Imagine that the Internet with all its billions of pages is a 3D world that you can physically visit, where the pages are actual places and that the relations (links) between the pages are roads you travel on. Today this world is dark, there is no light. When you get to a page you can read what’s there, you can use the functionality provided by the webmasters and sometimes you can interact with others – but only if the owners of the page allow you to comment, chat or interact in any other way. So, except from the opportunities given to you by the page owners, Internet today is seemingly dead. You cannot see the others visiting the same page as you. You cannot see who is travelling from one site/page to another at the same time. Even if the Web is full of life with billions and billions of movements, events and people, it appears dead to you. The Open Web Layer architecture makes all these things visible. The Open Web Layer is the light switch that turns the black and dead world alive and makes everything visible to all of us.

So if we go back to the imagined 3D world: while visiting cnn.com you can see all others present there at the same time. You also see who’s coming and who’s leaving. You can also talk to them, you can comment, like, tag and do all the things previously only possible if the site owners allowed you. And since cnn.com is related to bbcnews.com (because it is about news) you can see the sign to bbcnews.com, the road to it, you can even see it on the horizon some hundred meters away, and you can see that the people are flocking around bbcnews.com and you can either go there to see what’s going on or you can ask someone who is there (or was there) what’s going on. Why are people swarming around bbcnews.com right now? Also a great benefit is that the relations (links) between cnn.com and other places online are not anymore added and decided by the site owner (cnn.com) but are added, decided and rated by the users themselves. so what you get is relations much more relevant than ever before. You don’t need to spend so much time searching, because the others have already done that. The roads are built by the people who travel in this imaginary world. So in short, the Open Web Layer turns the light on and lets you see and interact with the swarming life that already exists on the Internet. The Open Web Layer fixes what we see as a fundamentally wrongly designed system from the start of. They forgot to turn on the light.

For about a years’ time, we’ve been working on a web application called StormDriver.com where you can experience the Open Web Layer. In StormDriver you can login, visit your favorite online places and experience the world I described above. It is technically a very difficult task but we are moving fast towards the first public version. Currently we are in the pre-registration phase, so if you want the first glimpse into the Open Web Layer register now at StormDriver.com.