Welcome to the new web.
lists.whatwg.org
lists.whatwg.org
Another example: trello.com is a very nice and free card tool for small projects, but because they wanted to avoid having an "edit" button on editable text, they hijack my clicks, so it makes it painful to select text, and quite impossible to use "middle-click as paste".
But, there is a more positive perspective liked to Google+. In fact, I think the midterm result of Google entering in the SNS arena could (and should) be to force open Facebook. I mean, right now G+ is not open, it doesn't have all the needed APIs, and this is probably OK because they they need a critical mass before opening, and one should not bash them for testing, pondering, adjusting a bit more before releasing some important changes. Time is on their side anyway.
But in the end, they will go, I hope, the full good-old Google way, which means:
- Read/write APIs for posts, followers, followees, etc.
- Ability to dump all data and go away
- RSS or similar subscribing hooks
These tools will allow a much higher interoperability for social content, similar to interoperability of emails today. Users will not really care if the comments on their baby pics are written using Facebook, G+ or any other Social Content Manager, they will read and respond to them in the SNS of their choice, like we do today with emails. (I wrote a bit more ion this topic there: https://plus.google.com/104035200377885758362/posts/A9r7twSD...)
I'm a pessimist - Google+ is too little, too late. Facebook is already too big to fail, Google+ being here the equivalent of Microsoft's Bing.
Facebook won't open up. They don't have than in their DNA, their biggest asset is their huge audience and they'll do anything they can to keep that audience on Facebook -- opening up their platform in a way that benefits competitors simply makes no sense.
The Internet as we know it is indeed dying.
Someone reasoning like you do some 7 years ago would have said Hotmail was too big, but then they came with Gmail and it was a real break in.
Imagine in a few months, G+ user can opt-in to see their friends' +1 on Youtube's videos in their stream, and for some reason it becomes very hot a feature. Then Facebook want the same, but don't have a Youtube. They "could" add Youtube +1 in their stream using Google open APIs, but then it would be fair for Google to require them to open their API for the reverse, and allow G+ users to have their FB friends' pics in their streams.
This would be a killer feature, because it is really not fun at all to have to go to g+, fb, tw, etc. (not counting Chinese SNSes I have to follow too) and then HN, etc.
In fact, Google Reader was not very far from such a tool, but didn't have the locally generated content's critical mass to move things over, and the interface is/was too "advanced user". Google plus may have enough mass, and had the chance to simplify the UX, by starting from scratch.
However, I have my doubts that this will work, quite the contrary - Google may have GMail and Youtube, but while Google was experimenting with shoving Buzz down on Gmail users' throats, Facebook was busy becoming a platform. Which is the reason why Facebook is now on its way to become THE identity provider for the Internet, the reason why Facebook is the preferred method of login for services like Foursquare.
And unfortunately for Google, the trust of other businesses in them has been eroded in time. For example, only Google could piss off an entire category of businesses by crawling their content and presenting it as its own, with graphical results on the first page of any location-related search: http://www.google.com/places/
It's a shame really, because if Google was considered a benevolent-dictator of the Internet, than trust itself would have been enough for third-parties to consider integration with them. In this instance however I'm seeing other online services just picking Facebook, as while they are evil, at least they are the ones with soon-to-reach 1 billion users.
Youtube integration will be awesome, but that's not enough when the rest of the Internet is on Facebook. Also, checkout what Facebook did with pictures uploads. They are effectively killing Flickr. I'm seeing them doing the same for movie uploads ... they probably haven't felt the need for doing that, seeing that the preferred way of distributing Youtube videos to friends is Facebook ;)
For instance, I am no fan of most of the changes in search (eg. Instant, Snippets) but I think that adjusting search result rankings to the "+1" of my circles is a big deal in long term. It makes "+1" an actually useful button. I now start using it as "intelligent bookmarking". Except if you believe in near future people will search Internet through Facebook or will not search at all, which I don't, then this little "+1" feature is a big leverage against Facebook.
Google are also challenged by Amazon with their platform, and I would be surprised if they did not prepare some thing on this side. It is just that, with Buzz and Wave, they learnt that one big company like them is not a start-up and therefore can't "release early, fail quickly, iterate" (as so often advocated here on HN). So we, observers, would better be patient.
Don't forget Chrome. It seems to me that this is an incredibly fast entrance in browser market, and really did shake things up, for the better. If Google, through its browser and mobile OS, find a way to make life much easier for open social network users, Facebook may have to comply. It would not be stupid for Facebook to be open, they would still have the biggest number of users, and their revenue should not drop just because they allow other social content provider to access their data openly (as long as they continue offering a good user experience).
What changes is the web framework style. Asynchronous page loading provides a smoother experience compared to refreshing the whole page. Gmail and Thunderbird will be increasingly similar. Just that one is in a sandbox called browser and the other's sandbox is called operation system.
What changes is the web framework style
The semantic web dream is dying, replaced by web versions of Microsoft Exchange.
Web sites/applications just try to be as user-friendly as possible. Unfortunately, stuff like RSS/Atom is not user-friendly compared to Follow/Like/Friend. HTTP GET ist not user-friendly compared to AJAX page changes. Providing open interfaces and standards is additional work, without obvious benefits for companies and most users don't care.
This semantic web dream you talk about--what is it? Nobody is selling this to ordinary people. All i see of "Semantic Web" guys, are baroque XML snippets (FOAF, RDF, etc) and mumbo jumbo about namespaces and ontologies.
What a nightmare! Hey guys, we are we so pessimistic these times? We should fight instead.
- Facebook is annoying but you want to keep in touch? Use one of the many tools allowing you to receive your fiends baby pics without opening Facebook. If no tool suits you, hack another one! (I would love a command line fb, by the way)
- Tired of shitty web apps that lost the pure HTTP way and mess with click events? Find or hack an extension that shut them down. If too badly bad, pull on the black hat and make a fuck of that.
- Lack of inspiration? Read again pg's essays, it fuels one with renewed inspiration.
They have been steadily moving in a more and more closed direction for years now. What would cause that trend to change?
Is it because they took more time than previously to open Android 3.0? It has been settled, right? And we know the reasons.
Did they slow down on releasing open-source softwares? Maybe, I don't follow it closely enough to decide.
Chromium is still open.
They did shut down some APIs, but this is a normal process of refactoring, removing stones you have on your way.
I see a recent strong trend in Google evolution, but it is not toward walled garden or closed formats or else. It is toward more and more design, ajaxy things, prettiness, and I think it is a bit unnecessary, and they may have to revert some of these changes.
Google isn't as bad as Facebook, yet. But they're not exactly as "open" as many other organizations either.
We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog.
We are giving the Web away because there are extremely few well designed, modern open source Web software.
How typically computer-geek of you. Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use systems and have abandoned them for products that are easier to use and appeal more to their perception of how technology should work!
How dare they! The plebes! DO NOT THEY NOT KNOW WHAT THEY DO?!
Why won't people do more work to preserve the freedom of the web, like setting up their own blogs, and manually maintaining their own contacts?!
1) reinvent the wheel over and over, each time with a new interface, shinier and more limited than the one before it
2) cater more to our hypothetical grandmas instead of our children ... which ironically are able to write HTML in Notepad just fine, if taught how to do that
Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use
systems and have abandoned them for products
that are easier to use
People all over Europe have learned to drive cars with manual transmissions - because after the initial pain, the vegetative nervous system kicks in and the wheel, the pedals, the gear switch, all of them become a natural extension, of which you don't think about anymore, just like breathing. And if automatic transmissions are great too, that's because they stay out of your way.
The UI of modern software is nothing like that. Nothing is logical anymore, nothing is designed anymore to be an extension of you. Normal users have to think about their every action, they have to visually search for clues in the UI for every stupid thing they do, they have to rote learn the paths they have to take for the software to take them from some point A, to some other point B. I saw users that have notes on the actual clicks they have to make for certain common actions. I don't know about you, but to me this is freaking painful to watch ;)
Btw, for some good user-experience guidelines, check out The Design of Everyday Things: http://amzn.to/ryfiuI (the link does contain my affiliate code) ... the one thing I took away from this book is that simplicity is a complex topic.
Why won't people do more work ...
setting up their own blogs
Really, step down from your high horse, it's not like you yourself are not guilty for the current state of our industry. We all are.
This is how it is, every time a user gets familiar with _concepts_ of his/her user interface, such as a minimize button, a window, a taskbar, it is "re-invented" and changed. No longer is there a minimize button in latest Ubuntu, the taskbar is no longer a taskbar its some weird form of activity with grouping bar in Windows 7.
All the concepts of the user interface such as buttons and scrollbars are exchanged, the basis of what a user _interfaces_ with, is changed. A great suprise then when a user has to relearn everything and gain new concepts just to use a new tool or web a new website. Many just dont go down that way and stick it out with facebook as "the internet".
Tip for UI designers: Stop designing, stop your user-interfacing design, there is one already which the user knows. Focus on _your_ data and fit it into the old and tried concepts of buttons that look like buttons and have only one function, not also state "button is staying pressed in", thats a checkbox. Darn it.
Exactly!
Javascript is more powerful, but that also means more power to screw up. Sometimes the results are amazing (like Gmail) - but more often than not it just ends up confusing and frustrating, with vital parts of the UI hidden behind a clusterfuck of menus and widgets.
Stopping random UI experiments would require a replacement system designed specifically for web apps that access a standard library of controls.
Users still have to learn the UI controls of each library or whatever else the designers come up with.
For the rest of the gui widgets like tabs which dont have a html spec, just style it up as close as you can to _look_ like a tab and make it behave like a link - thats enough.
Look at facebook, their UI is a horrible mess, they have introduced thier own "widgets" and changed behaviour for most of the common widgets, like the scrollbar which suddenly jumps back 40% when it reaches the lowest 10 or 20% or so. So the functionality expected - the scrollbar represents a _finite_ document, suddenly it is infinite. Destroy such "ui" crap with the force of a thousand suns.
It may be good for facebook, they can do so since they have 800 million users, and anyone whom they teach _their_ widgets and ui-interactions is further instilled and locked into their usage platform, but as a webdev of projects with less than 1 million people, you cant do that. Stick to the standard. Dont make your users locked into your widget and your conception of what a button or scrollbar is.
To me Facebook is just as convoluted and hard-to-use as anything else.
But I don't think that's the case. Grandma has to be taught to use Facebook as well, it's not like it's an intuitive interface, quite the contrary IMO.
It's a problem of not realizing the danger of loosing this wonderful and fragile thing we built.
A lot of you geeks have Facebook accounts, so it's not like it's a service for the technically impaired.
That's obviously tongue in cheek but there's some truth to it. At the end of the day does it really matter if people are happy using the one thing on their computer that they can actually use and understand?
Not only is theirs a serious concern, but it speaks to the main issue of the post, for it reminds us that like web interfaces, even text has accreted arbitrary rules to interpret it. Take the apostrophe for example, it is for most purposes superflous as one can tell from context whether a word is plural, possessive or a contraction. Well, I can tell the difference, cant you?
The original post is saturated with consistent, but by no means universal and certainly not empirically-derived, pre-conceived rules for communicating textual content: the date posted is in italics; the site name is bracketed and bold; the post name is bold; links which serve a sorting function are colored, underlined and bracketed; a presumably copied email prefaces the actual post in italics with each line itself prefaced with a less-than-sign; and most importantly much of the post is composed of incomplete sentences ("A web where...").
We allow ourselves to bend the rules of grammar. And as we bend them, we adapt to the new general rule.
We are all familiar with the english teacher's common correction of a misplaced object: "It's 'He and I went to the store', not 'Me and him went to the store'". This "rule" has been so often repeated, that most days I hear college-educated individuals perform the inverse, substituting the nominative for the objective case, as in "Bob critiqued the web page with Jack and I." What is interesting to me is apparently the act of replacing the nominative with the objective also occured in the Latin language around 200 AD (and it's a common act in children). So, if we create our rules for grammar empirically and not not arbitrarily, we can look at saying "Me and Jack did something" as acceptable because it has a natural precedent.
Which is all just to say that communication as a web form or in paragraphs is subjective and organic. Differences in type should be no more surprising than differences in human ethnicity.
At some point, the standard techniques for dealing with these issues will become Standards. This is a well worn path. Html was a standardization of the previous 10 years of work on markup languages, plenty of them proprietary. There are other examples... ODF standardizing on XML and cloning established MS Office functionality... etc.
Real Standards that could address the article's concerns are only reasonable when NO innovation is necessary, merely choosing a methodology that has already been built and proven to work in practice. IMO, Java more or less committed suicide when it started a standards-first innovation process, which resulted in many multi-year projects doing design-by-committee of an api before anyone tried to build an implementation or an actual product on top of it.
As long as G+ is introducing features not available elsewhere, the fact that it's a currently closed system just isn't a reasonable criticism.
As much as I like the ways that sites like G+ are trying to push the envelope, if you're handling data that was created by or belongs to others it's more important to fit into the greater data ecosystem than to stand out...
Old-web was just text and markup. A lot like the output of command line programs that could then be used by other programs to perform what we want.
New-web is about application. Programs made for the end-user. Apps aren't thought to be pipelined with other apps. Thus for a web-app, the browser is often designed to be the only supported plateform. Thus the extensive use of JS.
To be fair to Google, that sounds like a fairly standard clickjacking prevention mechanism. It's necessary to provide protection to browsers that don't support X-Frame-Options.
Tools will come out to ameliorate the problems with the new order of things. That things are controlled by a handful of entities is much more worrying, though.
Good thing is: No one is keeping you from giving a CPR to Fidonet. Redundancy gives resilience.
Users are supplied with controls to determine what components of their identity third parties can access. A "work" profile, a "friend profile" etc.
Third parties integrate the standarized identity profiles but have no control over what specific data they can access.
OAuth, Salmon, PubSubHubbub, FOAF, ... everything is right there.
> With less sarcasm: What use is this if one already reads the blog?
none. if you don't want to use it - don't. move on.
giving users another subscription channel is not a problem. a problem appears when someone uses these closed platforms as their only communication channel, f.ex. it's impossible to move a fanpage with it's community out of facebook. when people and organization treat it just as another feed broadcast (as whatwg did), everything is fine.
The main point of the author seems to be that G+ doesn't use progressive enhancement.
I was specifically responding to this part: >A web where re-sharing of content is limited by the platform, not by the capabilities of your client. A web where you cannot comment on an article unless registering in a corporate namespace (which kicked you out if you happened to choose a name they do not particularly like).
The point was that Google tried it open, it didn't work. Facebook is closed, they tried that. Is it working?
At some point, around 2009, most of the members of this forum got Facebook accounts. That forum is now completely dead.
Facebook took all the oxygen out of the site, and it seems like a lot of other sites.
Now very mainstream people seem to think of Facebook as "the internet" and they just hang out there. Some of the bigger sites are doing ok, still, of course.
But at least for that forum, its audience is gone.
To a person, the members of the audience say they love it, and many of them say they hate facebook because "its so impersonal." On the forum they were able to share more private things with closer friends.
I think they would rather hang out on the forum, but there isn't the critical mass anymore... simply because Facebook is more addictive.
It has gotten into some sort of a gamification, or addiction loop, in these peoples heads, it seems.
I think the web is going to undergo a radical change in the next 5 or so years.
For quite a few years people used the Internet Explorer icon on pamphlets and posters as an icon representing The Internet. It seems people are now starting to use Facebook's icon for that.
This was user testing with groups of young people in Tower Hamlets, London in 2010.
Aside from testing the UX spec we talked more widely around discovery and every group indicated that they began most tasks with a search on YouTube. Music, games, movies, homework research: all started visually on YT.
Facebook came up because the majority of these kids didn't have email addresses, instead doing all their email-like conversations on Facebook messaging and their IM on Blackberry BBM.
This really underlines why buying YouTube was a smart move for Google.
Walled gardens for the less technical savvy have been the norm. Outside of the hacker/coder/geek culture, has it ever really been different? Prodigy -> AOL -> MySpace -> Facebook
It's only a matter of time when something else will replace Facebook as "the Internet". These things work in cycles.
Communities before were usually separated by platforms, because the platforms were not yet sophisticated enough to support vast communities of varying opinions. Now we have a few big players that can do this and more. Social media has turned into a war over who can blow the most filter bubbles, and with services like OpenID and "connect with facebook", everything has slowly become part of the same identity.
I'm hoping that a new platform will eventually come along to pry this apart, but it's going to take a completely different paradigm to cause it. Unless something like Google+ proves otherwise, websites like Facebook and Twitter et al have the potential to monopolize social networking.
It's called Reddit.
Bear with me here, I realize this is probably an unpopular opinion.
On Reddit, all content is open -- I don't think I've ever seen a 'closed' sub-reddit available only to members. I'm not sure it's even possible.
Yet, in spite of all communities being effectively open, most sub-reddits have a strong sense of community, and are very active. Personally, I really enjoy proggit and r/math for this reason -- active discussion, community moderation, and a strong sense of community.
The next time you hear the phrase "It doesn't scale" in reference to something, ask yourself why it needs to. In some cases it might not.
Centralised approaches (e.g. websites on the open internet) obviously need to scale. Facebook is a public website. And it's on the open internet, for anyone with an account to see and ready to be hacked by those with skill who do not need accounts.
I always come back to this: How many people do you really need to be reading your profile? Friends, coworkers, family, ... potentially anyone, anywhere in the world with a computer and an internet connection? It just does not make sense.
As for shutting it down: The code is open source, so while it'd be hard to unite around a common replacement, if they tried to shut it down it would not be the end.
I think part of what has happened to these dwindling forums is that they are functionally out-dated, and a bit too insular. -It takes too much time for new people to get up to speed on most boards. (dont forget Hubski, btw. :))
I'm not claiming that my startup in particular will be it, but something like it. Just saying this probably puts me in the category of "just another young whipper snapper who aspires to be the next Zuck"... but I have no desire to do anything like Facebook or Google or intentionally copy any particular model. I just want to do what works (well).
Loggur is clearly an infant at this point and I'm sure the initial impression given by its current presentation of the idea doesn't exactly scream "innovation" or "the next big thing"... but bear with me. I'm starting off relatively simple and will iterate as I get feedback (as is expected of any startup) but the general end result, as I envision it, will essentially be an extremely wide variety of user-editable tools specific to each user and/or community, from communication to productivity and automation - or both. I realize that the current presentation is pretty vague, but that will change after iteration and solid examples. The current descriptions are based on an alpha version which I put together earlier this year to prove the concept.
A lot of people feel very alienated by this lowest common denominator standard of the web and the fact that niche sites are dying even in absolute terms. Hopefully we will see a revival, when more people realise they were better off before this over-sharing nonsense. People adapt more easily to a lower standard than to a higher one, though.
Hasn't it radically changed every year?
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/egoless-programming-the-...
In the 90s, USENET was lively and active. It was federated, decentralized, and you could use any client you wanted to access the information. Web based forums came along and shifted that control away from the loose internet and into the owners of the forums.
I don't remember it quite that fondly.
I also remember the missing replies, broken threads, spam you couldn't really do much about, endless flamewars about top-quoting vs bottom-quoting, etc.
Plus the pace was just glacial - it could take hours for some posters posts to appear.
Maybe is was better in the REALLY old days - a bit of quick, non-exhaustive google groups searching shows my first usenet posts in June of 1997.
I don't mean to glorify USENET. The web based forums brought many cool new features -- you could post images that worked reliably, the Slashdot-style moderation stuff was a big boon, etc. I just meant to point out that the internet moves in cycles, and those cycles seem to lead towards newer technology and more centralized control.
it's called 'text'. You've heard of 'words', yeah? Well text is just a collection of words - think of it like a photo album or playlist, but for words. We call them paragraphs.
The great thing about paragraphs is that you can group a whole bunch of words together to form more powerful concepts than the individual words themselves.
Paragraphs have a very simple UI - in fact you're using one right now!
What limits good content to 1995?