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Predicting the Internet in 1995
Rexdude writes "Here is a list of predictions from 'The Internet' magazine at the end of 1994. It highlights the major changes and events on the net as it was back then (20 million users only, for starters).
Seems a throwback to a relatively more innocent time, when the unwashed masses had not taken over the net as much as today. And look at the reverence accorded to long dead protocols like Gopher!"
I like how the only thing that's even remotely relevant today is that Nethack is still around and still entertaining. The complaint about the Web's organization has been solved mostly by the fact that there's a lot of stuff you don't want to find anyway!
People think it's wonderful how much cool stuff there is out there on the net. Online games are insanely addictive. Major gripes include spam, government regulation and censorship, and how difficult it is to find the information you want. Flamewars over global warming. Seriously, change some of the names (replace Mosaic with Firefox, Nethack with WoW, etc.) and most of what's written here wouldn't raise an eyebrow today. Maybe the only thing that's really changed is that a decade+ ago, these phenomena seemed more worth commenting on.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I dunno. Kenny Greenberg's comments seemed to hit pretty hard:
And as a reminder for those of you who got your hopes up in November of 2006 -- you might want to look at who was President in 1994. Hint: His last name wasn't "Bush".
Under the list Worst in Net Entertainment:
How little they knew ...
None of them predict search engines - because they were a genuine and unexpected innovation. I remember using the Web at around that time - before Yahoo attempted to create a directory, and Altavista produced their webspider-driven search engine. O'Reilly had a small directory of useful sites, but other than that the only way to find pages was by surfing from link to link, or by being given a URL out-of-band.I believe webspiders, and search engines built around data they collected, were the killer app that made the Web truly useful.
For the most part, they aren't too wrong. Sure they're obsessed with ISDN, but only because it seemed like the only fast internet solution at the time. Other predictions, like better web browsers, were inevitable anyway. And they certainly nailed the fact that the TCP/IP stack would become common equipment in the next generation of OSes.
But they really liked usenet. The web forum has supplanted it, but they didn't really see that. http is the monster protocol that gobbled up almost all of the web functions. One poster talks about an application evolving that encapsulated all of the internet protocols in one easy interface. The modern webbrowser is pretty much that, with webmail, webforums, and built in (but less functional) ftp clients.
There are some predictions that are still up in the air. Do people prefer moderated content? It's hard to say. Sure, lots of people read cnn.com, but lots of people post on unmoderated forums, or use myspace, or other "user-generated" content.
I think the biggest thing they missed was data-mining. They thought people had to be involved in searching for information, in moderating content, etc in a centralized way. Using links, pageviews, user reviews, and user moderation some systems can organize themselves. (This isn't to cast doubt on experts. I still prefer a good editor to 1000 monkeys.)
And I guess one more thing: the whole idea of "everybody" is silly on the net. If a million people use usenet, it's still useful. The fact that ten or a hundred times more people use some sort of webforum is in many ways irrelevant. Both exist side-by-side. The first list on the article listed online Diplomacy as a fun game on the net. It still exists, probably with about the same number of players. Not anywhere near some flashgame sites in traffic, sure, but that doesn't change anything.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
"Smart searches. The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like "What is the population of Fiji?" or "How far is Saturn from the Sun?" An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source."
They didn't envision google, but they did imagine ask jeeves. Well, except a version of it that was useful.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If I recall correctly, AOL and AOL Users were always been considered bad. Even back then.
AOL users were considered to be a mass invasion, especially on the insular world of USENET. There was always a problem with "newbies", often at the beginning of a school year, but the numbers were small, integrated rather quickly, and tended to be a lot more techno-savy than the AOL users turned out to be. Just look at USENET postings from around that era and you'll see people ranting about AOL users and this strange thing people used to call "netiquette".
It's pretty interesting to say the least. It certainly was a culture clash as the net-wisened, mostly academic early adopters were hit with the hard reality of "the rest of the world" that was AOL. (And hell, even AOL was probbably the cream of the "rest of the world" crop). It took a while for the cultures to merge, but today if you post something along the lines of "How do I use my email?" on a forum discussing auto-repair, you'll look like a total moron to everyone.
AccountKiller
...the killer app that made the Web truly useful
The problem is that back then, when someone setup a site, they put effort into it. Links usually meant something. Now a days... do links really matter? Not really. Any wikipedia page has hundreds of links---most irrelevant. This page alone has many links---most irrelevant. All internet usage is driven by Google. The problem is that google uses those -links- to rank its content. So google made links irrelevant---and the lack of good links will eventually make google irrelevant.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy