Where is the Web Going?

http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/01/where-is-web-going.html

by tadruj • 14 years ago

41 22 14 years ago

nirandfar.com

tadruj2• 14 years ago

There's also Del.icio.us as a collection/curation platform somewhere between Twitter and Tumblr.

iamwil• 14 years ago

I've been using delicious again as my bookmarking and curation platform of choice.

Anyway, I think the author forgot about delicious and flickr, which started in the early 2000's peaking in media hype around 2005, which sort of changes his graph and thesis. It's no longer a nice progression of up and to the right. He just picked out examples that supported his view, and ignore the others that don't.

tadruj2• 14 years ago

Flickr was a failed attempt to understand users and make it simple. It wasn't made for the masses and there was too much friction.

grannyg00se• 14 years ago

" Within the next few years, technology will improve your life in ways you can scarcely imagine."

I doubt this. It would be nice if there were some details provided with such a grand statement.

cryptoz• 14 years ago

Well, the very point being made is that details can't be provided - we can "scarcely imagine" them. But if you look to the past, I think you can draw parallels that give the author the benefit of the doubt here. Take a few select years from the last few decades and look at how "your life" may have changed as a direct result of technology in the time span of a few years. Around 1992, the Internet began to fundamentally alter most people's[1] lives for the better. Most of them never saw it coming. In 2008 or so, the smartphone app revolution altered developer's lives in a huge way. The examples abound, but of course it depends on who you are and what "your life" is. None of this will affect the solitary farmer in China - at least not directly, nor for a while.

[1] in the developed world. See ~2012 for the developing world.

ehutch79• 14 years ago

Let me get this straight here. Bookmarking, re-tweeting, and posting links on tumblr count as content creation for the purposes of this article?

I'm a bit incredulous as I don't really see it as such. I'd venture to say that you still only have ~1% of users creating content with any substance, let alone quality.

obituary_latte• 14 years ago

Well, technically, doing those things (re-tweeting, posting links, etc.) creates content... Substance and quality notwithstanding.

icebraining• 14 years ago

It creates data, but I'm not sure if it can be called content.

adamc• 14 years ago

If posting links was enough to "create content", we could automate a vast increase in content. Of course, that's nonsense.

What creates content, arguably, is posting the links in a useful context (and something as simple as knowing your friend likes these might create the context). I think that value is real (and is reflected in services like Twitter), but there are some stark limits because my time/interest in consuming that kind of content is limited. Services that help me navigate the sea of data to effectively find the pearls of interest will have value. But just providing more ocean to search through is of limited direct interest...

haunted• 14 years ago

Agreed. Sites like Tumblr and Twitter are mostly full of people reblogging and retweeting other people's posts, and the source posts are often things that have been posted before. Many Internet users have short memories, and even shorter attention spans.

The Internet is increasing full of people linking to content, instead of creating it, and there's a fine line between "curating" links and simply spamming them.

joebadmo2• 14 years ago

A single instance of creating a link to a post that exists is probably not content creation. But curating an interesting/topical stream of content surely is.

As discussed in other threads [0], Letters of Note, for example, provides a context for its instances of curated content that provide a valuable resource for someone interested in the subject matter.

And let's not forget that Google is an example of curation that provides immense value. Google search doesn't provide any new information, but it surfaces existing information in a context that's valuable.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3534574

konmpar• 14 years ago

"Whereas Web 1.0 was characterized by content published from one-to-many and social media was about easily creating and sharing content, from many-to-many, the curated web is about capturing and collecting only the content that matters, from many-to-one."

True story. Personalization is the future. Too many content so far.. take it.. examine it.. deliver it to each person separetely..

rglover• 14 years ago

By designing new interfaces, and suddenly making information accessible...

This is a very important point. Although we do harness a lot of our focus on creating "new and innovative" products, we mustn't forget about the less-fun industries that still effect our lives daily. The way that we fix these industries is through the interface and how we interact with and manipulate that data (e.g. medical records, tax information, etc.). Take what we've learned from the companies mentioned here (e.g. Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest) and apply it to existing industries.

zwieback2• 14 years ago

I agree with the characterization of the past but I don't think curating is the answer either. You can't easily distill quality content out of a sea of junk. Much of the best content on the web still comes from traditional editorial organisations like NYT, Economist, etc. Free-for all social content works great for sites like StackExchange but I don't even think Quora, which is kind of like a curator, is going anywhere.

joebadmo2• 14 years ago

"...I don't think curating is the answer either. You can't easily distill quality content out of a sea of junk."

These two sentiments seem contradictory to me. The fact that it's not easy to filter for quality is what makes curation valuable.

I'm not sure if the dichotomy presented is correct, though. Really, all the old institutions like the ones you state, are in some sense curators. They curate news, fact, analysis, etc. The democratization of content creation and the decoupling of creation and curation means it'll be easier for amateurs to participate without going through the old bureacratic regimes these institutions represent.

I think the more interesting frontier is the digital curation by human/machine teams. You can understand Google and Facebook as curation, too, but they use a combination of human and algorithmic curation (more G than FB), and to me the Tumblrs and Quoras seem like a step back toward more heavily human-curated. I'll be more interested to see more combinations of different people and different algorithms working on different data.

zwieback2• 14 years ago

Ok, but distill != filter. My experience is that no matter whether man or machine filters content it will not be as good as an expert sitting down authoring content.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Don't be misled into believing that the web is "going" somewhere merely due to the success of some high profile growth in certain areas.