The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL
brianbailey.me
brianbailey.me
So while this blog post makes a great point, it feels like it's trying to convince the sun not to rise tomorrow - nothing we do will stop platforms such as Facebook rising if they offer what people want/need. We would need to make a better version, and that isn't always feasible.
I don't use Facebook, but that certainly doesn't stop the masses using it and looking at me strangely when I try to explain to them why I don't use it. We're probably in for a bumpy tech ride in the near future as always-online comes to apps everywhere.
* = unless we trash the natural ecosystem, of course, in which case all bets are off
Part of the benefit of Facebook is that it's on the WWW.
a) WARNING you are leaving safety, are you sure you want to go out into the DANGEROUS Internet? Your friends will miss you! How about some Soma instead? b) Censorship c) They have the power to turn off hyperlinks at any time--like YouTube has already done.
Then again .. I didn't know YouTube did that ..
Someone needs to get the goal posts moving over there...or wait, we have another newsfeed update for better photos --ads.
Sorry to break it to you, but the internet is very corporate controlled. Its bits flow over the private networks of Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc. It's just that so far, these companies have not exercised the extent of their control.
And then when you examine eg China (arguably the largest Internet market), it too is completely government controlled.
The tier 3 internet business of these corps is different from the consumer internet business. The consumer internet business's legal monopolies aren't so much an arm of a big federal government as they are completely dominant over thousands of very small local governments, where $50k of local access TV funding will buy you exclusivity because those governments have been squeezed for funding for the last 10 years.
It's also not really comparable to the way things work in China, except insofar as 'corruption and imperfections exist' in both cases.
Word.
I think that's not really a paradox but orthogonal.
For one, successful platforms have risen in closed ecosystems too. E.g the TV networks of yore were very closed ecosystems, but several forms and platforms emerged in them.
Second, the creation destroying the environment that created it is not really a paradox. It's one way to assure no such new creation threatens it. And it's the essence of stories like Frankenstein etc.
What word would fit instead - would 'ironic' be any less controversial?
[1] When the beautiful doctor started working with dead bodies and so on, it was a "phase" he was going through. Not a bad person at all. When the monster saved a man's daughter from drowning he was shot for his trouble because something so ugly could only be evil.
It bugs me almost as much as all of the "Before Colombus, people thought the world was flat." repetition.
Well that's the thing with democracy and freedom in general.
It's not enough to vote. You have to be vigilant, and you have to be a political (as opposed to private) person.
That a platform like Facebook can swallow the internet if it "offers people what the want/need", means that people are not democratic (in the meaning of vigilant citizenry) enough. They are content with conveniences instead of asking for more control and freedom for them.
(I'm not talking about FSF style freedom either. I would be content with EFF style freedom).
* This item links to a blog post published 3 March 2013 and fictitiously dated "1998" at the top as a rhetorical point.
* The original title of the link as originally submitted was "The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL".
* The link was subsequently retitled to "The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL (1998)". I like to think that this was done as a covert act of subversion by a mischievous moderator quietly trying to draw attention to the capricious nature of news.ycombinator headline changes by following the rules to the letter.
For a time, Microsoft practically did own the inter- and post-bubble WWW with IE 5-6, but their profits were through OS and Office sales, not web revenue, and e-retailers of various sorts were the main players making money directly from WWW.
I think today's web, which perhaps started somewhere in the 2005 period with the rise of social media giants and the dominance of online advertising ala Google, is definitely a change, and brought with it the flip.
And the rise of AJAX and client side javascript web applications and made the web much better. Gmail was one of the first "ajax" applications that got big./
In the modern web, pages are still in HTML, font's can still be adjusted, and ads are automatically filtered out.
Huh? I remember loads and loads of pop ups
Geocities sites were not some special dark corner of the internet they were representative examples of the extant design of the era.
Ah, yes: Java applets that made your system crawl.
Flash interfaces that likely 'worked', but had been designed by an alien with no comprehension of human cognition or interface design.
Text that was delivered as a set of lossy JPEGs because the designer really, really wanted a font that was only installed on a dozen people's computers. (Good luck accessing that if you were blind or, more likely, stuck behind a slow, unreliable dial-up connection.)
Pop-up ads your browser was too stupid to block.
Endlessly looping MIDI making you forever hate Skye Boat Song and The Entertainer.
Good times, good times.
How is bad interface design a problem specific to Flash? Surely you can create a bad interface with modern tools just as easily?
With HTML you at least have a stronger pressure to use the same text boxes everyone else does, for example: There's more standardization of basic building blocks. You can go whole-hog with reinventing the square wheel only this time making it diamond-shaped and made out of cream cheese, but it's harder.
In Flash, apparently, there's less of a counterbalance to going off entirely on your own and making something only you can understand.
Oh, yeah... Back then websites were pretty much only text, images, and links.
Sometimes a good offense is the best defense. IMHO we need more internet-inspired disruptions that bring an open ethos to energy, transportation, and health.
I don't know exactly what it would look like, but I think it's worth exploring.
It would require certain capabilities from the participating blogs/pages/webservers, and it would be fragile in the case of url changes, but it might be workable.
Yes, I think this is the advantage of WordPress over Diaspora. To some extent the infrastructure is already in place. Diaspora runs Ruby so ubiquity might take longer. (I was skeptical of Diaspora at first but I do think it has a fighting chance.) I don't have stats handy but I'd guesstimate there's several million self-hosted WordPress blogs out there representing tons of computing power, at least a starting point. Why bet on a Twitter or Facebook or Google Plus API that could be shut off without warning when you know WordPress is here to stay? I've been saying this for years--since then Automattic has launched Jetpack and user profiles, extending Gravatar.com, but we're still a long way off. But as I've said before, I think something like this would need Matt's blessing, not because he's a gatekeeper but because I think it's an ambitious idea that needs an influential visionary behind it to pave the way forward. Anyway, I'm not saying anything new, lots of smart people are working on decentralized networks.