Time To Get Past Facebook And Invent A New Future

an astute article. One thing not addressed here is the failure of the Smantic Web paradigm to really take off; I don't know whether this is because of a lack of critical mass in the quantity of semantically coded data or the immaturity of ontology frameworks or something else - my best guess being that the browser is no more suitable to traversal of the semantic web than FTP/ Archie/ Veronica/ Gopher were suitable browsing tools for hyperterxt - although each solved 'part of the puzzle.'

So, all things being equal, we should expect more people to be creating web apps (compared to other kinds of technology) than their profitability or social value would warrant.

Framing makes a big difference. If there were an established culture and set of resources for engineering or biomedical startups, they might seem less daunting.

It was a show defined by the 80's/90's, with several plotlines that could have been resolved by someone having an iPhone in their pocket, or by the Enterprise having smart drones.

There were only a couple of episodes that dealt with holodeck addiction, and just one or two in which the holodeck was used to its full potential: as a reconfigurable-on-the-fly work space that can tie into ship-systems, and either show or replicate any hardware or display you describe verbally.

If the holodeck were a real thing, I would rarely come out of there. I'd just make real friends inside other holodecks, and we'd spend our lives learning and creating stuff. It would be an enormous social problem.

60's StarTrek tech doesn't count. Although Kirk's stylus/pad for signatures is not unlike the UPS guy's… and I'll bet Uhura's metallic ear slab was bluetooth.

You could have said that about AOL or CompuServe or any other of several previous market leaders. for that matter, people managed to have social lives prior to the advent of the internet; the media of communication were things like posters, bulletin boards (as in large pieces of wood), small ads, magazines and so on. I don't think the article is picking on FB particularly, it's just the company that happens to be on top of the social networking pile right now. What the author is getting at is that things have sort of plateaued for the time being and it's not obvious where the fundamental innovation is coming from, so in the meantime you're seeing a lot of cargo cultism.

Think of what we have now as a large-scale version of the pre-web internet, which was much more limited in scope than that of today, but internally quite well connected as long as you were content to adopt a unix-y way of looking at things. The advent of the browser upended all that, but at the very beginning it was quite clunky and a lot of people thought it might be a problem in search of a solution. To my mind, the proliferation of APIs and attempts to establish platforms is quite similar to past stages of development. Facebook is not the problem; it's the curremt least bad solution to the problem (for many people). I'll cannibalize a recent comment on another thread [1] to sum up why:

Avid Facebook users want their content within Facebook's standardized UI and relatively well-curated system. Like AOL, Facebook is the online equivalent of the mall - somewhat bland, but fairly clean, safe, and above all well-organized. Myspace was just as technically impressive as Facebook back in the day, but because it included a host of customization options it wound up looking like a shopping district that had gone to seed and was covered in bad graffiti and flyposters. You could tell it was doomed when some people were making a business out of selling sparkly animated gifs as page backgrounds. Myspace was so freely customizable that browsing and navigation ended up becoming a chore for visitors; you'd go to someone's page, loud music would start, and you'd be frantically looking for the transport/volume controls - like multimedia Geocities. With Facebook you never get lost as a visitor, and if the site limits a page owner's visual expression somewhat, the same is true for everyone else so you're not at a real disadvantage.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850935

So what is the problem, exactly? Platform fragmentation. I spend most of my social internet time on Hacker News and Metafilter, and on a few other forums to a lesser degree. It's probably not an accident that these are among the least visually crufty and feature-rich social sites on the web; HN doesn't even allow inline hyperlinks. I personally share things mostly by cutting and pasting URLs. I maintain very little presence on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or (insert your favorite thing here) because of the transactional overhead. All social sites involve Conversations with persistent Communities of People about Stuff, and I've capitalized those 4 elements because they're like the legs of a table and can be captured within relatively simple data structures.

Platform fragmentation is the fact of all these different services having distinct identities. From an individual human point of view what matters is this conversation, the social groups we are in, you and I as persons, and this substantive topic. We could be having this conversation on Facebook, G+, Twitter (in very fragmented form) or wherever. What makes HN unique is the stuff people want to talk about and the group of people with overlapping interests. The actual mechanisms of displaying and posting are incidental. to my mind they should be wholly transparent, in the same way that I don't care about exactly which routers this message goes through to reach you, or where those switches and servers are located, or who manufactured them or wrote the firmware. We've abstracted away the hardware layer, and in my perfect world we'd now abstract away the UI layer as well. On the other hand, you could make the argument that NNTP and Usenet have ultimately failed to fulfill their potential because of a tragedy-of-the-commons problem; it's so public that it's hard to curate, and it's not obvious how to make money out of it.

PS: also a problem for RSS. The browser is, at its core, a page rendering interface, just as a terminal is a highly interactive text interface. That's great, because we are very clever at putting things on pages. But what we need now is a network traversal interface.