I think short-signed reasoning like this is why businesses today abound with so much bad (stupid) behavior in the first place.
I'm not suggesting Steam is perfect (it is a DRM wrapper after all) but Valve, through Steam have implemented a rather simple and straight forward way to collect information by (and get this): asking for it. Revolutionary!
Just because it might be a little easier to automate (or hide) your data collecting policy doesn't mean it's the only (or right) way to do it. After all, *you're* asking for something of value. Don't you think the least you can do is pay *me* the respect of asking for it?
No, what you're missing is that after gaining acceptance and traction the combination of technologies commonly used to create services has begun to define the usefulness or relevance of online business.
And all that noise you're hearing is business trying to make sense of a changing landscape and pundits gushing to provide (seemly mostly wrong) answers.
So next time you hear someone froth up about the wonders of AJAX and the Web 2.0 maybe you can just smile to yourself knowing all their really trying to do is figure out how to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive and service based environment.
Not that I don't get where you're coming from. But the thing that we seem to be discussing when we pull out this useless and unintelligible term Web 2.0 is the real and fundamental shift in the (for lack of a better word) marketplace.
Pundits want to explain it (hi Tim!) businesses want to understand it. But we continuously end up talking about the technologies used (yay AJAX! yay Javascript!) or the days most popular implementations (OMG Social Social Revolution!) while we miss or ignore the simple fact that sites that are becoming relevant today are offering to be more then just a destination by provide users with useful services.
In fact you might argue that there seems to be an increasingly direct correlation between usefulness and relevance.
So sure, AJAX is topical and it helps you achieve some enhanced usability. But the fundamental shift in focus towards services seems to be the more salient point, remarkably, missing from the conversation.
Until the user realizes they've been suckered into working for the website owners.
I thought about this for a while myself. I work from both angels 1) as a user who values my privacy *and* my freedom 2) as a technology professional working in the development industry.
The thing you need to understand is that while yes, companies *are* rubbing their hands together thinking user generated content is a big fat freebie, no, that's not how it actually works (or will work out).
The thing to remember is that these are services. Sort of like dry cleaning is a service. The service any site provides is only useful if it is relevant. Irrelevant, cumbersome or annoying services will not find footing in the market, or will lose it as equal or better services emerge.
An example would be google versus yahoo, the one-time market leader.
So forgetting all the annoying hype and the related market (or pundit?) frenzy we still have a fundamental shift toward services. If your service isn't useful; it is irrelevant.
Which is to say that if you like and visit my site xyz.com and I provide tools that enhance or simplify your experience in some way, you are likely to use them. The more useful you find these services the more likely you are to use them. In this equation, evil doesn't necessarily = successful because it impedes useful. Hence we have companies like Google who's motto is famously: Don't be evil. I'm sure they will be (or have, or are), but they seem to understand that by behaving badly they risk losing relevance.
Anyway, what I've advocated here is to simply look beyond the social hype and the unintelligible Web 2.0 lingoism and call it what it is: a shift to services.
But the reason I make the distinction is because I think it's important to reiterate the over arching concept, which is the shift towards services, and how that really has been a useful and fundamental change in our focus.
Once we establish that it's easy to see that social services are/(*cough* well, can) be a useful subset of possible services. But more importantly we can see much more clearly what makes todays site more (services based) or less (destination based) relevant and that seems to be the topic du jour (in the guise of the nearly unintelligible concept: Web 2.0).
And finally, that services are about more then tacking on a blog, a wiki, a friends list and creating some worm-like 'viral marketing' campaign.
The exchange in a service based landscape is simple: You want traffic. There's an invisible contract between you (the site) and me (the visitor): if your service isn't useful; you are not relevant.
It's more then that (and I'm sure you know it)..
on
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Book aside (I didn't RTFA) and glossing over the Web 2.0 jargon the important change I see isn't the social features you seem to be mocking. That's just an easy facet to focus on.
What's news is websites have become services.
Mull that over for a second if you want.
Now days there are 2 kinds of websites: destinations and services.
A destinations major draw is it's content and it relies on this content to draw visitors and to thereby grow its site. A service will also have content, but like the name suggests a service also provides it's visitors with services and it relies on its content *and* the usefulness of its services to grow the site.
Now if we extrapolate that for a second we can create two imaginary retailers: musicshop01.com and musicshop02.com
Musicshop01.com is a good old music retailer. They sell cds, lps and t-shirts and have a great selection. People love to go to musicshop01.com and find the latest music.
Musicshop02.com just opened and they have a similar selection, but the owners a bit younger with some computer experience and a few programming buddies. People can browse catalogs and lists just like they could at musicshop01.com but they start to notice a few other features: they can create tags, add comments, create and manage lists, add ratings or reviews, view personal history, suggestions, search these items, add friends and send and receive recommendations. The website owner is happy because the cost of this user-generated content is very low (increased overhead) and the users are happy because the peer-generated content provides additional information which can prove useful.
Over time users realize that the services provided by musicshop02.com are convenient and can save them time and can help them find products that they might not find otherwise.
At the same time growth at musicshop01.com has been flat and is now beginning to drop as users become increasingly familiar with the services available at musicshop02.com.
That's the idea. Although I'd hope that you put at least some considerations into things, planning and the real world don't always match up perfectly. More so, because a lot of the technology that you'll find yourself deploying is either new or to be developed in-house.
Up the tread there are a few mentions of Avast (same I use) which seams to have the kind of mind-share today AVG had before.
First thing you'll want to do if figure out how to turn of that annoying talking notification (program settings>sounds), but after that it works pretty much like you'd want your antivirus to work (quietly and efficiently in the background).
I think the barrier to entry from an engineering standpoint has been lowered such that you can more easily make a site that appears to be pretty decent and attracts an audience.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Sites are increasingly complicated applications with a great set of increasingly complex tools available to help you bring your ideas to the public. Of course this doesn't help so much with the basics you've mentioned and to make things even more complicated the requirements for scaling are becoming increasingly complex; as we move from the read web to the write web scaling becomes less about replication and memory caching and more about complex sharding and well planned data layout.
In the old days it was only the big boys who really worried about these types of things, but today it's small and medium sized ventures doing it, and you can expect to see a few more short-cuts taken and a few blunders along the way.
I used to use AVG (and liked it a lot at the time) but switched to Avast after a couple of failed detections. Avast also will scan content, but they skip the stupid stuff and just scan content you're accessing. And ya, sometimes it's good to know someones got your back when you're on a p0rn binge.
Haven't we grown tired of this kind of trolling? BSD = good. GPL = good. There are lots of licenses so that *you* can enjoy the greatest freedom of them all: you choose the license with works best for you. So get the fuck over yourself.
You missed the point. What kills me is he could have downloaded Ubuntu (or *your* favorite) in that time and be done with it.
It's like he's SO close to really understanding the problem and still missing it. Windows is cumbersome and unwieldy. It's distrust of it's customers forces usability into second place which is really pretty amazing considering it's customers are the only reason as a commercial operation it exists in the first place.
That if you plan to do it (or hope to) it helps to read the ups and down of people who already have. And it's *nice* that some take the time out (as./ did and a number of other sites) to talk about it so that we can learn from their experience and mistakes.
But if you already know everything, by all means, shoot. But the outline that just got you modded as insightful isn't an application, didn't detail redundancy of any sort and would be a management nightmare (ie, all the interesting stuff).
I mean really, we could propose that solution to just about any web based application but that's not hardly the story is it?
knows they'll cry bloody murder with ANY change (and the loudest are the easiest to hear!). It can be ridiculous, stifling real development and useful enhancements.
That said, if you throw in too many of these you can simply kiss your user base good-bye..
I'll keeps on trying to get used to the awesome (??!) bar but I'm sure as I type this SOMEONE is creating a brand new shiny add-on to *truly* revert the behavior for those who feel the need it (oss, beauty eh?)..
I applaud the developers for the innovating work that they've done and wish them luck in their continuing success in finding the right balance between innovation and usability.
A) don't confuse a monopoly issue with common crime B) if you've never ordered drugs online I expect the read was eye-opening, but as someone who has let me give you a tiny bit of perspective: people who break the law can't always be trusted; but you already knew that.
Nothing personal, but if that's the impression you got you clearly aren't their target audience. It was cheeky, yes, but every drug mentioned included a list of mostly horrific side effects. But I guess that's hardly worth noticing if your going for the knee-jerk reaction.
Get The Fuck Out Of MY Sex Life. It's not just idiotic, it's insulting that some people have tried to make it into such a big deal. It's insulting because there are so many truly important things going on, at any given time, independent of which flavor we have in office.
You get your dick sucked and lie about it. I lie my way into war and domestic spying. Prioritize.
Slashdot Mirror
*cough* really? *cough*
I think short-signed reasoning like this is why businesses today abound with so much bad (stupid) behavior in the first place.
I'm not suggesting Steam is perfect (it is a DRM wrapper after all) but Valve, through Steam have implemented a rather simple and straight forward way to collect information by (and get this): asking for it. Revolutionary!
Just because it might be a little easier to automate (or hide) your data collecting policy doesn't mean it's the only (or right) way to do it. After all, *you're* asking for something of value. Don't you think the least you can do is pay *me* the respect of asking for it?
No, what you're missing is that after gaining acceptance and traction the combination of technologies commonly used to create services has begun to define the usefulness or relevance of online business.
And all that noise you're hearing is business trying to make sense of a changing landscape and pundits gushing to provide (seemly mostly wrong) answers.
So next time you hear someone froth up about the wonders of AJAX and the Web 2.0 maybe you can just smile to yourself knowing all their really trying to do is figure out how to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive and service based environment.
Not that I don't get where you're coming from. But the thing that we seem to be discussing when we pull out this useless and unintelligible term Web 2.0 is the real and fundamental shift in the (for lack of a better word) marketplace.
Pundits want to explain it (hi Tim!) businesses want to understand it. But we continuously end up talking about the technologies used (yay AJAX! yay Javascript!) or the days most popular implementations (OMG Social Social Revolution!) while we miss or ignore the simple fact that sites that are becoming relevant today are offering to be more then just a destination by provide users with useful services.
In fact you might argue that there seems to be an increasingly direct correlation between usefulness and relevance.
So sure, AJAX is topical and it helps you achieve some enhanced usability. But the fundamental shift in focus towards services seems to be the more salient point, remarkably, missing from the conversation.
I thought about this for a while myself. I work from both angels 1) as a user who values my privacy *and* my freedom 2) as a technology professional working in the development industry.
The thing you need to understand is that while yes, companies *are* rubbing their hands together thinking user generated content is a big fat freebie, no, that's not how it actually works (or will work out).
The thing to remember is that these are services. Sort of like dry cleaning is a service. The service any site provides is only useful if it is relevant. Irrelevant, cumbersome or annoying services will not find footing in the market, or will lose it as equal or better services emerge.
An example would be google versus yahoo, the one-time market leader.
So forgetting all the annoying hype and the related market (or pundit?) frenzy we still have a fundamental shift toward services. If your service isn't useful; it is irrelevant.
Which is to say that if you like and visit my site xyz.com and I provide tools that enhance or simplify your experience in some way, you are likely to use them. The more useful you find these services the more likely you are to use them. In this equation, evil doesn't necessarily = successful because it impedes useful. Hence we have companies like Google who's motto is famously: Don't be evil. I'm sure they will be (or have, or are), but they seem to understand that by behaving badly they risk losing relevance.
Anyway, what I've advocated here is to simply look beyond the social hype and the unintelligible Web 2.0 lingoism and call it what it is: a shift to services.
Yes, you are wrong and in such a peculiar manner that I don't know how (or even if) to correct you.
Semantics is true. :)
But the reason I make the distinction is because I think it's important to reiterate the over arching concept, which is the shift towards services, and how that really has been a useful and fundamental change in our focus.
Once we establish that it's easy to see that social services are/(*cough* well, can) be a useful subset of possible services. But more importantly we can see much more clearly what makes todays site more (services based) or less (destination based) relevant and that seems to be the topic du jour (in the guise of the nearly unintelligible concept: Web 2.0).
And finally, that services are about more then tacking on a blog, a wiki, a friends list and creating some worm-like 'viral marketing' campaign.
The exchange in a service based landscape is simple: You want traffic. There's an invisible contract between you (the site) and me (the visitor): if your service isn't useful; you are not relevant.
Book aside (I didn't RTFA) and glossing over the Web 2.0 jargon the important change I see isn't the social features you seem to be mocking. That's just an easy facet to focus on.
What's news is websites have become services.
Mull that over for a second if you want.
Now days there are 2 kinds of websites: destinations and services.
A destinations major draw is it's content and it relies on this content to draw visitors and to thereby grow its site. A service will also have content, but like the name suggests a service also provides it's visitors with services and it relies on its content *and* the usefulness of its services to grow the site.
Now if we extrapolate that for a second we can create two imaginary retailers: musicshop01.com and musicshop02.com
Musicshop01.com is a good old music retailer. They sell cds, lps and t-shirts and have a great selection. People love to go to musicshop01.com and find the latest music.
Musicshop02.com just opened and they have a similar selection, but the owners a bit younger with some computer experience and a few programming buddies. People can browse catalogs and lists just like they could at musicshop01.com but they start to notice a few other features: they can create tags, add comments, create and manage lists, add ratings or reviews, view personal history, suggestions, search these items, add friends and send and receive recommendations. The website owner is happy because the cost of this user-generated content is very low (increased overhead) and the users are happy because the peer-generated content provides additional information which can prove useful.
Over time users realize that the services provided by musicshop02.com are convenient and can save them time and can help them find products that they might not find otherwise.
At the same time growth at musicshop01.com has been flat and is now beginning to drop as users become increasingly familiar with the services available at musicshop02.com.
Welcome to the social revolution.
That's the idea. Although I'd hope that you put at least some considerations into things, planning and the real world don't always match up perfectly. More so, because a lot of the technology that you'll find yourself deploying is either new or to be developed in-house.
Up the tread there are a few mentions of Avast (same I use) which seams to have the kind of mind-share today AVG had before.
First thing you'll want to do if figure out how to turn of that annoying talking notification (program settings>sounds), but after that it works pretty much like you'd want your antivirus to work (quietly and efficiently in the background).
I think you hit the nail on the head. Sites are increasingly complicated applications with a great set of increasingly complex tools available to help you bring your ideas to the public. Of course this doesn't help so much with the basics you've mentioned and to make things even more complicated the requirements for scaling are becoming increasingly complex; as we move from the read web to the write web scaling becomes less about replication and memory caching and more about complex sharding and well planned data layout.
In the old days it was only the big boys who really worried about these types of things, but today it's small and medium sized ventures doing it, and you can expect to see a few more short-cuts taken and a few blunders along the way.
I used to use AVG (and liked it a lot at the time) but switched to Avast after a couple of failed detections. Avast also will scan content, but they skip the stupid stuff and just scan content you're accessing. And ya, sometimes it's good to know someones got your back when you're on a p0rn binge.
Haven't we grown tired of this kind of trolling? BSD = good. GPL = good. There are lots of licenses so that *you* can enjoy the greatest freedom of them all: you choose the license with works best for you. So get the fuck over yourself.
You missed the point. What kills me is he could have downloaded Ubuntu (or *your* favorite) in that time and be done with it.
It's like he's SO close to really understanding the problem and still missing it. Windows is cumbersome and unwieldy. It's distrust of it's customers forces usability into second place which is really pretty amazing considering it's customers are the only reason as a commercial operation it exists in the first place.
That if you plan to do it (or hope to) it helps to read the ups and down of people who already have. And it's *nice* that some take the time out (as ./ did and a number of other sites) to talk about it so that we can learn from their experience and mistakes.
But if you already know everything, by all means, shoot. But the outline that just got you modded as insightful isn't an application, didn't detail redundancy of any sort and would be a management nightmare (ie, all the interesting stuff).
I mean really, we could propose that solution to just about any web based application but that's not hardly the story is it?
teacher. For the chicks I think.
And ya, that's creepy.
knows they'll cry bloody murder with ANY change (and the loudest are the easiest to hear!). It can be ridiculous, stifling real development and useful enhancements.
That said, if you throw in too many of these you can simply kiss your user base good-bye..
I'll keeps on trying to get used to the awesome (??!) bar but I'm sure as I type this SOMEONE is creating a brand new shiny add-on to *truly* revert the behavior for those who feel the need it (oss, beauty eh?)..
I applaud the developers for the innovating work that they've done and wish them luck in their continuing success in finding the right balance between innovation and usability.
Oh! Oh! Me neither!
A) don't confuse a monopoly issue with common crime B) if you've never ordered drugs online I expect the read was eye-opening, but as someone who has let me give you a tiny bit of perspective: people who break the law can't always be trusted; but you already knew that.
Nothing personal, but if that's the impression you got you clearly aren't their target audience. It was cheeky, yes, but every drug mentioned included a list of mostly horrific side effects. But I guess that's hardly worth noticing if your going for the knee-jerk reaction.
Maybe if we taught them that they'd choose medication or coping-skills over addiction.
When you start to view balanced information as promotion you've clearly lost your way.
When organization strays so far from the heartbeat of the American entertainment business.
and "unjust" is murky. A blow-job is easy.
In political systems, how does entropy affect freedom?
Should we fail to do anything then we assert that we are tolerant of these violations and should expect ongoing erosion.
Is it American to ignore impropriety because it's inconvenient? Just imagine it's a democrat if you have to, corruption isn't drawn on party lines.
Get The Fuck Out Of MY Sex Life. It's not just idiotic, it's insulting that some people have tried to make it into such a big deal. It's insulting because there are so many truly important things going on, at any given time, independent of which flavor we have in office.
You get your dick sucked and lie about it. I lie my way into war and domestic spying. Prioritize.