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.'"
I never understood why there was such a backlash against Trillian.
I think it was because, back in The Day(tm), while it technically supported numerous protocols, it didn't do so perfectly... to the receiving end. That is, any non-Trillian user talking to a Trillian user noticed annoying artifacts and glitches in their chats, or other things that made it clear the user was breaking the flow of the "real" chat program.
A notable example in this respect would be ICQ users; when Trillian was first released, ICQ's method of chat was the "inbox of messages" style, as opposed to the (at the time) fledgling AIM's "two-person chat" style. In other words, ICQ presented one chat message at a time, while AIM presented it as a stream, as most of us would know it now. This meant that, while ICQ users were used to sending longer messages all at once, AIM (and Trillian) users were used to sending chat fragments broken at intervals best defined as "whenever the user felt there was a chance their ADD would threaten the message being fully read", or perhaps "whenever the user's brain filled up, thus requiring the message fragment to be sent IMMEDIATELY before they forgot what they were typing and got confused". This led to ICQ users being bombarded by "Uh-Oh!"s from Trillian users, only to find a series of messages such as "hey i was thinking", "do u wanna", "like", "go to the mall", "and", "i dunno", "see a movie", "tonight", and "?", each one having to be advanced manually because Trillian didn't respect how chat worked on networks other than AIM.
Toss in a few glitches such as where Trillian "helpfully" converted quotes and apostrophes to SmartQuotes (and thus ruined messages on systems or clients that garbled those characters), points where the client doesn't make any attempt to tell its users if a receiver doesn't support some feature (and the inevitable "hay y did'nt u get my image i sent in taht chat????????" complaints), and a userbase trained by the developers to believe that THEIR client can't possibly be the problem, and you can see where the backlash came from. It was a minor Eternal September, in a way. We were flooded by users who didn't care about the established conventions of specific IM networks in those days, were being assured that they didn't need to know any of it, weren't willing to learn said conventions, and weren't going away, and we knew exactly who to blame: Trillian.
Granted, in the modern day, they've fixed pretty well all of that (not to mention ICQ's default is now AIM-style), but still, it took many years and a lot of the stigma remains. And I remain using Pidgin.