Ben Francis

Ben Francis

@tola.me.uk

Krellian Founder. W3C Invited Expert on Web Apps and the Web of Things. Previously: Mozilla & Google. https://tola.me.uk

163 followers116 following207 posts

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

My only reservation is that applying to this to all websites (rather than installable web apps which self-declare as an app using a manifest) dilutes the perceived value of "web apps" as a competitor to "native apps" because they are "just websites".

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Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

They have a unique funding model driven by Programme Directors with total control and flexibility to shift, scale, or cut funding rapidly based on real-time results. They assemble teams of complimentary researchers from different organisations to maximise the chance of success.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

Their remit is fund the "edge of the possible" and back high risk/high reward research which is too speculative or risky to be funded in other ways. They are tackling huge problems like a cure for the common cold, climate cooling, synthetic biology and mathematically safe AI.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

I've had a great time at #TechNExt26 this week. High quality production, some thought provoking talks, and most of all good conversation. Thank you to everyone who came to my talk yesterday about the #WebOfThings and Krellian's #SmartBuilding solutions.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

- Hardware is hard - Software doesn’t stand still - Hosting public infrastructure is tough - Community is like herding cats - Cash flow kills - Defining international standards takes time

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

We tried to do all of these impossible things at once and it took an embarrassingly long time to get there, but I am now really excited to put a real product in people’s hands.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

Trillionaires should not exist. It would take the average American 16 million years to earn $1tn. There is no way that one human can be "worth" that much more than another human, no matter what they have achieved.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

Just two weeks until my talk at TechNExt Festival, "Making Buildings Smarter with the Web of Things" www.technext.co.uk/programme/ev... If you're interested in smart buildings or the Web of Things, please join me for this free talk at the The Catalyst in Newcastle on Thursday 18th June.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

Where does this lead? It seems like either: a) People stop making websites, LLMs are trained on the output of LLMs and the models collapse b) Some other business model emerges to fund the web beyond ads

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

Did Lean Startup get a conscience? www.incorruptible.co As someone who has been trying (and often failing) to follow the Lean Startup methodology for many years it has raised lots of questions for me about speed vs. long term impact. I am looking forward to reading this book.

incorruptible.coIncorruptible by Eric Ries — Why Good Companies Go BadEric Ries's new book — Incorruptible — on why successful companies turn on their founding values, and how to build ones that don't. Out May 26.
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Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

I'll also talk about how Krellian are helping facilities managers of commercial buildings to meet their net zero targets whilst saving money, by optimising space utilisation and reducing energy consumption using smart building technology. #SmartBuildings #NetZero

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

I will be talking about how the Web of Things provides a universal application layer for the Internet of Things that apps, services and AI agents can use to interact with the physical world. #IoT #WoT #Data #AI

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

I did think $10/month was a bit too good to be true. I don't feel good about a future where developer productivity is a function of which LLM you can afford to subscribe to, but also even Microsoft seem to be struggling to make the numbers work to make it a sustainable business.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

Very excited at the prospect of the Web Thing Protocol joining a standards track at the W3C, as the "WoT Thing Protocol". This would be the next step towards standardising a universal web-based application layer protocol for the Web of Things. #WoT #IoT lists.w3.org/Archives/Pub...

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

A reminder that whilst countries fight reckless wars and set fire to gas fields and oil refineries, our climate is being pushed beyond its limits. Humans living on the surface are only experiencing 1% of the dangerous global heating. #ClimateCrisis www.theguardian.com/environment/...

theguardian.comEarth being ‘pushed beyond its limits’ as energy imbalance reaches record highState of the Climate report finds Earth’s energy has moved dangerously out of balance, with oceans absorbing vast majority of trapped heat
Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

My microblogging is split across Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky. Twitter (I refuse to use its porn name) is full of vitriol, Mastodon is all geeks and Bluesky feels like a political bubble. Conversations feel fragmented, engagement is rock bottom and it's just not the same.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

I feel like if we could just settle on one protocol (or at least bridge to the extent that it doesn't matter), bringing Mastodon and Bluesky together could really help.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

I've been working on the first time setup for Krellian Hub, which involves creating a temporary Wi-Fi hotspot and captive portal, before connecting to another Wi-Fi network. It turns out that not even Claude can figure out how to use the NetworkManager DBus API. 😩

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

I recently found myself writing a desktop app, and realised that for the first time in my career I could actually implement the Model View Controller design pattern as it was originally intended (as opposed to the disjointed approximations we use in web apps).

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

I'm afraid to say this led to an hours-long debate with Gemini about the "right" way to implement MVC, where the LLM kept contradicting itself and going round in circles. It reached the point where it was literally saying one thing and then doing the opposite in its example code.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

In this blog post I take a deep dive into the last 10+ years of standardisation, how we got where we are today, and why I believe the Web of Things is still missing an essential component due to a subtle misunderstanding about what makes the web the web.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

I explain how I think we can put the “web” back in the “Web of Things” with a universal web-based application layer protocol, enabling an open ecosystem of IoT web services which weave together the rich tapestry of the IoT rather than cementing the current fragmented landscape.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

The Web of Things started with the simple but powerful idea of giving connected devices URLs on the web, to extend the World Wide Web of pages into a web of physical objects which can be monitored and controlled over the internet.

Ben Francis
@tola.me.uk

The WoT Working Group has made great progress in standardising building blocks for discovering and describing connected devices, but when it comes to communicating with them we've become stuck describing existing IoT protocols rather than defining something native to the web.