Welcome to the new web.

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-November/033914.html

by dkulchenko • 15 years ago

481 110 15 years ago

lists.whatwg.org

Gigablah• 15 years ago

And apparently the old web is filled with sarcasm and spite.

daark. I get the uncertainty and fear of the 'seedy' nature of G+ and rise of the corporate platforms...but seems like more of us trying things out, learning, so we can maybe direct change/influence the evolution of the platforms....

wmeredith• 15 years ago

Is the new web better at UX than this? That was painful to look at.

zdw• 15 years ago

Sounds just like the old web, if you were blind and went to a Flash fullscreen website.

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...

nirvana• 15 years ago

I'm a member of a forum for graduates of one of the schools I went to. In 2007 it was a vibrant and active forum, growing steadily, and straining its hosting account, which constantly had to be expanded.

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.

technel• 15 years ago

What kind of change? Further toward a centralized, monopolistic, Facebook-esque service or an implosion of that model?

janto• 15 years ago

> mainstream people seem to think of Facebook as "the internet"

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.

wgx2• 15 years ago

Just to corroborate, I've done user testing with young people (13-15) and Facebook is definitely seen as 'the internet' - along with YouTube.

maximusprime• 15 years ago

It's also weird IMHO when you see an advert or movie trailer, and they tell you to visit their facebook page, rather than their own website...

dissident• 15 years ago

As an administrator of an online message board, I concur. Web content is being so efficiently aggregated that some forums turn into the awkward conversation between two redditors: "Check this out!" "Heh, yeah. I saw that."

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.

1010010101112• 15 years ago

In my opinion, such a platform, or several, using an entirely different paradigm, already exist. To overtake Facebook, it is simply a matter of making it as easy to use as Facebook, and Facebook annoyances having reached a breaking point. Whether there is yet sufficient impetus to do the UI work and whether Facebook users are ready to move on to the next thing is another question.

tfb3• 15 years ago

I hope you don't mind a shameless plug, but I believe something like my startup might be this new platform of which you speak: http://loggur.com.

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.

muyuu• 15 years ago

The problem is that most of the web has been gobbled by inane "check this out!" comments and insightful, rich discussion is confined to an ever smaller % of it.

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.

mbesto• 15 years ago

I think the web is going to undergo a radical change in the next 5 or so years.

Hasn't it radically changed every year?

jsilence4• 15 years ago

"6. The only constant in the world is change."

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/egoless-programming-the-...

towelrod2• 15 years ago

Facebook is doing the same thing to your forum that your forum did to USENET.

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.

TylerE• 15 years ago

That's one way to look at it.

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.

lowglow• 15 years ago

The only power the "new web" has is the power we give it.

ericd• 15 years ago

It's not us geeks that will decide this. It's people who never understood the things he's talking about, and therefore won't miss them much. The things he's talking about are all more complicated than the thugs replacing them for the common use case (though it makes many more complex things impossible), which makes this somewhat inevitable.

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.

nbpoole• 15 years ago

> A web you cannot easily read without JavaScript because somewhere in the page header there is a „<style> body { visibility: hidden; } </style>” later getting unset by a script that the platform owners want you to run.

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.

sxtxixtxcxh• 15 years ago

i remember the old web, a web without RSS or ATOM feeds.

jsilence4• 15 years ago

Yeah. Gopher and Archie. And you would 'talk' with someone. People had shell accounts.

Good thing is: No one is keeping you from giving a CPR to Fidonet. Redundancy gives resilience.

dave1010uk• 15 years ago

I remember when #foo was an IRC channel, not a Twitter hash tag.

tambourine_man2• 15 years ago

Listen to this guy. Nils Dagsson Moskopp, what a great post.

We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog.

est• 15 years ago

> 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.

potatolicious• 15 years ago

> "We are giving the web away because people can't handle email, address book and a blog."

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?!

bad_user5• 15 years ago

That's because of a lack of education, because we, the technically inclined people, have failed to serve the normal people, preferring instead to:

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

What you're missing here is that those products that are easier to use get replaced like socks, with the users being back on square 1 every single time and struggling to perform even the most basic tasks by clicking their way around.

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

Setting up your own blog is just a few clicks away on Google's Blogger, on Wordpress.com, on Tumblr.com or on countless other services. It takes more work to set up a template that represents your style, but that's not something you can do on Facebook anyway.

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.

ColdAsIce5• 15 years ago

Most people cant handle facebook. They dont even know what they are doing there, its more like a random walk clicking around stuff. Have you ever watched a teenager use a computer? I have, it was not pretty.

perfunctory2• 15 years ago

> Users don't like our convoluted, hard-to-use systems

To me Facebook is just as convoluted and hard-to-use as anything else.

tambourine_man2• 15 years ago

If the systems are hard to use that's our fault. We, the technically oriented geeks, failed to build something for normal humans.

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.

rimantas2• 15 years ago

How are we giving away anything?

zobzu• 15 years ago

this was quite insighful actually.

pgroves• 15 years ago

As much as I wish the innovations of g+ and Facebook were centered around RSS and email, this is just the way new technologies evolve. Identity management and permissions management for who can see a user's content just don't have a good standard yet. Therefore private companies are rolling their own proprietary solutions and competing with each other.

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.

bad_user5• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, what features does G+ have that aren't available elsewhere.

rbarooah3• 15 years ago

The implication of what you are saying is that Google has determined that openness is a strategy they have failed to make work.

zalew• 15 years ago

it's a bit sad that in the most decentralized media, people tend to stick to the most centralized utilities to communicate with each other (I use them too). but:

> 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.

gbog5• 15 years ago

I agree with the claim in this forum post. It is annoying to have all pages javascript generated, clicks hijacked to make some special sauce, and content popping in, up, down or out whenever you hover something. It is a growing mess that will have it "let's rollback and clean this crap out" time, like Google did with its famous blank home page.

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...)

bad_user5• 15 years ago

You're an optimist.

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.

gbog5• 15 years ago

Google+ is not that small, and with their hooks in search, maps, mails, videos, etc, they can grab a significant portion of the social blob. They have some leverage.

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.

beza1e12• 15 years ago

There is no "too big to fail". There was a little financial incident in a small north american country some time ago, where some "too big to fail" institutions failed. I've already heared some teens don't like Facebook anymore because mom and dad are also there.

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.

dhx• 15 years ago

AltaVista. Yahoo. America Online. Nortel. WorldCom. Excite. GeoCities. Xoom. Hotmail. MySpace.

rbarooah3• 15 years ago

What makes you expect the 'good-old Google' to come back?

They have been steadily moving in a more and more closed direction for years now. What would cause that trend to change?

gbog5• 15 years ago

I don't know if there are so many facts behind your assertion that Google is going in a more and more closed direction.

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.

ms1232• 15 years ago

To me the difference between "old-web" and "new-web" is a lot like the one between "program" and "application.

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.

ColdAsIce5• 15 years ago

Straw man, text and markup was made for the end-user as well.

ms1232• 15 years ago

my point is that programs can be pipelined, not applications.

steilpass• 15 years ago

So what are we going to do about it? There must be a business opportunity here.

alexhawket3• 15 years ago

Standardized identity as a service with a distributed client/server approach like email. Companies can offer their own service and customers sign up to their chosen provider.

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.

jsilence4• 15 years ago

I really don't get it, why the dying social networks like Myspace, Friendster, StudieVZ et.al. are not embracing the distributed social protocols like crazy.

OAuth, Salmon, PubSubHubbub, FOAF, ... everything is right there.

bct• 15 years ago

Why does everything have to be a business opportunity? Prioritizing monetary value over other kinds of value is how we got into this mess in the first place.

hm2k2• 15 years ago

Google tried it the other way via Google Wave and unfortunately nobody bought into it.

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

Google Wave is probably the single worst introduction of a new technology that I've ever seen. To this day, I have no idea what it actually was or was for. All I know is that it did everything, but nothing, and it did it simultaneously in shared sessions.

sylvinus• 15 years ago

Regarding the rendering technologies it was exactly the same, a big pile of JS that you need to render actual content.

The main point of the author seems to be that G+ doesn't use progressive enhancement.

hm2k2• 15 years ago

Jesus, downvotes for mentioning Google Wave.

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?

ma2rten• 15 years ago

In the grant scheme of thing, do people really think it is a big deal if a page shows you a 404 error, even if the content you are looking for actually exists? I think it's very tempting to get lost in tiny details like that.

jsilence4• 15 years ago

It might appear to some like a tiny detail, but things like this break the web. HTTP status codes are there for a good reason. A similar situation is when your provider redirects you to its own search page instead of giving you the 404.

evertonfuller• 15 years ago

Someone call the UX police. Cannot read that. Looks like it got lost from 1995.

user242• 15 years ago

> Cannot read that

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!

bbsabelli• 15 years ago

No ads? No photos? No like button?

What limits good content to 1995?

ElliotH• 15 years ago

Blame your browser, it barely modifies the default styling.

earnubs• 15 years ago

We need a better, open, ways of connecting people on the 'old' web.

zqfm• 15 years ago

And don't forget: "This content not authorized for mobile devices."

16s• 15 years ago

It's ironic that ten years ago many people (average consumers) thought that AOL was the Internet. Now they think Facebook and Google are. Ten years from now, it'll be something else and HN type people will still be doing their own thing as usual.

sjs• 15 years ago

Is our thing complaining about the popular things from the lesser travelled discussion forums? Snickering about how the masses don't know Facebook from the web from the Internet. "The fools!"

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?

tgrass2• 15 years ago

As I write this there are two comments that have been downvoted to the bottom for expressing how difficult the post is to read. They draw attention to the post's textual interface, albeit perhaps sarcastically ("Is the new web better at UX than this? That was painful to look at.").

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.

quotemstr• 15 years ago

Perhaps not coincidentally, 200 AD was about the time that Rome started to falter: in 235, the "Crisis of the Third Century" permanently wrecked trade, knowledge, and culture. The crisis marked the real beginning of the medieval period, and 476 was too late to do anything about it.

tgrass2• 15 years ago

Tis true. And if not merely coincidence, it leaves us our choice of interpretation: was it cause or consequence.

nomdeplume• 15 years ago

I feel your pain; and wrote about it: http://danielmillsap.com/blog/culture/cultural-artifacts-in-...

harrylove• 15 years ago

The correct response to hyperbole is always, "We'll see."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbsx_vZTcNI

Welcome to the new web.

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