[sudo-discuss] The Web We Lost — The Web We Make — Medium

Tue Jun 25 09:20:31 PDT 2013

Flickr still exists. I use it! But, yeah. Remember when we all expected
that everyone would have their own personal we page?

On Tuesday, June 25, 2013, Romy Ilano wrote:

> https://medium.com/the-web-we-make/1afe8b898455
>
> The Web We Lost**
> **
>
>    - Anil Dash <http://@anildash> in The Web We Make<http://the-web-we-make>
>    - 6 min read
>
> **
>
> The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale
> social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for
> regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk
> about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that
> younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.
>
> So here's a few glimpses of a web that's mostly faded away:
>
>    - Five years ago, most social photos were uploaded to Flickr, where
>    they could be tagged by humans or even by apps and services, using machine
>    tags<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fgroups%2Fapi%2Fdiscuss%2F72157594497877875%2F>.
>    Images were easily discoverable on the public web using simple RSS feeds.
>    And the photos people uploaded could easily be licensed under permissive
>    licenses like those provided by Creative Commons, allowing remixing and
>    reuse in all manner of creative ways by artists, businesses, and
>    individuals.
>    - A decade ago, Technorati let you search most of the social web in
>    real-time (though the search tended to be awful slow in presenting
>    results), with tags that worked as hashtags do on Twitter today. You could
>    find the sites that had linked to your content with a simple search, and
>    find out who was talking about a topic regardless of what tools or
>    platforms they were using to publish their thoughts. At the time, this was
>    so exciting that when Technorati failed to keep up with the growth of the
>    blogosphere, people were so disappointed that even the usually-circumspect
>    Jason Kottke flamed the site<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fkottke.org%2F05%2F08%2Fso-long-technorati>for letting him down. At the first blush of its early success, though,
>    Technorati elicited effusive praise<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdaringfireball.net%2F2003%2F06%2Ftake_your_trackbacks_and_dangle>from the likes of John Gruber:
>
> [Y]ou could, in theory, write software to examine the source code of a few
> hundred thousand weblogs, and create a database of the links between these
> weblogs. If your software was clever enough, it could refresh its
> information every few hours, adding new links to the database nearly in
> real time. This is, in fact, exactly what Dave Sifry has created with his
> amazing Technorati. At this writing, Technorati is watching over 375,000
> weblogs, and has tracked over 38 million links. If you haven’t played with
> Technorati, you’re missing out.
>
>
>    - Ten years ago, you could allow people to post links on your site, or
>    to show a list of links which were driving inbound traffic to your site.
>    Because Google hadn't yet broadly introduced AdWords and AdSense, links
>    weren't about generating revenue, they were just a tool for expression or
>    editorializing. The web was an interesting and different place before links
>    got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdashes.com%2Fanil%2F2007%2F12%2Fgoogle-and-theory-of-mind.html>that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting
>    links.
>    - In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by
>    a company, even if you documented the protocol and encouraged others to
>    clone the service, you'd be described as introducing a tracking system worthy
>    of the PATRIOT act<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fweb-beta.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20051119153505%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fweblog.burningbird.net%2Farchives%2F2004%2F03%2F20%2Ftypekey-the-patriot-act-of-weblogging>.
>    There was such distrust of consistent authentication services that even
>    Microsoft had to give up on their attempts to create such a sign-in. Though
>    their user experience was not as simple as today's ubiquitous ability to
>    sign in with Facebook or Twitter, the TypeKey service introduced then had
>    much more restrictive terms of service about sharing data. And almost every
>    system which provided identity to users allowed for pseudonyms, respecting
>    the need that people have to not always use their legal names.
>    - In the early part of this century, if you made a service that let
>    users create or share content, the expectation was that they could easily
>    download a full-fidelity copy of their data, or import that data into other
>    competitive services, with no restrictions. Vendors spent years working on
>    interoperability around data exchange purely for the benefit of their
>    users, despite theoretically lowering the barrier to entry for competitors.
>    - In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation
>    that regular people might own their own identities by having their own
>    websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their
>    online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and
>    have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked
>    on to the end of a huge company's site<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdashes.com%2Fanil%2F2009%2F06%2Fthe-future-of-facebook-usernames.html>.
>    This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and
>    fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists
>    longer than those sites do.
>    - Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app
>    on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Freadwrite.com%2F2008%2F05%2F09%2Foembed_open_format>to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual
>    agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren't subject to the
>    vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead
>    were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself.
>    - A dozen years ago, when people wanted to support publishing tools
>    that epitomized all of these traits, they'd crowd-fund the costs<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Ftechbiz%2Fmedia%2Fnews%2F2001%2F01%2F40979>of the servers and technology needed to support them, even though things
>    cost a lot more in that era before cloud computing and cheap bandwidth.
>    Their peers in the technology world, though ostensibly competitors, would
>    even contribute to those efforts.
>
> This isn't our web today. We've lost key features that we used to rely on,
> and worse, we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the
> web world. To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in
> hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they've
> certainly made a small number of people rich.
>
> But they haven't shown *the web itself* the respect and care it deserves,
> as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the
> possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize
> how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.
> BACK TO THE FUTURE
>
> When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using
> Flickr photos because Instagram's meager metadata sucks, and the app is
> only reluctantly on the web at all. We get excuses about why we can't
> search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we got
> more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled
> together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit turf
> battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook
> not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies
> pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve
> users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more
> narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make
> a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots
> of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the
> web itself.
>
> We'll fix these things; I don't worry about that. The technology industry,
> like all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to
> the broad, empowering philosophies that underpinned the early social web.
> But we're going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people
> about what the web *means*, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved
> off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the
> experience of the Internet than what they know.
>
> This isn't some standard polemic about "those stupid walled-garden
> networks are bad!" I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and
> LinkedIn and the rest are *great* sites, and they give their users a lot
> of value. They're amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective.
> But they're based on a few assumptions that aren't necessarily correct. The
> primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user
> flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity
> that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that
> exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the
> profitability and sustainability of their networks.
>
> The first step to disabusing them of this notion is for the people
> creating the next generation of social applications to learn a little bit
> of history, to *know your shit*, whether that's about Twitter's business
> model<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdashes.com%2Fanil%2F2010%2F04%2Ften-years-of-twitter-ads.html>or Google's
> social features<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdashes.com%2Fanil%2F2012%2F04%2Fwhy-you-cant-trust-tech-press-to-teach-you-about-the-tech-industry.html>or anything else. We have to know what's been tried and failed, what good
> ideas were simply ahead of their time, and what opportunities have been
> lost in the current generation of dominant social networks.
>
> [Originally published<http://r/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdashes.com%2Fanil%2F2012%2F12%2Fthe-web-we-lost.html>December 2012.]
> <http://@anildash>
> Anil Dash <http://@anildash>
>
> I love NYC, tech & funk. You can see all the things I'm up to at
> http://anildash.com/ or reach me at anil at dashes.com or 646 833-8659.
>
> ******
>
>
> ---
>
> Romy Ilano
> romy at snowyla.com
>
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