Google tried it the other way via Google Wave and unfortunately nobody bought into it.
Welcome to the new web.
41–50 of 114 posts
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#42Earlier 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…
Unfortunately it's not possible to "stop" designing web UI as there is no standarzied ui library in html/css. Web apps have been shoehorned into a system that was never intended to behave like an app.
Stopping random UI experiments would require a replacement system designed specifically for web apps that access a standard library of controls.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
So you're basically saying that Facebook will open-up because Google may force them by using their quasi-monopoly, pulling an IExplorer versus Netscape on them.
However, I have my doubts that this will work, quite the contrary - Google may have GMail and Youtube, but while Google was experimenting with shoving Buzz down on Gmail users' throats, Facebook was busy becoming a platform. Which is the reason why Facebook is now on its way to become THE identity provider for the Internet, the reason why Facebook is the preferred method of login for services like Foursquare.
And unfortunately for Google, the trust of other businesses in them has been eroded in time. For example, only Google could piss off an entire category of businesses by crawling their content and presenting it as its own, with graphical results on the first page of any location-related search: http://www.google.com/places/
It's a shame really, because if Google was considered a benevolent-dictator of the Internet, than trust itself would have been enough for third-parties to consider integration with them. In this instance however I'm seeing other online services just picking Facebook, as while they are evil, at least they are the ones with soon-to-reach 1 billion users.
Youtube integration will be awesome, but that's not enough when the rest of the Internet is on Facebook. Also, checkout what Facebook did with pictures uploads. They are effectively killing Flickr. I'm seeing them doing the same for movie uploads ... they probably haven't felt the need for doing that, seeing that the preferred way of distributing Youtube videos to friends is Facebook ;)
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#44I 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…
AltaVista. Yahoo. America Online. Nortel. WorldCom. Excite. GeoCities. Xoom. Hotmail. MySpace.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Thunderbir…
Indeed, there is no such thing as too big to fail, however you can say of certain companies that they are too big to fail easily. Facebook was once small and fragile. Not anymore.
What changes is the web framework style
The semantic web dream is dying, replaced by web versions of Microsoft Exchange.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Certainly.
This was user testing with groups of young people in Tower Hamlets, London in 2010.
Aside from testing the UX spec we talked more widely around discovery and every group indicated that they began most tasks with a search on YouTube. Music, games, movies, homework research: all started visually on YT.
Facebook came up because the majority of these kids didn't have email addresses, instead doing all their email-like conversations on Facebook messaging and their IM on Blackberry BBM.
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#47I'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.
It's also weird IMHO when you see an advert or movie trailer, and they tell you to visit their facebook page, rather than their own website...
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
Unfortunately it's not possible to "stop" designing web UI as there is no standarzied ui library in html/css. Web apps have been shoehorned into a system that was never intended to behave like an app. Stopping random UI experiments would require a replacement system designed specifically for web apps that access a standard library of controls.
We've been using Twitter's Bootstrap in quite a lot of our recent web app projects. It provides a reasonable "standard widget set": http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#49I'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…
I think the web is going to undergo a radical change in the next 5 or so years.
Hasn't it radically changed every year?
Re: Welcome to the new web.
#50Google tried it the other way via Google Wave and unfortunately nobody bought into it.
Google Wave is probably the single worst introduction of a new technology that I've ever seen. To this day, I have no idea what it actually was or was for. All I know is that it did everything, but nothing, and it did it simultaneously in shared sessions.