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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 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.
I have to agree. I've been around long enough to remember when people built their own Web sites. First, they built crappy sites on the space their ISP gave them, than, when sites like Geocities and Tripod came along, many of them moved there.
Blogs are really just evolved versions of Geocities and Tripod. Just easier for the masses to use.
21st Century Renaissance Man
Folks who got on the Internet/WWW after about 2001 don't realize that it wasn't always just another medium for slapping ads in front of people.
This isn't a bad thing. It's Google's prime business model. Google is arguable the greatest player pushing against the trend discussed in the article. They don't want people locked into walled gardens or restricted in what they can do with their systems or on the internet. They just want more people to spend more time on the internet. The more people on the internet the more money they make. iOS vs. Android is the perfect example of this. iOS is one of the most restrictive computing platforms ever created (Hmmm...aside from game consoles which I wouldn't consider general purpose computing platforms). Google financed/bought/developed Android to give people an option that didn't require them to live with Apple's restrictions. They gave it away for free because they knew it would ultimately increase their advertising revenue by getting more people to spend more time on the internet. With Apple's system only Apple and the people Apple chooses make money. Consumers suffer by being restricted in their choices to what Apple wants them to have. With Google's everybody wins. Anyone can use Android to make money. But in doing so they increase the revenue of Google's core business while also bringing about a revolution of innovation in the mobile space.
This is pretty much true of nearly every product Google creates. Another example is Google maps. It was a a huge innovative step in online mapping software. They made it wide open for anyone to use for free creating their own useful innovative applications. They make money off it by once again increasing the number of people and the amount of time they're on the internet.
Don't get me wrong. Google isn't the do all be all of the internet. Google has plenty of faults. But they've probable contributed more to a free and open internet than anyone since Mozilla thrashed IE.
Who is John Galt?