It also explains why they effectively killed flash and Java applets. They were competing technologies that weren't owned by Google and not crawlable. If they would have taken off, Google's position as top search engine could have been in danger
What do I mean with “the threat of Facebook”? In the old days, before today’s large “social media” sites, people made their own web pages on places like GeoCities or on simpler social-media-like sites like LiveJournal, etc. Those sites all had content and linked to each other. This is the web which the Google search engine and its algorithm was meant to find things in, and it worked very nicely, as it took advantage of the links other people had made to your site as a proxy for relevance in search results for your site. People making small web pages about their favorite topics (with lots of links to other people’s pages, since information was hard to find) could slowly and easily transition into making larger and larger reference web sites with lots of information, thereby attracting lots of incoming links from others, which in turn enabled people to find the information using Google’s search engine.
Compare this to now. Firstly, people having a Facebook account have no place to simply place information, no incentive to simply make a web page about, say, tacos or model trains, because that’s not what Facebook is about. Facebook is about the here-and-now, and whatever is yesterday is forgotten. As I understand it, there is no real way, in Facebook, to make a continuously updated page with a fixed address for people to go to as a reference point about some subject, or at least people are not directed towards doing this as part of their online activity (as opposed to in the past, when it was basically the only thing which people could do). Secondly, this makes it so that people have no natural path going from using Facebook to creating a larger web site with information, and there are no smaller model train or taco Facebook “pages” which could have links to your larger site and thereby validate its relevance. Thirdly, even if this second point was false, Google could not use these Facebook pages, because Google cannot crawl them. These pages are all internal to Facebook, and Facebook has every incentive to not allow Google to crawl and search this information. Facebook would much rather people used their own site to search, and thereby gaining all of Google’s sources of income: User monitoring and advertising.
Putting walled gardens around large portions of the net will inevitably result in endless mergers and an eventual "website fee" that users pay to one of three highly entrenched monopolies that control all the content. It will be back to the cable TV days in no time
It makes sense to me that now someone who used to be motivated to build a site about their life or a topic of interest now may often just sign up for a service like FB and occasionally do a post with an article, picture, etc about themselves/their interests. It seems to require much less effort for folks, which is perhaps why they do this. I lament the change somewhat and wonder what the future holds for this type of thing.
It's also much easier to find readers.
Compare:
Facebook: become friends with your co-workers, now they see your picture
Blog: Please go to jupiter90000 (that's how many zeros?).blogspot.com to see my once a week pic updates!!
Java applets just always sucked and only masochists/sadists ever used them.
It's also a good reminder of the positive influence Apple has often had. Remember that "no flash" was the "no Esc" of its time, and that they had to go all-out to defend it (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/). 6 years later, it stands as one of the rare cases where a proprietary technology was replaced by an open standard.
If Flash didn't kill your battery and expose you to new security vulnerabilities every few weeks, it likely would have continued to this day.
But Adobe touted Flash on mobile as some kind of essential technology, when it was 100% crap.
If Apple offered it on iOS, Adobe would have been milking it to this day...
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/air_for_ios.html
So iOS do support Flash, just not its browser.
The offical reasons were speed and security, which was obviously a farce since all the major browser vendors wrote their own PDF viewers which is both slow and known for tons of security issues as well.
They could have just as easily wrote their own fast and secure implementations of flash and Java instead of disabling them. Especially for Java given Google's deep experience with it and that they already have their own runtime.
Apple may have fired first on flash but google recently disabled all NPAPI plugins in chrome as well. The reason... "Security". I guess code not made by Google isn't secure enough to be used on the internet?
http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/mobile/opera-del...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800
It actually ran quite well! I used to play flash games all the time.
Google went to significant efforts to sandbox it, but that still caused problems, not least with additional complexity. As for this idea that NPAPI should continue to live... Yes "security" is a problem with NPAPI.
As for Google fixing Java... You may have heard of Oracle? And the fact that they are .... not nice?
Yup, Google should:
1. Reverse Engineer a proprietary language/API (Flash).
2. Write a secure VM for it (Flash and Java), trying to hit a moving target.
or
Get everyone to use an open, standardized tech (HTML5/js).
Can you give me one reason Google should prop up Flash?
Security wasn't a farce at all. "Flash is a big hole" (which is true) translates to "Chrome is a big hole".
I do agree with you that Google's security model is broken in many ways, both on the web and in Android.
As in most things there's probably some truth on all sides.