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The Web We Lost

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Re: The Web We Lost

#111

Post by fudged71 »

_ttlh wrote: post #20
10098 wrote: post #9

Maybe I have changed, or maybe the Internet has changed, but I used to meet people on the internet. I used to make friends online, and some of these friendships gradually mutated into "offline" friendships. There used to be message boards, IRC and web chats where people would talk, form groups, become friends or enemies. People used to have blogs on livejournal or other services, some were trying to create content, w…

My feelings mirror yours... I'm actually building a product that I hope can help re-introduce some spontaneity in people's online interactions, as they journey through the web. Still very early stage though: [redacted] Here's a 60 second concept video: [redacted]

Neat idea. I love the video. How would you recommend creating a video like this? Just get someone good with after effects?

Re: The Web We Lost

#112

Post by cbs »

4ad wrote: post #77
quasistar wrote: post #57

Just a few reasons today's Web trumps anything from the 'Technorati' (seriously?) era: Open API's that reply in JSON, Cloud VPS's at $0.02 per hour, 10 Gb ethernet, 54 Mb fiber in my house, multicore computers in everyones pocket, GPS at everyones fingertips, web frameworks like Sinatra (yes, it took more than three lines of code and two bash commands to publish 'Hello World!' to the web back then), caching solutions…

Let's take an opposing view, shall we? > Open API's that reply in JSON The serialization format doesn't matter. What matter is that we have way more APIs, all different, with inconsistent semantics and non-orthogonal feature sets than the non-web APIs of 15 years ago. On average the people designing these APIs are less competent than the people from 15 years ago creating more headaches for the people that are compete…

I'd like to subscribe to your e-zine.

Re: The Web We Lost

#113

Post by [deleted] »

mmahemoff wrote: post #98
cletus wrote: post #74

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…

"Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a very small bubble. I'd honestly never heard of Technorati until long after it had waned." 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 d…

[deleted]

Re: The Web We Lost

#114

Post by acheron »

ricardobeat wrote: post #87

I think people are missing the point. Yes, Flickr is still here and you could use it. But Flickr never really got to mobile (a major strategy failure). Do you know since when Flickr has similar functionality to Instagram? Today - they just released a new version with filters. The point is, you can't build much on top of instagram, twitter, facebook, whatever. APIs are encumbered by pricy licenses, nobody wants to col…

My Google Reader account is surprised to learn that RSS is dead.

How else do you keep up with updates on a bunch of different sites? (Serious question.)

Re: The Web We Lost

#115

Post by SoftwareMaven »

locopati wrote: post #105
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family This can't be understated. As a highly technical person running my own web services, even I rarely posted photos. The support burden of managing the server, securing it, and keeping family up-to-date on passwords was just never worth it. Facebook wants to own all your data. It wants to be your identity. I would love to hear ideas for ways we can fix this that…

'I would love to hear ideas for ways we can fix this that are realistic' Peer-to-peer social with discovery. A system where companies/people/groups could self-host their own server, companies could host for others, but all the systems could talk to one another. Data gets stored where you want it to - on your own system or on another (though it's portable even there, by design).

I agree that this is probably the right answer. Unfortunately, it's a difficult business model to pursue and open source may not be able to solve it.

I look at this like I look at Linux versus Windows/OS X (as I type on my MBA next to my work Linux laptop): Open source may provide an alternative that, for a certain class of people, is every bit as good as the commercial mainstream; but for Joe Sixpack and Molly Mall, using such a solution doesn't even factor into their consciousness. It's not that it isn't good enough; it's that it doesn't even exist on their plane of existence.

I've spent a reasonable amount of time thinking about this (as a side-thread from a previous start-up I was involved with), and I have yet to come up with a combination that satisfies my preferences for data privacy and ownership with "normal people's" preferences for ease of use.

Unless a catastrophic failure occurs (Facebook crashes and loses everything), I don't think people will realize there might be better solutions.

Re: The Web We Lost

#117

Post by shmerl »

anildash wrote: post #11
untog wrote: post #6

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.

The problem is that you don't allow using normal commenting options (with Open ID or Persona) in addition to Facebook (if you need that one). So why can't it be called extreme? It's rather irritating to see sites requiring to have Facebook to comment (I don't use it). OpenID and Persona are the most flexible options.

Re: The Web We Lost

#118

Post by ep103 »

_ttlh wrote: post #20
10098 wrote: post #9

Maybe I have changed, or maybe the Internet has changed, but I used to meet people on the internet. I used to make friends online, and some of these friendships gradually mutated into "offline" friendships. There used to be message boards, IRC and web chats where people would talk, form groups, become friends or enemies. People used to have blogs on livejournal or other services, some were trying to create content, w…

My feelings mirror yours... I'm actually building a product that I hope can help re-introduce some spontaneity in people's online interactions, as they journey through the web. Still very early stage though: [redacted] Here's a 60 second concept video: [redacted]

This seems really cool. How is development coming?

Re: The Web We Lost

#119

Post by rmccue »

graue wrote: post #68
smacktoward wrote: post #27

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…

> 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.

This is one of the things the large hosts (Bluehost, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, etc.) are very keen on, and they've been doing lots of work to try and get this to a good level. It's one driving factor behind the push in the WordPress community to get automatic upgrades built in.

> Edit: icebraining pointed out downthread that you can mostly export a Tumblr blog by adding '/rss' to the URL of each page, a process that is easily automated.

In fact, WordPress has a Tumblr importer: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tumblr-importer/

Notably though, it's built on their JSON API, not on the RSS, so it's not really an open standard.

Re: The Web We Lost

#120

Post by ricardobeat »

acheron wrote: post #114
ricardobeat wrote: post #87

I think people are missing the point. Yes, Flickr is still here and you could use it. But Flickr never really got to mobile (a major strategy failure). Do you know since when Flickr has similar functionality to Instagram? Today - they just released a new version with filters. The point is, you can't build much on top of instagram, twitter, facebook, whatever. APIs are encumbered by pricy licenses, nobody wants to col…

My Google Reader account is surprised to learn that RSS is dead. How else do you keep up with updates on a bunch of different sites? (Serious question.)

Many sites around the web don't publish RSS anymore, and browsers have removed the default RSS readers.
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