Slashdot Mirror
The Web We Lost
An anonymous reader writes "Anil Dash has an insightful post about cutting through the social media hype to see all of the social functionality we've lost on the web over the past decade. 'We've lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich. But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilities of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be. ... We get bulls*** turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.'"
Most of the stuff this guy is bitching about is stuff that is STILL THERE. You can still create your own website and post whatever the hell you like, create whatever community you damn well please, etc. Unless you're in a country like China or Iran, you have every bit as much freedom today on the internet as you did 10 or 15 years ago.
Just because people CHOOSE to use social sites like Facebook and give up certain freedoms in the process doesn't mean anything has been lost. About the only area where I see where freedom has really been lost is in the increasing prevalence of tablets, phones, and likely soon even laptops that are behind software "walled gardens," like iOS. And even if that case, no one is *forcing* anyone to buy those devices.
And as for complaining about the lack of standards in sites sharing info, well WTF is new? Companies developing proprietary formats for sharing info is hardly something that Twitter just discovered recently.
To me this guy just sounds like another FOSS zealot bitching because the world doesn't work like he wants it to, and things didn't turn out like the Open Source utopia he had envisioned in 2000.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've certainly made a small number of people rich
For better or for worse, these are very important things in a Capitalistic society.
But they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves
For better or for worse, these are completely worthless things in a Capitlistic society.
We get bulls*** turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.
So it has been, so it is now and so it always shall be: Money drives everything. I don't understand Anil Dash's point and I didn't get much new information from it. It's pretty generic. Make observations (very easy) and then offer conclusions that are bland and optimistic like:
We'll fix these things; I don't worry about that. The technology industry, like all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to the broad, empowering philosophies that underpinned the early social web. But we're going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.
Wow this guy uses some pretty strong rhetoric for not having to explain how this is ever going to be fixed. Also, I feel like he fails to even scratch the surface of what is a very deep "intellectual property" hole of copyright and patents giving the mindset that other companies shouldn't use our ideas to make money or we want that money. And that is so ingrained right now that I don't see "we'll fix these things" as a given. Also this "pendulum" concept he speaks of is hilarious. Care to explain the historic swings of this pendulum to me?
Call me when somebody has a solution that will work. Since you'll never be calling me, I'll just continue to deal with the current state of things.
My work here is dung.
From what I see, though, one of the big issues is that when you get to be the size of Facebook or Twitter, it HAS to be about making money. Who is going to pay for your servers and who is going to pay your employees who work on the site full-time? Once you hit critical mass, in order not collapse under your own weight, you need to protect your monetary interests and that means closing off access to competing services.
Now, in the past, this wasn't as much of an issue because people actually paid for things and/or the advertisements covered costs. Today, the bottom has fallen out of the advertising market and no one wants to pay for anything anymore. I have friends that think Flickr's $25/year pro account is a rip-off. I think that's a *steal*.
The ecosystem of the web today is full of freeloaders and "entrepreneurs" who are trying to make a quick buck (via VC or getting bought, primarily) rather than trying to build awesome new products that people would actually want to pay for. No one wants to build companies anymore, they just want to build windfalls.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
The values TFS is talking about were not lost during the last decade. It is values that companies brought with them when they adopted the web. Those companies are run by people who have been brought up with a company structure that lost those values 50 years ago. It's called capitalism.
If you want everyone to cooperate you have to throw out competition first.
we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world.
No we haven't. They're just no longer in the majority. It's like religions: In the United States, for example, everyone's on about how the 0.5% of atheists that exist here are oppressing the christians' (who make up 76%) right to celebrate their christmas holiday. Please -- I'm just using this as an example, no flames! But elsewhere in the world, it's dominated by muslims, or jews, or hindus, or whatever. And within each of those communities, those values are the dominant ones.
The web was originally created by academics, scientists, engineers, and people from these fields are collaborative. They're peers, and they broker in knowledge sharing and exchange. It's very different than the hierarchy that most of society is based on. Now that "most of society" has moved onto the web, they've taken their values with them. The web is simply a communications medium; It does not have a morality.
That said... I miss the old days too.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Geeks created a cool idea, but people are selfish dicks.
And they've now narrowed the possibilities of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be. ...
Do you have actual specifics rather than buzzword laden marketing speak?
Also, people have been fracturing the web for their own gains since the early 90s. Does this guy not remember AOL, Compuserve, etc.?
Wrong, dead wrong.
his parents wanted him to be a super villilain, who would anhilate things
So basically his post can be summed up as:
'Whine' 'whine' 'buzzword' 'buzzword' 'get off my lawn' 'whine' 'whine' 'buzzword' 'whine' 'buzzword'. I'm surprised he didn't mention how they would also be able to shift paradigms and provide synergy as well.
TFA (or blog post in this case) talks about how much better the web used to be, then uses purple-colored links everywhere, tricking me into thinking I've already clicked those links.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Ignorance is bliss, eh?
I'm presuming many people for a long time including the author wanted to build a giant network just like Facebook BUT with all the options for "openness" and free choices between complete and zero interconnectivity between all sites you are a member of.
Now that Facebook has built one without these options the desire is to change it to that model.
What if the lack of those options was the thing that allowed Facebook to succeed in the first place?
Include them in the design in a quick and dirty way - makes it user unfriendly and clunky, with less chance of takeup.
Include them in the design in a way that is elegant - would take a lot of resources, making it far less likely for a single person to drive it.
Include them in the design with the help of a great number of collaborators - yep, because open source software and collaborative models always work outstanding in terms of making products that attract the largest user base.
It may not be that Zuckerberg has "robbed" the web of something, but rather that he succeeded in the only way the web allowed him to succeed given the scope.
Biggest example:
In the early says of the blogosphere lots of people did not have the tech-savvy necessary to start their own blogs. You needed to be able to buy your own domain-name, get a hosting service, install special blogging software, etc. Even if you had the expertise, remembering to maintain such a blog was not fool-proof. My first blog (detroitskeptic.com) currently points to a cyber-squatter because I forgot to tell the domain registrar when my email address changed, and my credit info expired.
Technorati was great, open, and non-corrupt; but it was only those three things to the small fraction of the human race that could actually do that stuff, but even in America that was under 10% of the population. Popular blogging platforms today (like Google's Wordpress) are fully in the control of a profit-seeking behemoth; but they also allow anyone who can master MS Word to have a blog.
Granted he admits these sites are great, he just wants them to focus on working together more. But he's missing a simple fact: the reason Facebook can afford to create a great site is they have revenue. They have revenue because they strategically screw anyone who finds a profitable niche in the Facebook-universe.
I've learned to asemble and repair things watching youtube videos. My children's schools use the Khan website for homework and practice tests. I run my domain servers on BSD that is created and distributed via the web; and my desktops and laptops run Linux Mint. The web is enabling great things even with all the nonsense and drivel out there.
The Internet cancer.
In the internet and web are far superior in every way even taking into account the authors minor gripes and whiny bitching.
Yep, this is just another "get off my lawn" loser who pines for the days when the Internet was some exclusive club for sweaty nerds.
Please don't mourn the loss of poorly-animated American flag GIFs on pastel blue backgrounds adorned with horrible ClipArt.
Please also don't wish back into existence webrings or link exchanges.
You can long for another GeoCities if you really, really want, but why? Does it mean that much to you to have a few extra million shitty web pages out there with orange "Under Construction" banners and 200 pictures of someone's favorite anime character? Besides, nowadays you can't even twirl a lolcat by its tail without hitting some kind of "free web hosting" site. Sure, they might stick an ad or two on your page, but so did Geocities, and even though people raged and bleated about how the evil overlords were trying to make their money back, they still used GeoCities for years to come.
Stop mourning the loss of inconsequential shit that's old and obsolete. That's what hipsters pay good money to do (ironically enough).
tl;dr: Everything in this article is either still around, or has been replaced with something very similar.
P.S. The author's name is "Anil Dash". Wow... probably sucked to be him in middle/high school.
If you need a way to send a contact a file via the interwebs, the most universal method is still email.
I am not a crackpot.
Only feeding them targeted advertising is.
So does he think websites are sucking in too much data from other servers, or not enough?
The web is shit, and it would still be shit if it happened the way he wanted, because the only thing holding it back was how shitty Javascript and HTML are. But then the browsers got XMLHttpRequest, and it was still shitty but now it could pull that shit from anywhere. And so they can keep polishing that turd, but no one knows where their data goes or who it goes to, yet this joker is whining because he can't mix the horribly abbreviated drivel posted to Twitter with the inane drivel posted to Tumblr with the 'shopped drivel posted to Instragram.
I don't know why you left the 90's and 2000's out of that. The 90s granted us the era of inane sitcom dominance, and the 2000s gave us the reality television tsunami and 24 hour news. It's too early to say whether the 2010's dramas are going to be a predominantly good or bad thing.
I don't use facebook (near dormant account) and I have no twitter account.
On the other hand, I have a github account. It, or bitbucket or any random hosting service with post hooks would suffice. That's the point, any one would work.
Then I have a post hook which sends a POST to a specific URL.
The URL happens to be to drone.io which is completely unrelated to github. It at the request of github, drone.io then goes and downloads the repository and builds it. It then sends an email relating success or failure.
The email goes to a mailing list hosted by a completely different organisation. That eventually sends the email to my address at yet another place which through the magic of MX winds up in my browser via my gmail account.
This was trivial to set up and involves something like 6 different organisations that I can see (probably more like 20 when you include all the services those guys use) who have absoloutely no connection to one another. Yet, when someone commits a change, I get an automatic report as to whether they broke the build.
Screw facebook at al. I really don't care whether I can post instagram mangled pictures on twitter.
It would have taken a week 5 years ago to to that. Today it takes 5 minutes, from scratch.
The level of integration present on utterly disparate services is fantastic and way better than it used to be.
The present is awesome. The author just eeds to look outside.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
How is this any different than AOL Instant Messenger vs MSN vs Yahoo? Thats the way most people communicated on the web prior to MySpace.
All of that web stuff is still available. What we really have lost is a lot of the feature set that existed pre-web. Things like killfiles and distributed discussions from NNTP have no ready equivalent today.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
"A decade ago, there weren't many choices. Everyone I knew all used the same services and it was easy to find stuff. Now all the people I know use all sorts of different services and I can't find anything! We've lost the small, intimate web community we used to have!"
Yeah, yeah. Every few years someone with a blog goes through a mid-life crisis and realizes the world isn't the way it used to be. BFD, so the world changes. Get over it. Abe Simpson summed it up best...
"I used to be with it, but then they changed what *it* was. Now what I'm with isn't *it*, and what's *it* seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you... "
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
This isn't some standard polemic about "those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!"
Yes it is. It's a long winded whine about how core principles have been lost, which they haven't.
I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites
But you point at them and say what huge amount of harm they've done.
But they're based on a few assumptions that aren't necessarily correct.
Oh really, let's examine them then.
The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth.
The primary fallacy of this article is that ordinary people want the complexity and extensibility, that every user wants to twiddle with RSS and build web pages from scratch. The vast majority of the internet using public don't. They want someone else to take care of the minutia. It's been that way since the days of the BBS. The BBS culture had users and sysops and wasn't pure peer to peer "read-write" because not everyone could be arsed to set up his own BBS and pay for a phone line or even bother something so simple as an ANSI menu layout screen. It's still this way. The vast majority of users just want to post their pictures, send mail, pirate media, write their blawgs and to leave the icky technical stuff to people more competent.
And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.'
And users can vote with their feet and migrate elsewhere. This article is written like the users have nowhere to go and the big services are some sort of social prison that nobody can escape. People are perfectly free to set up their own servers and whatnot. We've seen an explosion of cheap hosting like never before. But most people don't want to do that. The number of people I know, personally, that can write a simple HTML 1.0 web page from scratch, even with commercial tools, I can count on one hand. This is not the fault of the likes of Facebook or whoever. This is the because of the fact that even 20 years after the invention of the www, it's still complex with concepts that are nearly impossible for most people to wrap their heads around. And thus we wind up with services that are more than willing to do it for them.
The author is bemoaning the loss of the peer-to-peer read-write-web which never existed in the first place.
There are the technorati and there is everyone else, and the technorati run things. This is entirely by consent. There was no wresting control from users who wanted to do their own things. If there was any freedom lost (there hasn't been) it's because it was given up, not taken.
--
BMO
I don't know why the writer of the article is complaining. The web hasn't been about the people using it for YEARS now. Probably a decade by now.
Dude man... we're a commodity meant to be bled of everything useful, and then discarded. That's just how it is now, and you'll never change it because you're in the lower caste.
I set up a Facebook 'like' button on my wifes website and we had more likes than visitors, so I know the FB likes are faked. I then read a BBC article about how they advertised a fake company and got thousands of likes, but from Egypt and Phillipines... for a company that didn't do anything and didn't exist.
Then I read this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19832043
(it says FB has admitted they rig the 'like' system to increment it anytime it sees a link to a site exchanged, or on lots of other occassions).
So IMHO, I think the popularity of Facebook is overblown by artificial bots and the fake games FB does to rig it. I think that's more about duping advertisers and investors than actual popularity. To make you think its more popular than it actually is.
The web is still there, it will still be there after Facebook, just as it was there after MySpace.
I think most geeks love all the buttons, features, and lcd screen a $200 tv-combo remote control has to offer. It's something designed by engineers *for* engineers. Meanwhile, the rest (and I would dare say *most*) people of the world just simply wants to watch tv. power, volume, and channel are all the buttons most people want. Less is more. Apple designers knew the mass market. They don't much care for the niche.
Likewise, this guy sounds like he's lamenting the power of the internet being underutilized. I think that's true and it's unfair to blame these companies for fostering that behavior because they're just listening to their customers; or more likely, trying to lock them inside their corporate environment. So what? Make something better. Of course, this is easier said than done, but I hear the same complaints from chefs lamenting that most people would rather eat junk, unhealthy cheap food than a healthy meal. However, most people don't want to spend too much on a lunch meal, and more importantly, they want it fast. A restaurant lunch meal would take at least 10-12 minutes to prepare. The best way I've found to compete against fast food is to offer a buffet.
But my point is, don't just blame the companies if you're going that route. Blame the people as well. Re-educate them with a better service or website instead of just ranting if you want to change public opinion. But again, that's easier said than done. And as someone else has posted here, it takes a lot of effort/ talent/ luck to get an audience - something every youtube content-creator is competing for right now.
... dumbed down internet services.
That's all that needs to be said here, things like facebook and tumbler/twitter, etc are just a reflection of the lack of intelligence of most of mankind.
Pardon?
Anil Dash seems to remember things a bit differently than I do. We didn't "re-educate" the AOL users. Instead, those users turned the rest of the web into the trash pile so much of it is today.
The Twitter and Facebook fanatics of today (who know and care nothing about the way the web really works) are exactly the same people who would have been obsessively dialing into AOL twenty years ago. Nothing has changed with that demographic, and the idea that we are somehow going to "re-educate" them is laughably naive.
Today, we are still suffering from the consequences of the misguided belief that the average user could be "educated" to properly operate and maintain a general-purpose computer. The result? Huge botnets, DDoS attacks, and exploits at every turn. Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs had it exactly right - build a walled garden to keep those users from doing any more damage to themselves or to the rest of the net.
The "old web" is still out there. No one has taken it away from us. And if the teeming millions have no knowledge or appreciation of it, so what? As long as walled gardens keep them from ruining it for the rest of us, I fail to see the downside.
TFA seems to think the death of Technorati (propriatary website) and replacement by Facebook (propriatary website) is some great loss. I thought he was going to make an outstanding point. Instead, he's being a newfag and no one can stop him.
He misses the point of his own argument. TFA can't imagine a world where Facebook is an open protocol and interoperates with Facebook clones. That's exactly what we used to have with "social" protocols like IRC and NNTP. Anyone could run their own "social" web. It wasn't until the government stepped in and labeled everyone using those systems as pedophiles and pirates that people started migrating to the walled gardens for their own "safety." Sure, those open systems still exist, but they're mainly ghost towns. Even the spam bots are gone in a lot of cases.
Whenever I'm feeling nostalgic for ye olde web, I just load up Geocitiesizer:
http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=2&music=6&url=tech.slashdot.org/story/12/12/14/148208/the-web-we-lost
Come on slashdot. There has to be something of value to publish other than a childish rant about the wealthy and the envy of a few.
This is essentially a vast wasteland repeat, updated for the 21st century.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Sharing concerns about the trend toward gated communities and loss of choices and freedom, I was very eager to read Anil's blog post.
Sadly, while the muted violet-and-grey theme may be very stylish and tasteful, I find that its lack of contrast makes in nearly impossible to read.
I love Lynx, but is that what I need to resort to on the World Wide Web to understand the points that Web advocates are trying to make?
And anyone who agrees with this post is most likely not posting content to the internet with the same zeal to connect and share as they once had. I'm surprising myself by actually posting.
For me, the problem is that where most content on the Web was out on public pages, it now hides behind a Facebook etc. login screen. I don't use that service, so when I hit that login screen, I close the tab. After a while, it leaves you with a sick feeling.
The real problem is not that these older/better internet services aren't around anymore, but that most people don't look at every available option first, and then choose Facebook etc. They have learned that there is only Facebook and then commercial sites for buying/building things. They may as well not exist - so the argument that they are still there is mostly irrelevant.
As an example, the "young folks" (college/highschool age folks ) that I've convinced to use IRC with me have come around to my understanding, and feel basically the same way I do. But they wouldn't have known it was there, or how to use it. Back in the day, there was an incentive to learn about it. That incentive is gone - so it doesn't really matter if the services still exist or not.
Why is that fascinating? Many people thought AOL, Compuserve, etc. were the Internet during their heydays. In fact, what tou stated is a pretty mundane observation.
In general these cant be search-cataloged or accessed without an account. Vast important sections of the web are hidden this way.
Now complain about how much it sucks compared to before it was discovered and marketed for the masses.
I can't even find a good Gopher server anymore.
So, on the article's page, how come we can post comments about it...... via Facebook!!!???!!! Can't be that much of a walled garden then!
Come back when you have a real point to make, please.
.... there's Sex too!
But seriously - it doesn't. I mean look at Wikipedia. Look at Linux. Look at the the website hosting this comment! Money is involved, but not central. Humans are complex and bias organisms with a wide variety of drives, interests, desires and urges evolved by multiple coupled evolutionary processes. While I agree this guy comes off as a bit of a Naive Idealist - I see no reason to crush the hopes of Free Ideas and Services. We won't know until we try!
The people hating on the article need to get a clue. He may have worded it incorrectly but what he is saying that because of the internet these corporations have created, it has shifted to a consumer society rather than an internet populated by content-makers who build and run their own websites and host their own content. Further worsening things is SOPA and the other internet-dragon acts that, while not all entirely implemented, serve to do nothing but ruin the internet - people who do create content will be lucky if someone doesn't claim it was stolen, whether SOPA returns and gets passed or the internet stays the same. Google axes multiple blogger sites on a daily basis that are 100% legit and run entirely by their creator, containing original work made by said creator, and they aren't the only offender. People have no less ability to find their own way on the internet than they did in the early days. However, so few people actually do (even among us IT workers) that the mainstream consumer culture of the internet obscures them and so this article is appropriate, to the general masses.
> The result of a Capitalistic Society that practices Capitalism would be Open and Free Markets, right?
Wrong. Left to themselves, these tend to degenerate into monopolies as the incumbents use their profits to keep competitors out. Open and free markets must be maintained by forces outside of the market mechanism, such as regulations.
Capitalism doesn't produce free markets, it requires them (most definitions of it do anyway), so wrong causality direction.
In other news, introducing the profit motive to an egalitarian system reduces the egalitarianism.
It seems to be a popular name in some places. My guess is his parents weren't English speakers when he was born. However... the plant with the same name, Indigofera suffruticosa, commonly known as Anil, Guatemalan indigo, Small-leaved indigo (Sierra Leone), West Indian indigo, and Wild indigo,[2] is a flowering plant in the pea family, Fabaceae. In Hawaiian it is known as either ÊInikÅ/Inikoa, or KolÅ; in Fijian it is called Vaivai, the Samoans call it LaÊau mageso, on Guam it is called Aniles, and in Tonga it is referred to as Êakauveli (itchy plant).
You're right, what were they thinking?
Oh, and moderators... that comment wasn't offtopic, it's the author's name. WTF is wrong with you guys?? Overrated perhaps, funny perhaps, but on topic.
Free Martian Whores!
Maybe I'm going OT or maybe I don't really know what FOSS is or whatever. However I remember back in 1990s you can post questions, read interesting subjects from real people, sometimes get your ass flamed for saying something stupid, but it all seem to get wiped out by spammers. There was a time when I can post questions about "anyone know of a frequency synthesizer for Motorola HT220s?" or "I'm having problems with my Mac G3 and cannot upgrade it to OS9, any suggestions?"
But these days if I have a question such as "I'm having problems with XP when I tried installing such-and-such software" or "anyone know about the software to upgrade the Firestore FS4 from SD to HD?" Well these days the people that can answer these questions are in some group that you must be a member of group. But if you already are then you already know the answers to these questions. So then only option is to "google it" but only to find other people post same question on forums and people given non-answer solutions. Or psuedo-techie articles that are really sales and marketing site. Or the ***worst*** are fixya.com postings that are aggregates from posts from bankrupted answers on dopey forums.
My latest find, 1980s pre-internet tutorial on medical measurements, discusses how to measure ECGs and EEGs. Has diagrams and voltage levels, real cool. It is the kind of thing perfect for Usenet, there might be websites that discuss this subject but probably subject matter buried in 1000 page PDF or aggregated site with a lot of other stuff you dont need to know. FYI, Heart potential (ECG) 1 mV, 0.1 to 100 Hz. Brain potential (EEG) 10 uV, 0.1 to 100 Hz. Muscle potential (EMG) 0.2 uV to 5 mV, DC to 1000 Hz. Because this document was written on typewriter then manuscript sent to typesetter, authors had to exercise good proofreading and could not do lotsa copy-and-paste and could not use lots of flashy graphics. Only let one option. Make it the best you can because once it's printed and distributed, too late to fix any mistakes.
mfwright@batnet.com
I think a few of the points from TFA were sorta lame.. detracting from the central issue of aggregation of power into the hands of a few megasites.
I have to admit part of the issue is embedded in human perception. There is a "long tail" where while mega-sites may dominate the minds and bandwidth usage of many there are still countless millions of independent sites which exist yet tend to get overlooked the minds of those who bring up this issue.
It has been my experience most businesses even small ma-pa shops have their own domain names and home pages. Web design firms are everywhere now.. hosting business is growing not shrinking.
The major change has been on the user side of the equation where previously people would upload content to their ISP or a service like geocities.
Today blogging sites, facebook and wikipedia have replaced the need for most people to have personal web pages. Rather than creating a page explaining my "origional" (LOL) research I could just start or improve a wikipedia article.
Rather than publishing my endless stream of personal opinions I could get an account on a blogging service.
Rather than publishing an endless stream of nonsense about myself I could open my own facebook account.
While businesses are leveraging facebook to collect information on their customers and prospects web hosting is gaining ground not loosing it to facebook or anyone else.
The marketeers have millions to spend on propogation of "to the cloud" memes. I think it would be awesome to find a way to counteract this making running your own servers cool again.
P2P/torrents has shown it is technically possible to innovate in this area even though it ended up being a really stupid idea (providing an open feedback channel) having done more to bolster legislative support for opressive structures than the facebooks of the world ever have.
While I don't believe currently megasites have caused damage my fear for the future is mostly in the form of laws which institutionalize megasites in some way like a mattress industry lobbying for *more* regulation in order to keep competition out.
For example I can see structures where there are technical barriers such as future legislation requiring sophisticated infustructure and compliance verification for automatic detection of CP or IP infringement such as what has evolved within youtube. This would constitute a prohibitive bar for new entrants.
We had made up asinine words since before the MANIAC computers:
Metropolis chose the name MANIAC in the hope of stopping the rash of silly acronyms for machine names (Metropolis 1980), although von Neumann may have suggested the name to him.
Regulations kill unicorns. That's why we don't have any left.
... what about the Internet we lost? We used to have ftp, and gopher, and usenet, and telnet, and finger, and you could send email to webmaster@ or abuse@ or root@ and reach a human, or get things done by emailing majordomo, but nowadays it's all just these crap messaging systems and "click here if you forgot your password" and "type these letters to prove you're a human" and port 80, port 80, port 80. :-|
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I'm still mad at the loss of unicorns.
Interestingly enough, this exact state of affairs was predicted by Cliff in "Silicon Snake Oil", having seen the same thing happen with CB, and in Usenet and the fledging web.
His previous book lamented the sad state of computer security at the time, and if anything it's gotten worse.
Plan My Week for iPhone
You will always be in our hearts.
Because back during the days of Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL, there really wasn't a "Web" as we know it. In the late 80's-mid 90's people were either on BBS's or on one of those services. Prodigy didn't even have a "portal" to the "World Wide Web" until late '94...
So to contrast that era to the mid 90's to now, when we have had a much more developed or "grown" Web, users migrated back to the "Garden" of FB.
That was my point.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The big change in the web was 1993 when AOL users came on Usenet. Imagine for a moment what the internet would be like if everyone had to use real name accounts tied to workplace email, but all the employers were more or less cool and not paranoid. There was little security and machines tied together with RSH, rlogin... and where the machines didn't tie together you could freely use low security protocols like FTP, Telnet and RSH. There was no spam. No unethical, "man in the middles".
This article is about minor shifts in data aggregation. The big shifts IMHO were:
a) anonymity
b) commerce
c) the move from text based to image based (i.e. HTTP replacing Gopher and for information)
d) the death of Usenet and it being replaced with web based forums
I have no idea if the social media sites creating add on services but making the data harder for APIs is a good or a bad thing. What I can say though is in the scope of things it is not that huge a change.
IMHO IPv6 and going back to a world where every machine is directly accessible by every machine. That potentially could really create connection like we had 20 years ago.
I agree with the point you are making but you have that backwards.
AOL people when they got usenet thought it was a specialized type of AOL chatroom. They thought the internet was AOL.
Compuserve people never had that problem. They had always had lots of paid services so they understood the distinction between Compuserver native and the internet based services.
Too Low Contrast; Didn't Read.
Here's a fun fact:
Anyone who builds a Low Contrast Website, to express their opinion on,
automatically loses their right to complain about anything anyone else does wrong.
We also get Google and Wikipedia ... doing for free (with tip jars ala NPR/PBS) what AOL, Yahoo, etc could not do. This is just like musicians having to learn to make their money off their IP by selling concerts rather than by selling the songs. They make less on average as a consequence, but there are more people making those token wages as 2nd income (my perception, no data). Sure, we still have the top-pop-40 industrial-"musak" feeding the masses, but who cares? Let them tear each other apart in the free market while the rest of us enjoy the new subsistence economy.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
What do you expect after modern K-12 education brainwashing? Liberty???