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Less Than a Month To Go Before Google Breaks Hundreds of Thousands of Links All Over the Internet (greenspun.com)
Philip Greenspun:Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and it automatically gets pushed to the online version of the album). When they were pushing their Facebook competitor, Google+, they set it up so that Picasa created Google+ albums. They wasted a huge amount of humanity's time and effort by shutting down Picasa.
Now they're going to waste millions of additional hours worldwide by breaking links to all of the Google+ albums that they had Picasa create. People will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere.
Now they're going to waste millions of additional hours worldwide by breaking links to all of the Google+ albums that they had Picasa create. People will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere.
So, I just want to chime in here on the poster - Phillip Greenspun. Most of you won't remember it, but for those of building out web pages back in 1993, there wasn't exactly a lot of content. Phillip had a ton of pictures online and an online gallery before that was even a thing. Jerry Yang was still updating his content list of Internet by hand. I feel like back then the web was small enough that you really could see nearly everything of interest. Anyway, that was just a name I hadn't seen in a long time.
----- obSig
"I told you so" -- or, actually, Mike Macgirvin told us all so. But we were all too busy playing with our toys - or other things - to think about what was happening all around us. This day should have been forseen, fortold, and warned about since the beginning of "big centralized services" ---
OH WAIT -- it was.
Mike's been working on this since his days working on Friendica (before that actually) and he has continued to push forward to provide a truly decentralized, nomadic network that keeps you and your data free from vendor lock in. While everybody has been chasing "market share" and seeking to make the next "Facebook killer," Mike has been building a solution that is far more SOLID than even Berners-Lee's current vaporware.
Hubzilla (and more recently ZAP) with running the ZOT6 protocol (with work on Zot8 already underway!) have been working to deal with this problem for the better part of a decade.
"Nomadic identity" (the ability to host your social media presence, files, data, and just about anything else with multiple different providers on multiple different servers - and log into any of them and continue working if one of them goes down for any reason) has been part of Hubzilla for a LOOONG time.
Now, with Hubzilla version 4.0 just released over the weekend, Hubzilla adds Nomadic Content addressing that separates content addressing from DNS within the ZOT network. Now, if you use Zot, you can move your content to a different server and there are no links to update - your traffic will just follow you to the new location.
The Zot network (called "the GRID") is a completely decentralized network that allows VERY granular access control and privacy options - in a solution that is MIT licensed and runs on a standard LAMP/LEMP stack. And the Hubzilla platform is as easy (I think easier) to extend with addons and custom modules as Wordpress is write plugins for.
The OP SHOULD be a "non-story" as all these challenges have been known for a long time.
The fact that we are lamenting this reality on SlashDot just shows how far we have fallen.