Riding the Web Evolution: From Egoism to Altruism

Internet and the latest correlated technologies, such as Web 2.0, represent inventions that have changed the world with their social contribution. Yet, digital divide and cyber-balkanization are Internet's discriminatory phenomena well known by field experts. In addition, we want now to raise the attention on the actual employment of these technologies: the vast potential within the Internet is currently dispersed in millions of applications devoted to frivolous and egocentric utilizations. Being (almost) the only use people have made of the most pervasive communication system ever made, this represents an unacceptable waste of opportunities. To revert this trend, we propose a novel utilization paradigm of Internet technologies which is aimed at liberating part of resources that are captured but not used by egocentric applications to give them back to a possible common (and altruistic) use.