'm on the web, my computer or my phone?

There is some movement: Facebook have their new API but it is still rooted on their platform - you draw data in to them, not out. Flickr are fairly open, to their credit. Google, surprisingly, aren't - POP mail in GMail looses you your valuable filing metadata, and you are completely buggered with respect to Google Reader.

I guess in a way in all comes back to the Semantic Web - if you can exchange data freely then all sort of interesting things will pop up. While you silo it a huge amount of energy is wasted on duplication. And that's bad for all involved.

(We apologise for the sloppy writing in this post. It's that sort of day...)