The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL

http://brianbailey.me/the-world-wide-web-is-moving-to-aol

by jchrisa • 13 years ago

200 54 13 years ago

Love the line "Just to be safe, be sure to print out all of your favorite pages before the end of the month."

Fantastic bit of satire. Poking fun of companies built for the flip is well deserved, however I have to wonder if things really have changed? Or was it that in the 90s when a web company didn't take off did it simply shut down without notice?

flatline• 13 years ago

Most of the money in online services in the mid-90s was being made by companies like AOL, CompuServe, etc. [citation needed] WWW was essentially one competing protocol/platform among many. When its dominance was all but assured by the late 90s, indeed, many companies started trying to make money directly on the web, and most of them collapsed and took with them all the VC funding that was being poured into the virtual black hole of the "new paradigm" of unbounded e-business growth.

For a time, Microsoft practically did own the inter- and post-bubble WWW with IE 5-6, but their profits were through OS and Office sales, not web revenue, and e-retailers of various sorts were the main players making money directly from WWW.

I think today's web, which perhaps started somewhere in the 2005 period with the rise of social media giants and the dominance of online advertising ala Google, is definitely a change, and brought with it the flip.

rmc2• 13 years ago

somewhere in the 2005 period with the rise of social media giants and the dominance of online advertising ala Google

And the rise of AJAX and client side javascript web applications and made the web much better. Gmail was one of the first "ajax" applications that got big./

RyanZAG• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, this decision has never been in our hands. We got lucky with WWW / TCPIP / many others - sometimes because the people implementing it were more interested in making it good than making money, and sometimes because technical limitations made it impossible to close.

So while this blog post makes a great point, it feels like it's trying to convince the sun not to rise tomorrow - nothing we do will stop platforms such as Facebook rising if they offer what people want/need. We would need to make a better version, and that isn't always feasible.

I don't use Facebook, but that certainly doesn't stop the masses using it and looking at me strangely when I try to explain to them why I don't use it. We're probably in for a bumpy tech ride in the near future as always-online comes to apps everywhere.

codeulike2• 13 years ago

The paradox is, platforms like Facebook never could arise without the free internet for people to rapidly prototype, evolve, pivot and merge ideas. Hopefully, having a free (as in, non corporate controlled) internet will come to be seen as an important economic differentiator. I would argue that economic success* for a country in the 21st century and beyond is largely going to hinge on it having an open internet ecosystem.

* = unless we trash the natural ecosystem, of course, in which case all bets are off

rmc2• 13 years ago

Additionally many people share links (funny and otherwise) through Facebook. You can break out of Facebook by clicking on a link someone posts/

Part of the benefit of Facebook is that it's on the WWW.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

> Hopefully, having a free (as in, non corporate controlled) internet will come to be seen as an important economic differentiator

Sorry to break it to you, but the internet is very corporate controlled. Its bits flow over the private networks of Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc. It's just that so far, these companies have not exercised the extent of their control.

pjbrunet5• 13 years ago

"platforms like Facebook never could arise without the free internet"

Word.

coldtea2• 13 years ago

>The paradox is, platforms like Facebook never could arise without the free internet for people to rapidly prototype, evolve, pivot and merge ideas.

I think that's not really a paradox but orthogonal.

For one, successful platforms have risen in closed ecosystems too. E.g the TV networks of yore were very closed ecosystems, but several forms and platforms emerged in them.

Second, the creation destroying the environment that created it is not really a paradox. It's one way to assure no such new creation threatens it. And it's the essence of stories like Frankenstein etc.

coldtea2• 13 years ago

>So while this blog post makes a great point, it feels like it's trying to convince the sun not to rise tomorrow - nothing we do will stop platforms such as Facebook rising if they offer what people want/need. We would need to make a better version, and that isn't always feasible.

Well that's the thing with democracy and freedom in general.

It's not enough to vote. You have to be vigilant, and you have to be a political (as opposed to private) person.

That a platform like Facebook can swallow the internet if it "offers people what the want/need", means that people are not democratic (in the meaning of vigilant citizenry) enough. They are content with conveniences instead of asking for more control and freedom for them.

(I'm not talking about FSF style freedom either. I would be content with EFF style freedom).

znowi• 13 years ago

I did a search on "World Wide Web, Inc." and this came up: http://websales.us/

bhauer• 13 years ago

Being so zealously anti-Facebook as I am, I kept waiting for a Facebook punchline. Ah, I see you have risen above that and make a bigger point. Bravo.

EGreg• 13 years ago

I wrote this two years ago:

http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21

andyl• 13 years ago

We are lucky indeed to have www, tcp, etc. The open ethos of the internet works, but needs defending.

Sometimes a good offense is the best defense. IMHO we need more internet-inspired disruptions that bring an open ethos to energy, transportation, and health.

pjbrunet5• 13 years ago

WordPress could be expanded to do battle with Facebook, IMO.

tlrobinson2• 13 years ago

This is a good idea. It seems like everyone working on this problem so far has been trying to start from scratch (Diaspora, Tent, etc), but building on existing popular platforms would give a system a huge advantage.

I don't know exactly what it would look like, but I think it's worth exploring.

jchrisa2• 13 years ago

The is not from 1998, it's satire of all the we got bought blogs in this latest round of angel consolidation...

macspoofing• 13 years ago

Thank you Capt'n Obvious. You save the day again.

ezequiel-garzon• 13 years ago

It may be clear, but still the title shouldn't mention "1998".

mherdeg• 13 years ago

So just to spell it out for other readers:

* This item links to a blog post published 3 March 2013 and fictitiously dated "1998" at the top as a rhetorical point.

* The original title of the link as originally submitted was "The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL".

* The link was subsequently retitled to "The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL (1998)". I like to think that this was done as a covert act of subversion by a mischievous moderator quietly trying to draw attention to the capricious nature of news.ycombinator headline changes by following the rules to the letter.

elathan• 13 years ago

According to Wikipedia, the term 'blog' was invented in 1999. :)

whoosy• 13 years ago

"Just to be safe, be sure to print out all of your favorite pages before the end of the month."

Oh, yeah... Back then websites were pretty much only text, images, and links.

gbog• 13 years ago

Well, the websites I check are made of the same "text, images, and links" nowadays

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

I've been arguing for a few years that this is a cyclical thing - just as before Facebook there was AOL, before AOL there was Compuserve and so on. Every so often technological advances make the wider net so much easier to use that the curated platform suddenly looks antiquated, then a few years later those advances facilitate the construction of a new platform.

teeja• 13 years ago

True, true. Consider the 'September' phenomenon. Newbies need a place to congregate. Those services catered to new users (termed IIRC 'lusers' at the time). Once 'it all' has become more familiar, then specialization happens, and more creative/sophisticated users start to resent the 'operation of the machine' and branch out into the niches (as teens are doing now with FB). I see no reason to expect that has changed.

kevinlu310• 13 years ago

The history is always repeating itself. So what is the next repeating story?

The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL

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