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Wow, ton of memories being dredged up by this post and the comments ... good times :) I often think back to that time period. He mentions that there was no con

Wow, ton of memories being dredged up by this post and the comments ... good times :) I often think back to that time period. He mentions that there was no concept of social networks back then, but IMO he's totally wrong. I mean, obviously there weren't any social networks as they exist today, but between the message board communities, and the massively interlinked personal e/n blogs ... there very much was a social network. And it was decentralized. For a short time, it was turning out to be a beautiful thing, especially once RSS started gaining popularity. I understand why myspace and facebook took all of that marketshare; it wasn't easy enough for the average person to put up their own site, and by the time things like wordpress became popular, every instance was so generic looking (despite templates) that it was tough to get anyone reading your stuff. There was a glimmer of hope with things like google's RSS reader, and Google's social graph API (https://developers.google.com/social-graph/ https://developers.google.com/social-graph/) ... the future could have been awesome, but alas

fps 10y ago
I think the Internet hasn't significantly changed since those days. I think the difference is that now it's on the publisher to get things in lots of places, vs before it was on the reader to aggregate all the sources that they cared about. You still have decentralized publishing, and you still have lots of disparate reading applications. News Aggregators like Something Awful, Slashdot and Fark have been superseded (for me) by Reddit and HN. IRC has been somewhat replaced by Slack, Gitter, Discord. AIM/MSN/ICQ has been replaced by a dozen other non-interoperable IM systems. BBS systems running on phpBB and other similar self-hosted tools are still massively popular. Email still chugs on, almost completely unchanged. I feel like Facebook solves the issue of a single, curated application platform that a user isn't expected to leave - what AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe used to do. I agree, I preferred some of the old technologies, as they seemed more open with a lower barrier to entry, but I don't think the future is particularly bleak.

fps 10y ago

I think the Internet hasn't significantly changed since those days. I think the difference is that now it's on the publisher to get things in lots of places, vs before it was on the reader to aggregate all the sources that they cared about. You still have decentralized publishing, and you still have lots of disparate reading applications. News Aggregators like Something Awful, Slashdot and Fark have been superseded (for me) by Reddit and HN. IRC has been somewhat replaced by Slack, Gitter, Discord. AIM/MSN/ICQ has been replaced by a dozen other non-interoperable IM systems. BBS systems running on phpBB and other similar self-hosted tools are still massively popular. Email still chugs on, almost completely unchanged. I feel like Facebook solves the issue of a single, curated application platform that a user isn't expected to leave - what AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe used to do. I agree, I preferred some of the old technologies, as they seemed more open with a lower barrier to entry, but I don't think the future is particularly bleak.