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> Twitter recently changed “favorites” to “likes” and swapped out the star for a heart. I’m pretty used to this from Tumblr, so I was surprised by the amount of

> Twitter recently changed “favorites” to “likes” and swapped out the star for a heart. I’m pretty used to this from Tumblr, so I was surprised by the amount of pushback. Until I saw someone make a brilliant point (which I neglected to save a link to): these tiny changes bother us because they remind us that even our very personal spaces are owned by someone else. This is, in so many words, the main argument against the cloud and against web apps in general. Although, with regards to things changing under your feet, even with traditional self-hosted software, a pretty big issue becomes that you must either upgrade eventually, suffer security bugs due to something being dropped from support, or (if you are using only open-source software) become a maintainer for every single piece of software you care about...

agumonkey 11y ago
Something the desktop era didn't have to bother with. You owned the device, the software, the storage. The web is sucking the world into its cloud for reasons that seem less and less relevant.
- lazaroclapp 11y ago
  The desktop era still required you upgrading your software often enough to patch security issues and remain inside of support. I suppose the main advantage is that you still roughly got to pick when to upgrade. Also, the time between major UI shifts was long enough that by the time you absolutely needed to move from your current version, you were buying a new desktop. Rather than having the one you'd already been using randomly "mutate" from under you...
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    Exactly. In a less connected world, you have more control over things. The pacing felt a bit more balanced or maybe we're still in a transitory regime where the cloud thing is not fully developped and integrated.
  - creshal 11y ago
    > The desktop era still required you upgrading your software often enough to patch security issues and remain inside of support. And sometimes people find UI issues bad enough to take the risk. Just look at e.g. all the how-tos to downgrade Skype to version 6 or 4, just to avoid the horrible current UI. Or the migration from Office 2003 to newer versions with the ribbon UI. If I'd give my users the choice, they'd all vote to downgrade.
    - Drdrdrq 11y ago
      Actually, that was the reason I sold one user on OpenOffice, back then. Happy user now. :)
  - rms_returns 11y ago
    > I suppose the main advantage is that you still roughly got to pick when to upgrade. I think that argument applies only when you are using someone else's cloud hosted solution like ClearBooks or SalesForce. But if you host your own cloud infrastructure on Amazon AWS or Linode and install a custom web-base product, you DO get to decide when to upgrade (apart from many other benefits of course).

agumonkey 11y ago

Something the desktop era didn't have to bother with. You owned the device, the software, the storage. The web is sucking the world into its cloud for reasons that seem less and less relevant.

lazaroclapp 11y ago
The desktop era still required you upgrading your software often enough to patch security issues and remain inside of support. I suppose the main advantage is that you still roughly got to pick when to upgrade. Also, the time between major UI shifts was long enough that by the time you absolutely needed to move from your current version, you were buying a new desktop. Rather than having the one you'd already been using randomly "mutate" from under you...
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Exactly. In a less connected world, you have more control over things. The pacing felt a bit more balanced or maybe we're still in a transitory regime where the cloud thing is not fully developped and integrated.
- creshal 11y ago
  > The desktop era still required you upgrading your software often enough to patch security issues and remain inside of support. And sometimes people find UI issues bad enough to take the risk. Just look at e.g. all the how-tos to downgrade Skype to version 6 or 4, just to avoid the horrible current UI. Or the migration from Office 2003 to newer versions with the ribbon UI. If I'd give my users the choice, they'd all vote to downgrade.
  - Drdrdrq 11y ago
    Actually, that was the reason I sold one user on OpenOffice, back then. Happy user now. :)
- rms_returns 11y ago
  > I suppose the main advantage is that you still roughly got to pick when to upgrade. I think that argument applies only when you are using someone else's cloud hosted solution like ClearBooks or SalesForce. But if you host your own cloud infrastructure on Amazon AWS or Linode and install a custom web-base product, you DO get to decide when to upgrade (apart from many other benefits of course).