Listen to this guy. Nils Dagsson Moskopp, what a great post.
We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog.
Welcome to the new web.
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Re: Welcome to the new web.
#12I'm a member of a forum for graduates of one of the schools I went to. In 2007 it was a vibrant and active forum, growing steadily, and straining its hosting account, which constantly had to be expanded. At some point, around 2009, most of the members of this forum got Facebook accounts. That forum is now completely dead. Facebook took all the oxygen out of the site, and it seems like a lot of other sites. Now very m…
> mainstream people seem to think of Facebook as "the internet"
For quite a few years people used the Internet Explorer icon on pamphlets and posters as an icon representing The Internet. It seems people are now starting to use Facebook's icon for that.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#13this was quite insighful actually.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#14Listen to this guy. Nils Dagsson Moskopp, what a great post. We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog.
> We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog.
We are giving the Web away because there are extremely few well designed, modern open source Web software.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#15Listen to this guy. Nils Dagsson Moskopp, what a great post. We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog.
> "We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog."
How typically computer-geek of you. Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use systems and have abandoned them for products that are easier to use and appeal more to their perception of how technology should work!
How dare they! The plebes! DO NOT THEY NOT KNOW WHAT THEY DO?!
Why won't people do more work to preserve the freedom of the web, like setting up their own blogs, and manually maintaining their own contacts?!
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#16As much as I wish the innovations of g+ and Facebook were centered around RSS and email, this is just the way new technologies evolve. Identity management and permissions management for who can see a user's content just don't have a good standard yet. Therefore private companies are rolling their own proprietary solutions and competing with each other.
At some point, the standard techniques for dealing with these issues will become Standards. This is a well worn path. Html was a standardization of the previous 10 years of work on markup languages, plenty of them proprietary. There are other examples... ODF standardizing on XML and cloning established MS Office functionality... etc.
Real Standards that could address the article's concerns are only reasonable when NO innovation is necessary, merely choosing a methodology that has already been built and proven to work in practice. IMO, Java more or less committed suicide when it started a standards-first innovation process, which resulted in many multi-year projects doing design-by-committee of an api before anyone tried to build an implementation or an actual product on top of it.
As long as G+ is introducing features not available elsewhere, the fact that it's a currently closed system just isn't a reasonable criticism.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#17The only power the "new web" has is the power we give it.
It's not us geeks that will decide this. It's people who never understood the things he's talking about, and therefore won't miss them much. The things he's talking about are all more complicated than the thugs replacing them for the common use case (though it makes many more complex things impossible), which makes this somewhat inevitable.
Tools will come out to ameliorate the problems with the new order of things. That things are controlled by a handful of entities is much more worrying, though.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#18it's a bit sad that in the most decentralized media, people tend to stick to the most centralized utilities to communicate with each other (I use them too). but:
> With less sarcasm: What use is this if one already reads the blog?
none. if you don't want to use it - don't. move on.
giving users another subscription channel is not a problem. a problem appears when someone uses these closed platforms as their only communication channel, f.ex. it's impossible to move a fanpage with it's community out of facebook. when people and organization treat it just as another feed broadcast (as whatwg did), everything is fine.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#19I agree with the claim in this forum post. It is annoying to have all pages javascript generated, clicks hijacked to make some special sauce, and content popping in, up, down or out whenever you hover something. It is a growing mess that will have it "let's rollback and clean this crap out" time, like Google did with its famous blank home page.
Another example: trello.com is a very nice and free card tool for small projects, but because they wanted to avoid having an "edit" button on editable text, they hijack my clicks, so it makes it painful to select text, and quite impossible to use "middle-click as paste".
But, there is a more positive perspective liked to Google+. In fact, I think the midterm result of Google entering in the SNS arena could (and should) be to force open Facebook. I mean, right now G+ is not open, it doesn't have all the needed APIs, and this is probably OK because they they need a critical mass before opening, and one should not bash them for testing, pondering, adjusting a bit more before releasing some important changes. Time is on their side anyway.
But in the end, they will go, I hope, the full good-old Google way, which means:
- Read/write APIs for posts, followers, followees, etc.
- Ability to dump all data and go away
- RSS or similar subscribing hooks
These tools will allow a much higher interoperability for social content, similar to interoperability of emails today. Users will not really care if the comments on their baby pics are written using Facebook, G+ or any other Social Content Manager, they will read and respond to them in the SNS of their choice, like we do today with emails. (I wrote a bit more ion this topic there: https://plus.google.com/104035200377885758362/posts/A9r7twSD...)
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#20If you are going to build a social network today, you MUST have two objectives: 1. Convince the user to get off Facebook and use your system instead. 2. Keep your users on your website as long as possible before they move back to Facebook.