Clone: An Interesting Topic on the Web

Clone is an interesting topic for many people. Many of us may remember Star Wars series in which clones become terrible killing machines. But here we do not discuss these physical clones in Sci-Fi movies. In contrast, we are interesting in one question: do we need clones of web sites in World Wide Web?

Yesterday, Rogelio Bernal Andreo, founder of CoRank, posted an article at Read/WriteWeb in which he somehow degraded the importance of cloning. Although his arguments are fairly well self-explained in the article, I want to address another side of his arguments, i.e., web clones are important for a flourishing WWW.

Let's look at our human society. Disregarding the born-nature of individual human beings, we are producing clones, many clones, of several functional persons repeatedly. For example, at Los Angels there is a postman named John and at New York there is another postman named Peter. Disregarding that John and Peter has different tempers and personalities, they perform the same function with regard to the entire human society. If we exchange them and let John go to New York but Peter come to Los Angels, the entire society very likely keeps the same since both of them can simply perform their original functions and nobody else might care of this exchange. Therefore, John and Peter are indeed clones to each other if this discussion is with respect to the entire human society.

Besides the existence of this type of clones, a rich and complicated network such as the human society needs these existences. A crucial difference between a rich and complicated network and a simple network is their scales. In a simple network, such as within a small village, we probably need only one postman because there is a fairly small number of members. On the contrary, we definitely need more than one postman in US because of the significant larger number of people. As the result, we clone this single postman many times by, for example, our education and training system. By cloning this typical functional person (postman), we distribute a universal function (delivering mails) so that it can be well performed locally in our society.

As a richer and richer, and more and more complicated network, World Wide Web also needs this type of clones. It is fairly hopeless to assume that the advance of the distributional computation technologies could be faster than the growth of World Wide Web. In the other words, a single Google cannot solve all web search; and a single Digg cannot dig everything. We need to start thinking of the entire web as a society that is composed by many cities and towns instead of treating the web as a single village. Therefore, we indeed need (other than bury) clones, no matter they are Digg clones or Google clones. But one thing is important to these clones---they need to understand that we need only one USPS national wide, but there must be many clones of USPS offices across the nation.

We and Machine

As it was reported, Tim O'Reilly opened the keynote phase of the Web 2.0 Expo describing the Web 2.0 philosophy: "It's about building the global computing network and harnessing all the collective intelligence of all the people who are connected…. We are talking about persistent computing in which we are becoming part of a great machine."

I see more and more people starting to agree a point that I also raised in my article of web evolution, i.e., we are cloning certain degree of our consciousness into machines.

But we are not becoming part of a machine. By contrast, we are machinizing our mind and let the machinized mind compose a society which is the World Wide Web. The Web is a society while computing on the web is the aggregation of individual capabilities. Isn't it a better metaphor than watching the entire web to be a single machine?

How deep do we want to clone ourselves?

For individual web users, the evolution of World Wide Web is a history of incremental self-cloning (mentally, of course).

The traditional WWW (or we may call it Web 1.0) allows web users to create homepages to describe themselves. These homepages can show who they are and what they care about. Human readers may understand them. But there is no directly mutual communication between readers and homepages. So basically, Web 1.0 allows users to mentally clone themselves as babies.

Web 2.0 allows users to create personal accounts on various web sites. By subscribing to a web site, such as this one "blogger.com," we can not only post information describing ourselves, but also enjoy community-specific services provided by individual community organizers (such as various blogging facilities here on "blogger.com"). Moreover, these Web-2.0 accounts can actively perform various services for their owners by web feeds and widgets. From the individual point of view, it means that these accounts contain deeper implementation of humans' capabilities. This is why we can say that Web 2.0 allows users to mentally clone themselves as pre-school kids, a higher level of self-cloning mentally.

Tracing this orbit, future web evolution is going to more and more deepen this self-cloning of human web users. Users can materialize their mind, capabilities, and interpersonal relationships at deeper and deeper levels on the web. And these materializations can be behaved more and more close to their real-world copies, who are the original web users. So from one side, these online personal homepages or accounts are the virtual children of the web users. On the other side, they are actually are the mental clones of users themselves.

Now the question is: how deep do we want to clone ourselves? Do we really want to fully clone our thoughts? Will this trend lead to thinking machines? Will the nighmare of terminators become true some day? We don't know the answers yet. But the web is moving towards the answers of these questions.