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Splinternet, Or How We Broke the Good Old Web
StormDriver writes "I don't want to be that scruffy guy with 'The end is nigh' sign and some really bad dental problems, but most industry analysts already noticed that global Internet is coming apart, changing into a cluster of smaller and more closed webs. They have even created a catchy name for this Web 3.0 – the Splinternet.
It's a self-promotion piece that tries to pull disparate internet issues together and fails.
Disclaimer: can’t read the article (filtered)
Ironic.
"His name was James Damore."
Nothing more than a bogus lead-in story talking about the product that the story's author is "preparing to release someday". Basically, creating a problem for his "solution".
News flash: develop your damn product first, let people try it out, and THEN promote it. Astroturfing vaporware is the epitome of hubris.
I predict EPIC FAIL for this one.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
There seems to be a particular psychological disorder, which people apparently get more vulnerable to the older they get, called "Nostalgia". I think it's closely related to "Dementia". Might even just be a type of dementia.
Nostalgia causes people to forget the truth about the past and remember it in a far better light than it actually happened. For example, from the article:
In the beginning, most users browsed the Internet from similar desktop machines. Even if the operating system was different, standardized web protocols and languages made the final experience similar, whether you were using Windows 3.1 machine or your trusty classic Mac.
Did that guy ever USE a version of IE before version 7, or the old Netscape Navigator browsers?
I remember all the time, trying to visit websites, getting messages that the website was designed for some other browser, and either not being able to access the content on the site at all, or having it render terribly glitchy. As a sometimes Linux user, I noticed a lot of problems accessing some websites with the browsers available for Linux (Netscape, Mosaic, etc).
Standards compatibility has come a long, long way since then. I would argue that we have better standards, and better implementations of those standards now than we ever did before. IE9 has greatly improved Microsoft's standards compliance, by most accounts. iPhone/Android/Blackberry/misc cell phones do a pretty decent job rendering most websites - something which could not be said of the early cell phone browsers.
I think sites like facebook are the greatest threat to WWW interconnectedness. It seems to me that the new trend is to congregate on exclusive networks, like facebook. The problem with facebook? Most content is invisible to non-members. Yeah, sure, it's free to register...but what if I don't want to? Is facebook really giving me new informational content (I'm not talking about the social networking aspect) that was not available before in another form on the internet? No. It's just walling off the information from me.
Clubs, cafes, restaurants, theaters...all used to have websites. Informative websites. Websites that used to state things like what was on the menu, or who was DJing on Friday night, or which band was playing on Saturday night, what the dress code is, how much cover is, pictures of what the place looked like, etc.
Then facebook came with its profiles for businesses. Sure, it started off with a mostly empty profile that just pointed to the existing website. But now, in many cases, it's the other way around: now it's the website that is empty - it often contains the establishment's name and address and a link to the facebook group/page/profile. That's it.
Dunno 'bout everyone else, but for me, that really sucks. Information that was once freely available is now behind somebody's registration wall. It's like the early 90s again, with CompuSERVE and AOL. Now I often find that without a facebook profile, it's impossible to figure out what's going on in town tonight using the web - something that was easily doable until very recently.
The Internet is fracturing into interconnected networks!