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.
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Welcome to the new web.
21–30 of 114 posts
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#22I'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.
Just to corroborate, I've done user testing with young people (13-15) and Facebook is definitely seen as 'the internet' - along with YouTube.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#23I 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 p…
You're an optimist.
I'm a pessimist - Google+ is too little, too late. Facebook is already too big to fail, Google+ being here the equivalent of Microsoft's Bing.
Facebook won't open up. They don't have than in their DNA, their biggest asset is their huge audience and they'll do anything they can to keep that audience on Facebook -- opening up their platform in a way that benefits competitors simply makes no sense.
The Internet as we know it is indeed dying.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#24As 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 iss…
Out of curiosity, what features does G+ have that aren't available elsewhere.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#25To me the difference between "old-web" and "new-web" is a lot like the one between "program" and "application.
Old-web was just text and markup. A lot like the output of command line programs that could then be used by other programs to perform what we want.
New-web is about application. Programs made for the end-user. Apps aren't thought to be pipelined with other apps. Thus for a web-app, the browser is often designed to be the only supported plateform. Thus the extensive use of JS.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Just to corroborate, I've done user testing with young people (13-15) and Facebook is definitely seen as 'the internet' - along with YouTube.
Interesting. Can you impart any more information?
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#27Listen 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 free…
That's because of a lack of education, because we, the technically inclined people, have failed to serve the normal people, preferring instead to:
1) reinvent the wheel over and over, each time with a new interface, shinier and more limited than the one before it
2) cater more to our hypothetical grandmas instead of our children ... which ironically are able to write HTML in Notepad just fine, if taught how to do that
Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use
systems and have abandoned them for products
that are easier to use
People all over Europe have learned to drive cars with manual transmissions - because after the initial pain, the vegetative nervous system kicks in and the wheel, the pedals, the gear switch, all of them become a natural extension, of which you don't think about anymore, just like breathing. And if automatic transmissions are great too, that's because they stay out of your way.
The UI of modern software is nothing like that. Nothing is logical anymore, nothing is designed anymore to be an extension of you. Normal users have to think about their every action, they have to visually search for clues in the UI for every stupid thing they do, they have to rote learn the paths they have to take for the software to take them from some point A, to some other point B. I saw users that have notes on the actual clicks they have to make for certain common actions. I don't know about you, but to me this is freaking painful to watch ;)
Btw, for some good user-experience guidelines, check out The Design of Everyday Things: http://amzn.to/ryfiuI (the link does contain my affiliate code) ... the one thing I took away from this book is that simplicity is a complex topic.
Why won't people do more work ...
setting up their own blogs
Really, step down from your high horse, it's not like you yourself are not guilty for the current state of our industry. We all are.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Just to corroborate, I've done user testing with young people (13-15) and Facebook is definitely seen as 'the internet' - along with YouTube.
When I was 13-15 "the internet" was IRC and nothing else. I still can't understand how I managed to spent countless hours doing just that (scripting and that "flooding" thing seemed to be great fun though)
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#29Listen 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 free…
Most people cant handle facebook. They dont even know what they are doing there, its more like a random walk clicking around stuff. Have you ever watched a teenager use a computer? I have, it was not pretty.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#30To me the difference between "old-web" and "new-web" is a lot like the one between "program" and "application. Old-web was just text and markup. A lot like the output of command line programs that could then be used by other programs to perform what we want. New-web is about application. Programs made for the end-user. Apps aren't thought to be pipelined with other apps. Thus for a web-app, the browser is often desig…
Straw man, text and markup was made for the end-user as well.