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Welcome to the new web.

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Re: Welcome to the new web.

#31

Post by gbog »

bad_user wrote: post #23
gbog wrote: post #19

I 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. T…

Google+ is not that small, and with their hooks in search, maps, mails, videos, etc, they can grab a significant portion of the social blob. They have some leverage.

Someone reasoning like you do some 7 years ago would have said Hotmail was too big, but then they came with Gmail and it was a real break in.

Imagine in a few months, G+ user can opt-in to see their friends' +1 on Youtube's videos in their stream, and for some reason it becomes very hot a feature. Then Facebook want the same, but don't have a Youtube. They "could" add Youtube +1 in their stream using Google open APIs, but then it would be fair for Google to require them to open their API for the reverse, and allow G+ users to have their FB friends' pics in their streams.

This would be a killer feature, because it is really not fun at all to have to go to g+, fb, tw, etc. (not counting Chinese SNSes I have to follow too) and then HN, etc.

In fact, Google Reader was not very far from such a tool, but didn't have the locally generated content's critical mass to move things over, and the interface is/was too "advanced user". Google plus may have enough mass, and had the chance to simplify the UX, by starting from scratch.

Re: Welcome to the new web.

#32

Post by ms123 »

ColdAsIce wrote: post #30
ms123 wrote: post #25

To 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.

my point is that programs can be pipelined, not applications.

Re: Welcome to the new web.

#33

Post by dissident »

nirvana wrote: post #6

I'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…

As an administrator of an online message board, I concur. Web content is being so efficiently aggregated that some forums turn into the awkward conversation between two redditors: "Check this out!" "Heh, yeah. I saw that."

Communities before were usually separated by platforms, because the platforms were not yet sophisticated enough to support vast communities of varying opinions. Now we have a few big players that can do this and more. Social media has turned into a war over who can blow the most filter bubbles, and with services like OpenID and "connect with facebook", everything has slowly become part of the same identity.

I'm hoping that a new platform will eventually come along to pry this apart, but it's going to take a completely different paradigm to cause it. Unless something like Google+ proves otherwise, websites like Facebook and Twitter et al have the potential to monopolize social networking.

Re: Welcome to the new web.

#34

Post by ColdAsIce »

bad_user wrote: post #27
potatolicious wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 tha…

"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."

This is how it is, every time a user gets familiar with _concepts_ of his/her user interface, such as a minimize button, a window, a taskbar, it is "re-invented" and changed. No longer is there a minimize button in latest Ubuntu, the taskbar is no longer a taskbar its some weird form of activity with grouping bar in Windows 7.

All the concepts of the user interface such as buttons and scrollbars are exchanged, the basis of what a user _interfaces_ with, is changed. A great suprise then when a user has to relearn everything and gain new concepts just to use a new tool or web a new website. Many just dont go down that way and stick it out with facebook as "the internet".

Tip for UI designers: Stop designing, stop your user-interfacing design, there is one already which the user knows. Focus on _your_ data and fit it into the old and tried concepts of buttons that look like buttons and have only one function, not also state "button is staying pressed in", thats a checkbox. Darn it.

Re: Welcome to the new web.

#35

Post by perfunctory »

potatolicious wrote: post #15
tambourine_man wrote: post #11

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.

> "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…

> Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use systems

To me Facebook is just as convoluted and hard-to-use as anything else.

Re: Welcome to the new web.

#38

Post by perfunctory »

ColdAsIce wrote: post #34
bad_user wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

"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." This is how it is, every time a user…

> Stop designing ...thats a checkbox. Darn it.

Exactly!

Re: Welcome to the new web.

#39

Post by beza1e1 »

bad_user wrote: post #23
gbog wrote: post #19

I 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. T…

There is no "too big to fail". There was a little financial incident in a small north american country some time ago, where some "too big to fail" institutions failed. I've already heared some teens don't like Facebook anymore because mom and dad are also there.

What changes is the web framework style. Asynchronous page loading provides a smoother experience compared to refreshing the whole page. Gmail and Thunderbird will be increasingly similar. Just that one is in a sandbox called browser and the other's sandbox is called operation system.

Re: Welcome to the new web.

#40

Post by alexhawket »

steilpass wrote: post #37

So what are we going to do about it? There must be a business opportunity here.

Standardized identity as a service with a distributed client/server approach like email. Companies can offer their own service and customers sign up to their chosen provider.

Users are supplied with controls to determine what components of their identity third parties can access. A "work" profile, a "friend profile" etc.

Third parties integrate the standarized identity profiles but have no control over what specific data they can access.

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