21–30 of 75 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things were better, then. Yeah we had to contend with flash sites and low bandwidth, and didn't have slick css3 and backnode.js but the web was more fun in those days.
Flash sites? If the content didn't load in lynx it wasn't worth viewing.
Usenet, or something very much like it, with a markup language (to allow for rich content), a paired messaging protocol (to allow for directly contacting individuals in chat / private message mode), and associated content distribution (images, video) could, I've felt for years, displace virtually all of existing social media. The primary missing elements are filtering (as noted) and a distributed search capability.
That paired messaging protocol we used was called email. Filtering was pretty sophisticated using scorefiles and killfiles. You didn't have rich media because the Usenet was about exchange of thoughts and knowledge, but people were pretty opinionated about formatting to make reading your posts pleasant for everyone.
The rich media thing: it's useful. A minimal markup (such as markdown) would likely be sufficient. The ability to be able to emphasize and strongly emphasize text, create bullets and numbered lists, indicate (multiple levels) of quotes, hyperlinks. There's not much that Markdown itself doesn't provide.
A small amount of chrome for the masses would be nice. For the most part my feeling is that existing HTML markup goes too far, generally in the direction of unusability for far too many websites.
Another feature which is quite useful is indicating followups and actions. Here I find Reddit has one of the best models around, though the UI/UX lightweight nature of G+'s Notifications widget is also nice (the absolute uselessness of most of the actual notifications, and the inability to filter / set precedence / classify types of notifications is a major failure of the site). G+ also suffers from one of the largest DOMs I've seen in any major website -- I've backed off using it pretty much at all, and find my browser memory footprint is vastly more bearable.
This is my search engine for Usenet, currently only for the 1980s but I hope to have 2003 onwards searchable soon. I have about 2TB of news from 2003 which just needs indexing and uploading. http://www.dejadejadeja.com/10years/ My goal is to give people an alternative to 'Google Groups'. It's built on PHP and MySQL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flash sites? If the content didn't load in lynx it wasn't worth viewing.
I still think this sometimes.
This is my search engine for Usenet, currently only for the 1980s but I hope to have 2003 onwards searchable soon. I have about 2TB of news from 2003 which just needs indexing and uploading. http://www.dejadejadeja.com/10years/ My goal is to give people an alternative to 'Google Groups'. It's built on PHP and MySQL.
This is my search engine for Usenet, currently only for the 1980s but I hope to have 2003 onwards searchable soon. I have about 2TB of news from 2003 which just needs indexing and uploading. http://www.dejadejadeja.com/10years/ My goal is to give people an alternative to 'Google Groups'. It's built on PHP and MySQL.
This is my search engine for Usenet, currently only for the 1980s but I hope to have 2003 onwards searchable soon. I have about 2TB of news from 2003 which just needs indexing and uploading. http://www.dejadejadeja.com/10years/ My goal is to give people an alternative to 'Google Groups'. It's built on PHP and MySQL.
I take it you're missing the 90s? (Alas, most of my Usenet usage was between 1994 and 2003.)
Google Groups has the 90s, but it's locked behind a 'Googlewall'.
What is this usenet?
Usenet, or something very much like it, with a markup language (to allow for rich content), a paired messaging protocol (to allow for directly contacting individuals in chat / private message mode), and associated content distribution (images, video) could, I've felt for years, displace virtually all of existing social media. The primary missing elements are filtering (as noted) and a distributed search capability.
Reddit is more-or-less the Usenet of the masses, but without private messaging (and the fact that it's hosted on the World Wide Web).
One of the failings of Reddit over G+ is that it doesn't have the equivalent of a personal "user subreddit" page.
I realized I could fix that: http://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius
(not that what's there will be of interest to most, but it's a neat convention / hack IMO).
This is my search engine for Usenet, currently only for the 1980s but I hope to have 2003 onwards searchable soon. I have about 2TB of news from 2003 which just needs indexing and uploading. http://www.dejadejadeja.com/10years/ My goal is to give people an alternative to 'Google Groups'. It's built on PHP and MySQL.