The Web We Lost

http://dashes.com/anil/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html

by kzasada • 14 years ago

636 153 14 years ago

krakensden• 14 years ago

I don't understand why he thinks the pendulum is swinging back. Is there any particular evidence of that?

rheide• 14 years ago

Um, did you read the article? There's tons of good points in there. Some of them might be a bit exaggerated though .(like the oembed one, was that ever popular?)

anildash2• 14 years ago

Twitter's original "sidebar" implementation of inline media used OEmbed, actually.

gojomo• 14 years ago

You're right, he doesn't specifically give support for the idea idea we're recovering these values and capabilities.

But I think he's alluding to people, as they gain experience and perspective, becoming aware of the limits of proprietary platforms, and investigating (or rediscovering) other possibilities.

mhurron• 14 years ago

I'm honestly not seeing that people are giving up Facebook or the like because of any limits imposed by Facebook.

The worst I saw was some of the more technical minded go to Google+, which is basically the same thing all over again.

gkelly• 14 years ago

I don't think it's swinging back, but I would like to hear his reasons for claiming it is.

lubujackson• 14 years ago

I would say the first sign is that the sheen has worn off and people are starting to notice some deep-set flaws in the services they use. Fewer people think Google is good and never "evil", Macs don't always "just work", and Facebook continues to have "privacy issues".

smacktoward5• 14 years ago

I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many ways, a Better Web than the one we have today.

The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that most people care about: it's harder. To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had to choose a Web host. You had to know how to connect the domain to the Web host. You had to choose the right software to do what you wanted to do. You had to install that software, and configure it properly.

The reason hosted services became popular is because they let you skip all that stuff. You fill out a form and you're up and running. Someone else worries about all that other stuff for you. This makes those services accessible in a way that the Web of 2000 was not.

Of course, to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a lot of things. You lose access to your raw data. You lose your privacy. You lose the ability to change vendors if the one you're on turns evil.

But to non-technical people, those losses aren't obvious. They don't understand what they've lost until losing those things turns around and bites them. It's like DRM: people don't understand why DRM-encumbered music downloads are bad until their iPod dies and they want to move their iTunes-bought music to an Android phone. "What do you mean I can't do that?" is what you hear the moment the penny drops. But before then, they don't understand the risk.

This is what will need to be overcome to make tomorrow's Web like yesterday's was: it'll need to be as easy for people to use as today's is, or you'll need to educate the entire world about why they should put up with it not being that easy. Otherwise people will keep on blindly stumbling into the heavily-advertised walled gardens, not realizing that's what they're doing until the day they decide they want to leave, and can't.

majormajor2• 14 years ago

I strongly prefer the web of today to the web of ten years ago because those barriers to entry prevented most people from doing all the cool stuff Anil talks about. So it was possible to have all those better connections, but it didn't happen much.

One way or another, services would've arised that would've tied it all together for the non-technical. I don't think we lost anything more than a potential to have a "better web" that never would've been realized anyway. (And many of those things are still possible, just even less worth the effort now that there are entrenched networks.)

shiftpgdn• 14 years ago

I miss the barrier to entry that we used to have. I know this might be a narrowminded view but that barrier to entry prevented a lot of the drivel that we see on the internet today.

In the 90s and early 2000s if you wanted to put something online you had to have at least a moderate level of technical aptitude. Compare that to today's nonstop garbage fountain of ignorance on sites like tumblr, twitter and facebook.

elsurudo• 14 years ago

I agree with your broader point, so I don't mean to nitpick but: the majority (maybe all? I'm not sure nowadays) of iTunes track are DRM-free.

smacktoward5• 14 years ago

I knew someone was going to pick this nit :-D I just feared overloading an already-herniated comment with additional verbiage. Sorry about that.

For the record: yes, if you buy a track from the iTunes Music Store today, it is most likely DRM-free. However, people who have been active ITMS customers over the years are likely to have purchased at least some DRM-encumbered tracks before Apple moved away from DRM.

roc• 14 years ago

What about Wordpress? (snark about technical messes aside)

It's as easy as it can possibly be to get a hosted blog up and running -- even with your own domain -- via their forms.

But, unlike Facebook, if you don't like their service, or need more, or don't like some ToS change or version 'update', you can wrap it up with a bow and take it elsewhere.

And businesses exist that will even make that as easy as filling out a form.

There's nothing about making the web of 2005 easier that required things be built as monolithic products instead of protocols and platforms.

And it's that distinction, products vs protocols, that's being lamented.

derefr• 14 years ago

Also, Blogger, the service that the link in the paragraph "... publishing tools that epitomized all of these traits..." was referring to. Or, more modernly, Tumblr. These are all sites that give you your own [sub]domain, where you make the rules and you control (almost) all the data, and where, even if there are other mechanisms for connecting things together, you can still just pull an RSS feed of all the relevant content and mash up whatever you like.

smacktoward5• 14 years ago

WordPress is actually a good example. There's the self-hosted software distributed at WordPress.org, which works in the Web 2000 fashion (here's some software, figure the rest out yourself). And there's the hosted service at WordPress.com, which works in the walled-garden fashion (though with liberal allowances for things like getting at your data, which is nice).

Lots of people run their own WordPress installations, but very, very few of them manage to do it well -- properly locking the software down, keeping the core and plugins up to date with security patches, putting the admin area behind SSL, etc. Which is why there's so many hacked WordPress sites out there.

mmahemoff2• 14 years ago

I write a lot on both WordPress and Google Plus, and Google Plus is way easier for basic authoring. Image uploading, post re-sharing, dealing with comments...all much simpler on G+. I still use WordPress because I prefer to own more important content, but I'm under no illusions about ease of management and writing.

"And businesses exist that will even make that as easy as filling out a form."

Which businesses? I recently migrated to one of the major dedicated WordPress hosts and it was anything but the trivial experience some make it out to be.

stcredzero2• 14 years ago

> To participate, it expected you to know how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly complicated to everybody else.

This is why a lot of technically superior cool things people invent lose out to corrupted versions.

> to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a lot of things.

I don't see how any of those things are necessary. I can see how the environment incentivizes those things, but none of them are necessary. Maybe there's no practical difference in the end.

Network Effects are just as important as software freedom and technical excellence. By now, the tech world should know this lesson, as should those who would support the cause of software freedom and technical excellence.

jmathai2• 14 years ago

> Of course, to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a lot of things. You lose access to your raw data. You lose your privacy. You lose the ability to change vendors if the one you're on turns evil.

That's not true. We've been building OpenPhoto for a year and a half to prove that statement wrong.

You can have the ease of use of signing up for a site without giving up control and ownership of your data. It baffles me why this model isn't more prevalent since we're proving it works and can be made easy enough for non technical users. We need more people building applications this way. Simply put, it's better.

For those unfamiliar with OpenPhoto you can get more information at http://theopenphotoproject.org but the highlights are:

* open source (https://github.com/photo)

* hosted or self installed

* web and mobile apps that work with hosted and self hosted instances (also open source)

* users select where their files are stored (dropbox, box, s3, cx, dreamhost, etc. -- google drive, sky drive coming soon)

* users import photos from 3rd party services

* users are free to migrate from one storage provider to another (we make it a single click)

* urls are properly name spaced so they're true permalinks if you map a TLD to your site

* i could go on forever....but if you're interested head over to https://openphoto.me

smacktoward5• 14 years ago

I was very careful to say the hosted services make you give up a lot of things rather than you have to give up a lot of things, because it's not necessarily true that you must lose those things to get the easier experience. The services just want you to, because it makes life simpler for them technically (reliable interop is hard) and gives them extra ways to make money off you.

brigade2• 14 years ago

I think it being harder is only the second most important thing to most people. Rather, the fact that these 3rd party services are free is the biggest factor; even $30 per year for a domain and hosting is more than most people are willing to pay.

Mz2• 14 years ago

If you aren't technical, it kind of doesn't matter if you know up front or not (about potential risks). If you don't have the skill, you accept the risk or loss and hope that because it isn't relevant now, that it won't ever matter. Or you say "I will cross that bridge when I come to it."

I know a little html and css. I learned them to manage my own sites. I have some tech training (Certificate in GIS from a decade ago, never really used). I wish I were more technically savvy. I migrated my sites to Wordpress and found that frustrating and I am still trying to work out how to complete the migration. But it means that when I want to put up new content, I can at least do that much in a fairly brief span of time.

So, agreeing with you that the web we lost was harder and that was a showstopper for many people. Not agreeing that it is terribly relevant if those people know the risks or not up front, because if they want to participate (and this is increasingly not something you can really opt out of) and you can't do the technical piece yourself, well, you suck it up. Too bad, so sad.

netcan• 14 years ago

"But to non-technical people, those losses aren't obvious"

To most people, those losses aren't losses. You can't lose what you don't have. I don't think its just about techie vs non-techie people. There are plenty of people who could have posted photos online 15 years ago that didn't until more recently. Accessibility is one thing, a critical component. But, culture is another essential part. It's a component hosted services contributed too.

People didn't tweet before twitter because there was no way of tweeting, but also because there was no such thing as tweeting. The cultural concept didn't exist.

motters• 14 years ago

The reason why people didn't post photos 15 years ago was that digital cameras barely existed back then. There was a revolution in photography in the early 2000s which made sites like Flickr possible.

peterhost• 14 years ago

"You can't loose what you don't have"

Like privacy, like knowing you're being a product, like helping facebook, google and pals map you, your friends, your friend's dog,...

Seriously...

A smartphone is a tracking device that can make calls. An app is a tracking sotftware that can display pictures.

That's what you lose. Maybe people don't care, but i guess that if they had a chance to understand what's really at stake, they would care and reconsider.

Nothing is free. At least in the earlier days of the web people understood that, because everyone payed some sort of bill. And bills without hidden costs, sortof help people think what it is they are (or are not) paying for.

aw3c2• 14 years ago

Geocities made it easy for anyone to publish to the web. Probably others too but it is the most prominent example I guess.

Yes, this is not what the linked article is about. But it is a counter-point to your "it was too hard for random people back then" saying.

icebraining4• 14 years ago

Geocities was OK if you wanted a basic, ugly and completely static website. Our expectations are a little higher nowadays.

untog• 14 years ago

Funny that he says all this then has a Facebook comments box at the bottom of the page.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that IMO- people are far more likely to have their real names on Facebook, and thus leave sensible comments rather than total drivel. But it makes a point that he doesn't include in the article- sometimes these centralised information stores can be useful.

anildash2• 14 years ago

I think I did mention that in the piece, but I deliberately keep the Facebook comments even on articles where I'm critical of Facebook to show that I'm not some extremist zealot. I'm just a normal person who happens to love the web.

chime• 14 years ago

Offtopic: Can you please change your link color? It looks like every link is already visited and I know for fact I did not visit every single one.

graue5• 14 years ago

Why use Facebook comments, though? I thought what you wrote here was great, but the choice of commenting system seems to conflict with the (excellent) points you're making.

Using a built-in commenting system like that of WordPress would be much more in line with The Web That Was. Those types of comment systems are still common, so using them would hardly make you a zealot.

Until I came here, I didn't realize your blog had a comments section, because I block Facebook comments with Ghostery. Not worth it to me as a privacy-vs-content tradeoff. I do allow Disqus, which identifies me by email and is therefore much more in the spirit of services like Technorati.

jamesmcn• 14 years ago

I'd like to meet someone who thinks you are an extremist zealot.

Wait, no I don't. I really don't.

marssaxman• 14 years ago

It does guarantee that people like me can't comment on your pages, though, which would not be true if you had a normal self-hosted comment system.

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

Nobody cares if you're an extremist zealot. And if they do,they'll stop caring after a minute.

Practice what you preach. Make the web better.. even if it's tad better by getting rid of FB comments.

shmerl• 14 years ago

The problem is that you don't allow using normal commenting options (with Open ID or Persona) in addition to Facebook (if you need that one). So why can't it be called extreme? It's rather irritating to see sites requiring to have Facebook to comment (I don't use it). OpenID and Persona are the most flexible options.

IheartApplesDix4• 14 years ago

I prefer Disqus comment system even though when you sign in, it gives it access to post on your whatever account you decide to use. I just go back to twitter then block access again everytime I use it. It's obviously not a good long term solution though.

Does every website really need to have a universal comment system?

joebadmo• 14 years ago

After all that, I can't comment on the piece with OpenID or any other service I actually use. Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, or AOL? Really?

The way out of this mess is for people with loud voices to support efforts like Tent.io, open, decentralized, standardized protocols that don't lock us into corporate silos: https://tent.io/

10098• 14 years ago

Maybe I have changed, or maybe the Internet has changed, but I used to meet people on the internet. I used to make friends online, and some of these friendships gradually mutated into "offline" friendships. There used to be message boards, IRC and web chats where people would talk, form groups, become friends or enemies.

People used to have blogs on livejournal or other services, some were trying to create content, write interesting posts. I met a lot of new people through that medium too.

But now everybody is locked inside the narrow bubble of their own social network. People don't become friends on facebook - they usually "friend" their IRL friends. You can't fit a good meaningful post into a tweet. And you can't have a normal discussion without sane comment threads like on livejournal - and I haven't seen that on any of the popular social sites.

That's also a part of the web we lost.

_ttlh3• 14 years ago

My feelings mirror yours... I'm actually building a product that I hope can help re-introduce some spontaneity in people's online interactions, as they journey through the web. Still very early stage though: [redacted]

Here's a 60 second concept video: [redacted]

fudged71• 14 years ago

Neat idea. I love the video. How would you recommend creating a video like this? Just get someone good with after effects?

ep103• 14 years ago

This seems really cool. How is development coming?

graue5• 14 years ago

That might be more you who's changed. I've made friends via Hacker News, and I believe it's fairly common for heavy Twitter or Tumblr users to meet people that way, too. This article[1] (long) discusses how the same phenomenon happened on Google Reader until its social features were removed a year ago.

1. http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network

theorique• 14 years ago

I still do this on facebook and other social sites. Talking with people online based on groups of common interest, I've made geographically dispersed friends.

Granted, it is probably different from the way it was done in the past, but it is still possible.

dfxm12• 14 years ago

We didn't lose that part of the web, the signal to noise ratio just gets weaker and weaker as time goes on (for various reasons).

harlanlewis• 14 years ago

I've had the same feeling, but I don't think it's the internet - it's us.

Reflecting on some long-lost social circle that called an ancient BB home, I realized it had been a decade since I'd last meaningfully connected with an online community.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Take Dribbbble - folks follow, share, meet, and eventually collaborate with total strangers, following basically the same script I did 10 years ago. One of the qualities of successful online communities is their ability to catalyze connections between individuals through external channels - not just comments on a photo thread, but sharing IM, SMS, meatspace. Older communities like bikeforums.net are living artifacts of the old model. Some newer communities, like Meetup, race you through the first couple stages. Facebook works very hard to keep you inside.

I think my personal investment in communities has simply become focused on more immediate circles. But if I wanted to, there's a whole internet of people chatting about their interests with strangers who become friends (and allies and enemies).

Finally - no thread on ye olden days of message boards is complete without a link to The Flame Warriors - http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/acne.htm.

rhdoenges• 14 years ago

I've found that Tumblr's tag system works very well for the sort of serendipitous interaction you bring up. By tracking tags, I have met plenty of friends who, of course, share some of my interests. Heck, some of us started up an IRC channel. The web isn't going to stop forming friendships anytime soon.

aes256• 14 years ago

Looks like the author is wearing rose-tinted glasses to me.

While much of the observations may be true, the web is still a far richer and more valuable resource than it was five or ten years ago.

IheartApplesDix4• 14 years ago

I don't find this to be true, but that's perhaps I'm not far richer than I was 5 or 10 years ago. Somewhere along the way, accessibility to truth was thrown under the bus for clickbait and walled gardens.

marcioaguiar2• 14 years ago

Accessibility to truth? Tell me more about how you used to access the truth in 1998.

agentultra• 14 years ago

I think it's rather funny when people talk about the, "social web." Before the social graph, technorati, and flickr there were newsgroups, email lists, HTTP, IRC, etc. The Internet itself is a social tool. Perhaps the term refers to some epoch of which I am not aware but it seems to me from a big-picture perspective that we've only narrowly improved the experience since Eternal September.

The "walled garden" networks will always strive to find their value in lowering the barrier to entry for new participants on the web. Facebook makes it super easy to share your photos with your family and friends and passively update them on the minutiae of your life. Twitter does the same thing to large degree in a more public fashion. Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest... all of the same zeitgeist: user experience.

But the cognoscenti are certainly aware that the web is the sum of its parts and walled gardens are antithesis to participation within its ecosystem. However the problem is and has always been participation: there is no single sign-in, no simple user experience, no common parlance for the mainstream to absorb. We got about as far as blogs and stopped there once MySpace, Facebook, et al took over.

I'd prefer a return to the roots but I think we'll need software and services that provide a better user experience and product-based focus rather than the service-oriented approach that has become popular.

kjackson2012• 14 years ago

I think it's different now than before because almost everyone is comfortable with the idea of communicating over the Internet. I used to IRC and MUD and the types of people that engaged in those activities were, for lack of a better term, more nerdy, like me. Back in the 1990s, people still weren't used to sitting in front of their computers all day long, because there largely wasn't anything to do with a non-networked computer. You could play games, or you could be writing an essay or a report, but there wasn't much else that could keep you engaged for hours upon hours, unlike today.

People used to spend more of their time talking on the phone or watching TV, or socializing. But having computers online all the time has turned it truly into a "social web".

vividmind• 14 years ago

Facebook is web's McDonalds.

djbender• 14 years ago

The new AOL.

barce3• 14 years ago

This proves the quote from "Gladiator," that what we do echoes through eternity.

meej• 14 years ago

Indeed, the first thought I had upon reading Dash's article was, "Kottke was right".

http://kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-aol

kamjam3• 14 years ago

Meh, I disagree with a lot of that. You speak as if the internet ONLY consists of social now. Your points are nostalgic and looking at the past through rose tinted glasses IMO.

Five years ago, most social photos were uploaded to Flickr

You can still do this. People choose not to. I don't want strangers viewing my social pictures, esp if I had kids. These are private moments to be shared with my friends.

Ten years ago, you could allow people to post links on your site

You still can, it's your site. If you decide to monetize your site and display AdWords then that's your call. You don't have to be a sheep and follow what everyone else is doing.

In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by a company...

Don't use them and create an account. No one is forcing you to use them, but for some of us (me) it's just easier to link several sign-ins together with my Google account. These are generally sites I trust. If I don't trust them then I'll use a disposable email account anyway to register. If the "average man" on the street doesn't know better then that's his/her problem, it's the same basic principle as identity theft and people guard against that. It's time they did the same online.

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

Really? A few people maybe, but most non-tech people I know really couldn't give 2 hoots. Wordpress and all the blogging sites have made a lot more people I know open their "own" sites than would have been owning a domain name and all the other hosting and "headache" that goes with it.

Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app...

Yes, agree it is bad, but that's business. The same thing happens in the real world, just because it is online the principles of business do not disappear and unfortunately not everyone is that tech-savvy and some of those people who pumped millions into a business may not "get" the web like you.

I don't think we have "lost" any of these. People have just decided to move on as the technology has advanced. The internet is a lot more open and a lot more accessible to many more people than it has ever been. As a developer I may care about the above (I don't) but as a regular joe, I don't think I would waste 2 seconds, no matter how long I have been using the web.

haldean• 14 years ago

The point about links is that other people can profit by posting links on your site. Before Ad(Words|Sense), you could freely allow people to post links in comments (without having to worry about nofollow or anything) because people would only profit from those links if what they linked to was relevant/interesting. Now just the act of following a link can mean a few pennies in someone's pocket, so allowing links to be posted to your site is a quick way to get seriously astroturfed.

kamjam3• 14 years ago

Right, fair enough. Stackoverflow used to add in a nofollow to all links posted on their site. I think they have removed it now for users of a certain rep.

If your site is small, then just moderate the comments yourself. If there are not that many then it will not take much time!

marcioaguiar2• 14 years ago

I completely agree with you. He's just nostalgic. We can do everything we did before and much more. The social aspect of the web seems very positive to me. Communities like reddit, twitter, kickstarter have real impacts on people life. If nobody wants to go chat on IRC anymore it was their option to do so.

fleitz• 14 years ago

The web we lost is still there, it's just that's it's just as accessible as it was 10 years. We post photos to Facebook not because of the technical superiority but because our friends and family can see them.

You can still put your photos on flickr where no one you know will ever see them.

gfodor• 14 years ago

Wow. Microsoft Passport. I haven't thought about that in years, and recalling how the tech world recoiled in horror then for things we have eagerly embraced now is illuminating.

quasistar• 14 years ago

Just a few reasons today's Web trumps anything from the 'Technorati' (seriously?) era: Open API's that reply in JSON, Cloud VPS's at $0.02 per hour, 10 Gb ethernet, 54 Mb fiber in my house, multicore computers in everyones pocket, GPS at everyones fingertips, web frameworks like Sinatra (yes, it took more than three lines of code and two bash commands to publish 'Hello World!' to the web back then), caching solutions like Redis, data crunching pipelines like hadoop, payment processing like Dwolla...need I go on? There will always be folks hankering for the glory days of alt.religion.kibology and compuserve. Ignore them. Create something game-changing instead.

lifeguard4• 14 years ago

We didn't have swarms of zombie windows PCs to be DDOS'd by back then, either. That was a plus.

AJAX is awesome, but I hate that every site uses it 'just because' and my browser in now hosting applications with persistent network connections instead of displaying a document.

4ad2• 14 years ago

Let's take an opposing view, shall we?

> Open API's that reply in JSON

The serialization format doesn't matter. What matter is that we have way more APIs, all different, with inconsistent semantics and non-orthogonal feature sets than the non-web APIs of 15 years ago. On average the people designing these APIs are less competent than the people from 15 years ago creating more headaches for the people that are competent.

> Cloud VPS's at $0.02 per hour

Cloud virtualization is expensive, not cheap. It has its merits, the overhead for elasticity is much less than it used to be, but this matters only at scale. At small scale you get unpredictable performance and terrible I/O.

> 10 Gb ethernet

No such thing. Even on servers its rare. I had 1 GigE on my laptop 10 years ago. I can't get a better NIC on any laptop today. The world is actually worse than it used to be because back in the day I didn't need to worry about saturating Ethernet. Now I do.

> 54 Mb fiber in my house

I used to be able to buy a symmetric link with a fixed IP address and reverse DNS. Now fixed IP is a rarity, symmetric links are usually not available for non-business customers and when they are, they cost more than 15 years ago. Reverse DNS? Ha ha.

> multicore computers in everyones pocket

I don't need a multicore computer in my pocket. I need a phone with good signal and a battery that lasts. They don't make them anymore. Even if I need a computer, smartphones barely qualify. iOS is locked and Android requires me to do a type of programming I don't like. I'm used to computers that I can program the way I want, not being bound by some framework.

> GPS at everyones fingertips

I don't care. I never used a GPS, never needed one. What I've seen is that now people get lost when their GPS breaks. I view that as a failure of civilisation.

> web frameworks

I'd probably break some Hacker News scalability limit if I started writing about this one.

> caching solutions like Redis

Redis is required because the other pieces of the stack suck. It's a remedy, hardly a cure from an architectural point of view. The broad architectures around us are more unsuitable and more abused than they used to be.

It's actually worse than that. Unix and Plan 9 have thought us that's it is better to model behaviour through a single bounded interface rather than a growing set of specialised interfaces. This allows composition, protects against lock in, and allows synthetic components. Now there's a Redis API, there's a Cassandra API, there's a MongoDB API, there's a Zookeeper API, there's a Riak API, there's a RabbitMQ API. Everything has an API. A different API. Not only this destroys composability, it also hinders experimentation, increases the technical debt, makes the cost of transition higher, and bounds the writer into using a limited set of tools.

> data crunching pipelines like hadoop

Hadoop is a a player in an extremely niche field. I don't think it's relevant to talk about a thing as specific as hadoop in the context of something as general as the cultural and pragmatical shifts in the Internet. However, if you brought in the discussion, Hadoop is awful. Companies deploy it because it's trendy, not because they need it, introducing complexity, additional dependencies and a whole new set of problems to solve. Hadoop also dropped the bar on what is considered simple and sane deployment causing new software to be just as awful to deploy when they wouldn't really need to.

> payment processing like Dwolla

No idea what this is, but payments on the Internet are worse then they used to be. Sure, now you can buy anything, but it's harder to pay. Paypal periodically asks me for IDs and freezes my accounts just because I happen to move between two countries, there are many more types of cards, some work on the Internet better than others, some banks work on the Internet better than others. Merchants support only limited and disjoint set of payment options forcing me to have multiple types of credit cards and various types of accounts I don't want or care about. Back in the day, you had a credit card, it worked. Now I can buy groceries and shoes on the Internet. Back in the day I could not, but I didn't want to. I wanted to buy various types of equipement, and that I could.

> There will always be folks hankering for the glory days of alt.religion.kibology and compuserve. Ignore them.

The article was not about the olde glory days, it was about a fundamental shift in the way people and machines interact on the Internet. A transition from protocols to services. I think this is a worthy thing to discuss and your dismissive, condescending post is not warranted.

cbs2• 14 years ago

I'd like to subscribe to your e-zine.

tommorris• 14 years ago

> Create something game-changing instead.

I can't just be a citizen on the web. I have to be an entrepreneur in order to matter.

I want the wide-eyed hippies back in charge rather than the Ayn Rand freaks.

saurik2• 14 years ago

There is an example in there of how creating a single sign-on service in 2005 being "described as introducing a tracking system worthy of the PATRIOT act". That was years after this kind of thing was considered a problem, however, and it was somewhat rightfully so, and I believe the real story is that things actually got "better" as we came to understand these services more. I am not certain things actually got worse over the last ten years: in some ways they really got better.

Going back to 2002, Microsoft had been working on "Hailstorm", which was a very poorly chosen name for something that people rapidly became afraid of ;P. It was later renamed to "My Services", but it included Microsoft Passport (yes, this is mentioned in the article, but I don't think it is given enough weight), a single sign-on service provider that Microsoft was encouraging other websites to use. It would provide details about you, including your e-mail address, to the sites you connected with.

I had remembered a bunch of people being angry about it, so I did a Google search for "Microsoft Password mark of the beast", and came across an article written at the time in some random magazine called "Microsoft's Passport to Controversy -- Depending on whom you ask, Passport is either a useful consumer convenience or the mark of the beast".

http://business.highbeam.com/787/article-1G1-83378739/micros...

However, it should be noted that one of the fears at the time was not "man, vague centralization is bad", it was "omg, Microsoft doesn't just want this service to take over the web... they want this service to take over the world". Now, of course, you read me saying that, and think "ugh, stop with the rhetoric: that's just an example of people freaking out about something we find common-place; that's what the article is about: did you read it? ;P".

But... it was actually for real. Microsoft was lobbying to make Microsoft Passport be the new US National ID system, and it wasn't just a pie-in-the-sky goal... they were lobbying to make it happen, had the ears of the right people, and were making serious progress on it. For reference, there was an article written about the situation in the Seattle Times with the title "Feds might use Microsoft product for online ID".

> Forget about a national ID card. Instead, the federal government might use Microsoft's Passport technology to verify the online identity of America's citizens, federal employees and businesses, according to the White House technology czar.

> On Sept. 30, the government plans to begin testing Web sites where businesses can pay taxes and citizens can learn about benefits and social services. It's also exploring how to verify the identity of users so the sites can share private information.

http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20020802161525/http://seattl...

I thereby feel the need to note that, even as late as 2005, if you were going to start talking about building the world's next best "single sign-on" provider, this is what you were being mentally compared with: yes, the one service mentioned (TypeKey) ended up having "much more restrictive terms of service about sharing data", but it is looking at the past through rose-colored glasses to think that things have gone downhill.

Let's put it this way: can you seriously imagine Facebook or Twitter ever being considered as the official login system for the IRS? I can't in 2012, but that was the honest-to-goodness reality of "the web we lost" from 10 years ago. At some point, in the last 10 years, it became more, not less, clear to everyone that this kind of service needed limits. There was backlash in 2002; but I believe it was much more fringe-concern than it would be now in 2012.

> Yesterday, appearing at the conference, Gates reiterated the goal, saying he expects governments in many countries will find it difficult getting to "critical mass" with authentication systems they develop on their own. He said some governments may opt to use companies such as Microsoft or America Online as "the bank" that registers people for online usage.

lifeguard4• 14 years ago

In 2002 Microsoft was still a dangerous (and the US DOJ found illegal) monopoly. THAT is why we feared Hail Storm.

lifeguard4• 14 years ago

This is an excellent writeup. I think it misses an important trend in the Web's population: fewer nerds. It used to be a lot of work to get a PC with a broadband connection. Now every cell phone has cheap broadband and a suite of apps built in. The Web today is mostly populated by users who are not enthralled with the technological underpinnings that make it possible. And that is natural. The the lamentable effect is that now there is a market for accessible communication and media. And this is overwhelming the traditions of sharing and valuing anonymity on the Web.

I imagine the nerd population has grown, and accelerated over time. It is just that the non-nerds are getting on-line much faster.

cletus• 14 years ago

I think this is an example of seeing the past through rose-coloured glasses.

Yes there was Flickr but you could discover photos. Thing is, Flickr is still there and you can still use it. What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family.

Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a very small bubble. I'd honestly never heard of Technorati until long after it had waned.

I don't agree that the monetization of the Web has degraded the value (to the user) of links on sites other than links on sites aren't the primary discovery mechanism like they used to be, which is actually a good thing (IMHO).

> 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

This is only true to a limited extent IMHO. The primary services for creating information 10+ years ago were email providers. Because Web-based mail was a latecomer, services like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail grew up in an era where many people used Outlook, Thunderbird and other desktop email clients so they had to support POP3 (and later IMAP) and you could use those services to export your mail.

But that isn't the same as designing your services for interoperability. That was an unintended consequence.

As the idea of "your mail, everywhere (you have an Internet connection)" became dominant, so did Webmail. POP3/IMAP became less important.

Again, I consider this a net positive change.

> 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

This I disagree with. Having your own domain and Website 10+ years ago was pretty unusual. Administering your own site is not easy, particularly as malware became more prevalent. This has declined because no one wants to run their own Website (or email server for that matter) because it's a crazy amount of effort for very little real gain.

The only real problem I see with the present state of the Web is that Facebook wants to own all your data. It wants to be your identity. It wants to be your Internet. That's bad. It's bad for the Web and bad for consumers. But honestly, I don't see it coming to pass. Facebook is just as susceptible to disruption as so many behemoths that have come (and gone) before it.

10+ years ago Microsoft dominated your computing environment. Many couldn't envision a future that would break free of this grasp. In a few short years Microsoft has diminished their control of your computing experience in ways few could've predicted. I'll just leave this as an example of the danger of extrapolation:

http://xkcd.com/605/

SoftwareMaven2• 14 years ago

sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family

This can't be understated. As a highly technical person running my own web services, even I rarely posted photos. The support burden of managing the server, securing it, and keeping family up-to-date on passwords was just never worth it.

Facebook wants to own all your data. It wants to be your identity.

I would love to hear ideas for ways we can fix this that are realistic because I completely agree with you. Any ideas have to recognize the value that sites like FB provide (as the OP did not) and come up with better solutions.

In 1995, I would not have believed that Microsoft would not be the focal point of the industry. The Internet shifted things such that Microsoft is no longer the focal point. It can (and probably will) happen again to Google and FB.

locopati3• 14 years ago

'I would love to hear ideas for ways we can fix this that are realistic'

Peer-to-peer social with discovery. A system where companies/people/groups could self-host their own server, companies could host for others, but all the systems could talk to one another. Data gets stored where you want it to - on your own system or on another (though it's portable even there, by design).

barce3• 14 years ago

In Technorati's defense, it's what allowed lots of savvy people to target the top 100 blogs and enjoy the network effect from doing that. A good example is Tim Ferriss' book, The 4 Hour Work Week. It was useful for figuring out which blogs one ought to be commenting on in order to create synergy with one's blog.

ghaff• 14 years ago

With all due respect etc., I think you're sorta making the parent's point. Technorati (and related) was useful for the Xrati to create their commentariat bubble that was largely irrelevant to the world or even the tech-focused world as a whole. Not that such bubbles don't still exist to significant degrees with or without specific websites whether Technorati or HN.

doctorpangloss• 14 years ago

When hypertext was still conceptual and imagined in microfiche, links were still the primary discovery mechanism of new or related content. I think that idea has stuck around for over 50 years because it is intuitive. It reduces whatever models you might be imagining for discovery into a simpler form.

Google may command the top spot on visited websites, but people use it so often to just open a wikipedia article with the exact query. This suggests Vannevar Bush understood some mechanics of knowledge acquisition better than Larry and Sergei did.

The OP is right. There are fewer links on blogs, and he helped me understand why.

saraid216• 14 years ago

It's worth noticing that, in Google+, only one link gets a first-class position in any given post. If you want to throw down a fuller list of citations, it's a lot less visible. To me, this says that Google subconsciously understands what they've done and have chosen not to fight it. Or they just don't know how and have given up.

freejack• 14 years ago

Anil is technically correct. And 10 years ago, the top three social networks were Userland Radio, MoveAbleType and Blogware. And Blackberry was an awesome smartphone.

And 10 years later, the early adopters have moved on to other things and the mass market has arrived to stake their claim to the social web with Facebook, Twitter et al.

cbs2• 14 years ago

I think this is an example of seeing the past through rose-coloured glasses.

We have taken two steps forward, is it all that bad to reflect on the step we took backward?

A lot of the improvements we've made do not come at the cost of the things we've lost. Some things did have to go to enable the new ways, but some are also the victims of happenstance and circumstance. Some losses are implementation details really, or nice-to-haves that got cut for time/budget. Instead of a point for point dismissal of his post, consider the possibility that desirable properties of the old way do exist. Could long lost characteristics of the internet be rolled back into the current state of affairs in a beneficial way?

I think so. For example, a few of his points strike on the consolidation of the internet. Now that computing is dirt cheap I can run off into my corner and do my own thing, and the interconnectivty some of the new toys offer mean the people I care about know what I'm up to over here and can seamlessly experience it.

Facebook is just as susceptible to disruption

It sure is, but not by the kind of people who can't think about the concept of portable data and interoperability beyond POP/IMAP. Is mint.com not a very obvious poster child for data portability in this decade?

mmahemoff2• 14 years ago

"Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a very small bubble. I'd honestly never heard of Technorati until long after it had waned."

To any blogger back then, Technorati was as ubiquitous as Google Analytics is today. I think the point here is Technorati reached a point where it couldn't deal with all the spam and today, it's very hard to track inbound links. Neither Google nor anyone else does a decent job of this. (They show referring pages when people click on a link, but not occasions when an author creates the link.)

"What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family."

This is a bitter irony, because Flickr was (probably?) the first service to explicitly include a privacy option for sharing with friends and family. That most people do it today on other services (e.g. FB) probably says more about senior management at Yahoo over the years than anything profound about the web and walled gardens.

Alaskan005• 14 years ago

"The only real problem I see with the present state of the Web is that Facebook wants to own all your data"

"I don't agree that the monetization of the Web has degraded the value"

Good thing you work for Google and can give an unbiased opinion.

"10+ years ago Microsoft dominated your computing environment. Many couldn't envision a future that would break free of this grasp. In a few short years Microsoft has diminished their control of your computing experience in ways few could've predicted."

If you have a money-making website, the new medium, you have to pay tribute to Adwords or be bust, increasing prices on every item. The King is dead, Long live the King.

PaulHoule• 14 years ago

Technorati always seemed to be a joke to me.

A friend of mine got thousands of splogs indexed in Technorati and got real traffic from it.

On the other hand, whenever I ran a blog that was legit, Technorati always dismissed it out of hand as a splog.

rythie• 14 years ago

> What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family.

I don't understand this point at all. Flickr has a feature for sharing with friends and family, in fact it has a group for 'friends' and another for 'family' or you can use both. I was doing exactly that in 2005 with Flickr though to 2008 when moved that to Facebook as more friends and family were registered there. What they didn't have was all the other social network stuff like status updates, chat, people tagging etc.

mattmanser• 14 years ago

This guy has the most awesome title ever!

Director of Public Technology Incubator Expert Labs

Listen to him! That's like master of the universe. On steroids. Go Anil, go!

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

I don't see the sarcasm. He is the Director of Expert Labs, a public technology incubator.

vog• 14 years ago

-1 for the ad hominem

barce3• 14 years ago

I think Facebook benefited lots from what could be called "Net Neutrality" in 2003.

unimpressive• 14 years ago

I hate to add emoticons to this quite serious discussion, but I can't help but think that we've lost; over the course of 40 years, a lot more than the cooperation and interoperability described here.

We lost operating systems that expect the user to eventually learn a programming language.

We lost the expectation that a user will ever learn one.

We lost the early expectations of a peer to peer Internet.

We lost the hope of encryption protecting anybody beyond a few stubborn nerds and activists.

We lost the idea of client programs, forcing more and more of our data into computers we don't control.

Were losing the idea that the public can manage their own computers, as we have thus far seen a poor job of it.[0]

Were losing our memory that these things were possible, that they ever could have been or could be.

Were losing the chance to change these things for the future, should we wish to.

[0]: I remember reading over 50% of computers on the Internet are in a botnet, if anyone could indulge my laziness and source this; I would be grateful.

Mz2• 14 years ago

Your list makes me want to add:

We lost "six degrees of separation".

(Though that loss seems to run somewhat more in one direction than the other. Still, ordinary people can rub elbows these days with people they couldn't have so much as gotten an autograph from in the past.)

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

I think people are missing the point. Yes, Flickr is still here and you could use it. But Flickr never really got to mobile (a major strategy failure). Do you know since when Flickr has similar functionality to Instagram? Today - they just released a new version with filters.

The point is, you can't build much on top of instagram, twitter, facebook, whatever. APIs are encumbered by pricy licenses, nobody wants to collaborate. Open standards for sharing data are dying. RSS is dead. Mash-ups are dead. Everything is behind private APIs and walled gardens, the web doesn't connect everything anymore.

icebraining4• 14 years ago

But when did it ever?

acheron• 14 years ago

My Google Reader account is surprised to learn that RSS is dead.

How else do you keep up with updates on a bunch of different sites? (Serious question.)

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

Many sites around the web don't publish RSS anymore, and browsers have removed the default RSS readers.

gurkendoktor• 14 years ago

That's "easy" in 2012: You Like them on Facebook (and wait for them to pay $$$ to promote their postings to get into your newsfeed).

endlessvoid94• 14 years ago

I think most of the frameworks, libraries, and tools we use to build these new services can do an awful lot more to make this kind of thing easier. I actually suspect we'll enter a new age of programming soon, where a lot of the cruft and boilerplate of managing filesystems and metadata around your data (from databases) will be handled automatically, making this kind of thing much, much easier.

Who knows, though. I'm optimistic.

benwerd• 14 years ago

This. This is the web I care about. The principles that keep me doing what I do for a living. I love this web, and how it works.

But the thing is, I love the web we have now, too. I love the interconnectedness and the fact that you don't need to be technical to find, share and create amazing stuff. You just have to have imagination and humanity.

So, let's go back. Let's take the web we've got today, and let's consciously retrofit it with the plumbing we had back then. Let's take the services we all work on and stick in those APIs. Let's make it all work better together, so that the sum of all the web applications is far more than all the web applications separately.

Think about the back-end services we all value: Stripe. Twilio. AWS. What unites all of them is that they're incredibly simple to develop with, and to connect into other applications. That's why Twitter succeeded in the beginning, too: because its API was simple enough that people could build apps for the nascent mobile app ecosystem. This is good for all of our products, as well as for the web's health as a platform.

It's not hard. That's the beauty of it: all these APIs and standards are simple to build and simple to use. That's why they survived. All that has to happen is an understanding that being closed is not a better way to serve your users or run a tech business.

aaron695• 14 years ago

Sorry but I think this article is totally wrong.

Tags for instance are a classic example of something people raved about, thought would work than were a total failure.

It was found filenames actually gave more useful information to the user than tags.

(PS if it's not obvious hashtags are not tags)

joey_muller• 14 years ago

I find myself disagreeing with my cofounder on things like giving the user more and more control. It adds too much complexity. Providing the basic, minimum requirements will be sufficient for 99% of our customers. I'd rather focus on them than the small sliver of folks who'd want that extra control.

yo-mf• 14 years ago

I think Anil missed something in his allusion to AOL. There was an Internet before AOL that a few of us were actively using. There was a thing called “the web” that some folks were toying with while the masses toiled in Prodigy and AOL. Were those services bad or evil? No, but they accelerated the onramping of the next generation of Internet adopters that then quickly moved to the wild and free Web. With the development of the web came all sorts innovation and novel services that brought order to the often chaotic web.

We are on the same onramp now as we were in the late 90’s. Facebook, Twitter, et. al. are just another stopping point to whatever comes next. We lost some things along the way, we abandoned some of our anonymity, and in some ways our freedom and experience suffered. But we have also gained tremendously in the decade since. We have smartphones with apps that guide us to cool places and discovery new experiences. We have apps that make our shopping experiences easier and cheaper. We have apps that let us express ourselves in sounds, pictures, videos, text, and to share those expressions of ourselves to the world in a few clicks. We can find any number of experts and sites that offer assistance without flipping open phonebooks or blindly Googling the world.

Yes, we lost something. I also agree that we have forgotten some of the earlier values that made the web such a joy. We got enticed by free apps and gaudy user experiences. However, there will be a backlash someday and the next generation of Internet users will jump outside of these walled gardens to take control of their own online identity.

nnq• 14 years ago

We moved in the wrong direction a bit, but still, we moved further and that's all that matters! "Average people" "wanted"/needed the web to become like this because they want "everything in one package" kind of deals and that's the only way they could swallow it... but they've swallowed the "red pill" even if was hidden inside a poisoned cheeseburger, so they're on the right track now.

And we had to move in this direction to get the "average Joes" and your grandma on board. Facebook pushes everything in the wrong direction IMHO, from privacy and censorship and content monetarization to technology (PHP, Hiphop, C++, hackathlons?! what new "toxic" technologies and ideas will they support or "invent" next?), but they and those like them brought "the people" online.

But now that they've survived the poisoned cheeseburgers and digested them, it's time to reap the benefits of the red pill. Now that we've taken the detour necessary to get the non-techies on board, it's time to steer the ship in the right direction!

jasonkester• 14 years ago

Anybody remember meaningful URLs?

As in, site.com/view?postid=1234 or site.com/view?userid=1234. Back when "the URL [was] the new command line" and you could easily discover all the content from a site and rework it as you liked. You could tell how many posts a blog had or how many users a site had by pluggin in a few numbers and doing a binary search. No need for an API or a feed. Just look at the URL and you could see what you needed to mess with.

Then SEO happened and URLs started looking like site.com/10-shocking-secrets-about-cat-odor-control-devices, which you can't really do anything with except shorten them to shrt.nr/Ssk and make them even less meaningful.

It always surprised me that nobody complained when we started losing that.

sellandb• 14 years ago

I think that is an interesting point. I have always found "site.com/view?postid=1234" feels lazy vs. the alternative "site.com/posts/article-title". While there is a relatively small group of people who might poke around with the URL parameters regularly, the vast majority of internet users IMHO would prefer to see a URL with some indication about what is on the other side. That's not to say we can't have both either, just that you tend to only need one or the other.

Avshalom• 14 years ago

on the other hand site.com/description combined with the habit of writing urls in english has allowed me to navigate a tremendous number of websites in languages I don't speak.

mrb• 14 years ago

I am suprised nobody mentioned it already, but the Google Wave Protocol [0] was exactly about bringing some of these properties back to the Web: easily discoverable information, real-time data feeds, decentralization of content, running your own "site", etc.

The author said "we've abandoned [these] core values", and this is precisely why Wave failed: people don't care enough about these values.

[0] http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/05/hello-world-meet-goog...

meerita• 14 years ago

I Think Anil went too melancholic with this article. It doesn't give us any clue of the bad things, he just feels the current web isn't right, to my point of view, "the past was better" argument always fails, because in the past there were more chaos than current one, just look how bad was the web 10 years ago with crappy websites coded with HTML and gifs, search engines that didn't do a good job, no webservices at all functioning properly.

Adapt of die.

chris_wot• 14 years ago

"...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."

Oh my gosh. This is the GNOME project!

papsosouid• 14 years ago

>we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world

No, we didn't. They did. The users of this new non-web never saw the old web, they weren't online then. People seem to forget that the entire internet connected population back then is like 5% of the current internet connected population. Those of us who liked the web are still here, we're just outnumbered.

return0• 14 years ago

I would advocate it's a good thing that we have closed social platforms. Most of the content they generate does not leak to search engines and that's a good thing, because most of it is trivialities. Imagine a researcher looking for medical information having to filter through all kinds of anecdotal nonsense to find true scientific studies. It's like browsing youtube and expecting to randomly bump on gems. IMHO, most social stuff is of little value. People still publish in traditional platforms the important bits [with the exception of closed scientific journals; but that's a different issue].

rastem• 14 years ago

I find it humorous that the comments on that site are only enabled if you login with Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail.

azio• 14 years ago

We also lost Flash. Screw you Steve Jobs for killing it. I remember the days when futuristic sites were built using it with all the advance animation and stuff that nobody is doing these days.

dimitar• 14 years ago

I really miss old-fashioned forums.

I know you can point out that they weren't that different from this site or that facebook groups are not that different, but it doesn't feel the same.

I hope they enjoy a Renaissance someday soon and cohabitate with 'social media'. Maybe a new, shiny framework or CMS for making them?

The Web We Lost

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