91–100 of 162 posts
Who knows, though. I'm optimistic.
I don't understand why he thinks the pendulum is swinging back. Is there any particular evidence of that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
WordPress is actually a good example. There's the self-hosted software distributed at WordPress.org, which works in the Web 2000 fashion (here's some software, figure the rest out yourself). And there's the hosted service at WordPress.com, which works in the walled-garden fashion (though with liberal allowances for things like getting at your data, which is nice). Lots of people run their own WordPress installations,…
You made me think, "If only there were a host where you could install the software with one click, and it would automatically update itself..." Follow that thread far enough and the line between a blogging service and a hosting service begins to blur. The real objective, I think, isn't to get everyone hosting their own stuff, but to popularize technologies that both allow data portability (you can move to another ser…
I've thrown up a couple of basic WP installs on there in the past. One-ish click install and it Auto updates.
Funny that he says all this then has a Facebook comments box at the bottom of the page. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that IMO- people are far more likely to have their real names on Facebook, and thus leave sensible comments rather than total drivel. But it makes a point that he doesn't include in the article- sometimes these centralised information stores can be useful.
I think I did mention that in the piece, but I deliberately keep the Facebook comments even on articles where I'm critical of Facebook to show that I'm not some extremist zealot. I'm just a normal person who happens to love the web.
Practice what you preach. Make the web better.. even if it's tad better by getting rid of FB comments.
I think this is an example of seeing the past through rose-coloured glasses. Yes there was Flickr but you could discover photos. Thing is, Flickr is still there and you can still use it . What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family. Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a ve…
And 10 years later, the early adopters have moved on to other things and the mass market has arrived to stake their claim to the social web with Facebook, Twitter et al.
I think this is an example of seeing the past through rose-coloured glasses. Yes there was Flickr but you could discover photos. Thing is, Flickr is still there and you can still use it . What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family. Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a ve…
We have taken two steps forward, is it all that bad to reflect on the step we took backward?
A lot of the improvements we've made do not come at the cost of the things we've lost. Some things did have to go to enable the new ways, but some are also the victims of happenstance and circumstance. Some losses are implementation details really, or nice-to-haves that got cut for time/budget. Instead of a point for point dismissal of his post, consider the possibility that desirable properties of the old way do exist. Could long lost characteristics of the internet be rolled back into the current state of affairs in a beneficial way?
I think so. For example, a few of his points strike on the consolidation of the internet. Now that computing is dirt cheap I can run off into my corner and do my own thing, and the interconnectivty some of the new toys offer mean the people I care about know what I'm up to over here and can seamlessly experience it.
Facebook is just as susceptible to disruption
It sure is, but not by the kind of people who can't think about the concept of portable data and interoperability beyond POP/IMAP. Is mint.com not a very obvious poster child for data portability in this decade?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Geocities made it easy for anyone to publish to the web. Probably others too but it is the most prominent example I guess. Yes, this is not what the linked article is about. But it is a counter-point to your "it was too hard for random people back then" saying.
Geocities was OK if you wanted a basic, ugly and completely static website. Our expectations are a little higher nowadays.
What most people seem to want to do with a personal website is provide some contact information, list some stuff they like, link to their friends and family and occasionally tell the world what they're up to. Personalizing the appearance of one's personal page seemed important, looking at Geocities and Myspace, but Facebook seems to suggest that it might not be necessary. On the other hand, interaction with other users has become more important.
I think this is an example of seeing the past through rose-coloured glasses. Yes there was Flickr but you could discover photos. Thing is, Flickr is still there and you can still use it . What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family. Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a ve…
To any blogger back then, Technorati was as ubiquitous as Google Analytics is today. I think the point here is Technorati reached a point where it couldn't deal with all the spam and today, it's very hard to track inbound links. Neither Google nor anyone else does a decent job of this. (They show referring pages when people click on a link, but not occasions when an author creates the link.)
"What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family."
This is a bitter irony, because Flickr was (probably?) the first service to explicitly include a privacy option for sharing with friends and family. That most people do it today on other services (e.g. FB) probably says more about senior management at Yahoo over the years than anything profound about the web and walled gardens.
But the thing is, I love the web we have now, too. I love the interconnectedness and the fact that you don't need to be technical to find, share and create amazing stuff. You just have to have imagination and humanity.
So, let's go back. Let's take the web we've got today, and let's consciously retrofit it with the plumbing we had back then. Let's take the services we all work on and stick in those APIs. Let's make it all work better together, so that the sum of all the web applications is far more than all the web applications separately.
Think about the back-end services we all value: Stripe. Twilio. AWS. What unites all of them is that they're incredibly simple to develop with, and to connect into other applications. That's why Twitter succeeded in the beginning, too: because its API was simple enough that people could build apps for the nascent mobile app ecosystem. This is good for all of our products, as well as for the web's health as a platform.
It's not hard. That's the beauty of it: all these APIs and standards are simple to build and simple to use. That's why they survived. All that has to happen is an understanding that being closed is not a better way to serve your users or run a tech business.
I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many ways, a Better Web than the one we have today. The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had t…
What about Wordpress? (snark about technical messes aside) It's as easy as it can possibly be to get a hosted blog up and running -- even with your own domain -- via their forms. But, unlike Facebook, if you don't like their service, or need more, or don't like some ToS change or version 'update', you can wrap it up with a bow and take it elsewhere. And businesses exist that will even make that as easy as filling out…
"And businesses exist that will even make that as easy as filling out a form."
Which businesses? I recently migrated to one of the major dedicated WordPress hosts and it was anything but the trivial experience some make it out to be.