3 ms·

>But the real impact on the economy and humanity from eBay, AirBB and FaceTwitter is low. Yay! This post. A mathy-engineering type condescendingly putting down

>But the real impact on the economy and humanity from eBay, AirBB and FaceTwitter is low. Yay! This post. A mathy-engineering type condescendingly putting down services with a billion users while the world communicates and shares things with each other on FaceTwitter (I see what you did there, the services are the same functionally, so why differentiate them? very clever). While they're sitting around being too good for these services for the masses, the masses are being entertained, meeting new people, and staying in touch with old acquaintances, and enjoying themselves. Also not thinking a lick of the engineer who is too good to use their services. >The web is a dumbed down version of older hypertext systems and hasn't shaken that legacy in 25 years.... You can fool yourself about worse is better while making a few bucks. Yep. Worse is better because all of these things are just iterations on the thing you originally saw, which is obviously the pinnacle of the web. It's like people who move to New York City and expect the city to stay exactly the way it was when they first became emotionally attached to it. Or people who join reddit and complain about it going to shit because it's different from when they joined it. The web wasn't in some ideal state that you happened to come across and get in with while it was good. The one constant of the internet and the web is how it evolves and changes.

Detrus 11y ago
I was never good at mathy things, decent at abstract art. The masses were already entertained by AOL chatrooms and ICQ. A lot of older people I see stay in touch with email, and they got each other's addresses by talking on the phone. And they use it exactly like facebook newsfeed, forwarding silly news stories to each other and not being able to format out the endless forwarding chain. They don't think a lick of the innovative engineering and billions of dollars behind facebook, because their batch of friends just forwards emails. I've heard some complaints about the terrible formatting, people asking to be taken off the lists, people not knowing how to do it, but it mostly works. Facebook confuses them too. Some only use Skype. What is facebook when you boil it down to its real functionality? Address book with photos Event system for the address book Mail forwarding between people in the address book Filters for forwarded messages Filters for people in the address book Media storage and filters on who can view it But mostly a UI that enables a larger percentage of casual computer users to use more of these features than they could in email. Takes the friction out of the forwarding messages use case. Sharing photos and the address book are in one place and searchable. A single UI for a bunch of features that used to be a mess of separate UIs http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000-1200-924/craigslist%20andrew%20parker.png http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f0... And there are your entertained masses and billions of dollars. But what was it worth when half of those features were stuck in email? The GUI and the way we organize programs is why we shoveled a bunch of these features from one place to another and made a big fuss about it when an unknown proportion of users started using more features than they did in email.

Detrus 11y ago

I was never good at mathy things, decent at abstract art. The masses were already entertained by AOL chatrooms and ICQ. A lot of older people I see stay in touch with email, and they got each other's addresses by talking on the phone. And they use it exactly like facebook newsfeed, forwarding silly news stories to each other and not being able to format out the endless forwarding chain. They don't think a lick of the innovative engineering and billions of dollars behind facebook, because their batch of friends just forwards emails. I've heard some complaints about the terrible formatting, people asking to be taken off the lists, people not knowing how to do it, but it mostly works. Facebook confuses them too. Some only use Skype. What is facebook when you boil it down to its real functionality? Address book with photos Event system for the address book Mail forwarding between people in the address book Filters for forwarded messages Filters for people in the address book Media storage and filters on who can view it But mostly a UI that enables a larger percentage of casual computer users to use more of these features than they could in email. Takes the friction out of the forwarding messages use case. Sharing photos and the address book are in one place and searchable. A single UI for a bunch of features that used to be a mess of separate UIs http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000-1200-924/craigslist%20andrew%20parker.png http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f0... And there are your entertained masses and billions of dollars. But what was it worth when half of those features were stuck in email? The GUI and the way we organize programs is why we shoveled a bunch of these features from one place to another and made a big fuss about it when an unknown proportion of users started using more features than they did in email.