4 ms·

Did we get to this point of fragmentation due to smart phones and their walled garden philosophy? People stopped making applications for the sake of interoperab

Did we get to this point of fragmentation due to smart phones and their walled garden philosophy? People stopped making applications for the sake of interoperability. ... if RealAudio™ was founded today it'd be king. Or is facebook to blame? John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- he was wrong, censorship just has to wait for the right monopoly to appear. And with the success of monopoly interoperability becomes its casualty

losteric 9y ago
Amazon and Facebook, to me, are symptoms of a deeper problem: Technology is still hard. We're building complex large-scale products because the non-technical consumers can't use the simple small-scale products. We're here because it's convenient, not because it's good. I always felt that Google should have created simple tools for web publishing and creating personal walled-gardens - make the web personal for 7 billion non-technical humans, and the brands they consume. Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. G+ copied Facebook when they should have studied why people were using Facebook instead of the open web. Don't make the problem worse, fixed those problems; take the role of guardian of the internet. Create or support standard APIs, release relevant IP/research, and bankroll SV startups that build the tools to publish or consume through the open web. Google is still an ad/search company that relies on the open web. They need to protect it and drive further innovation. What happens after the coming adpocalypse - micropayments? Subscription bundles? Who knows? Or, perhaps we'll be chained to ads forever because we'll be locked into walled-garden apps... what a hell that would be. Are there any companies working in this space? Closest I've seen is Squarespace, and even then... not really...
- callumlocke 9y ago
  > Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. I guess Wordpress is an example. It's got a hosted plan, which requires little more computer literacy than Facebook, and you can also leave at any time and self-host the software, which keeps the hosted offering honest. But it's just not as contagious as something like Facebook. That's the problem, Facebook isn't just more 'convenient' than self-hosted tools, it also has your friends tagging you in photos.
  - losteric 9y ago
    I'd argue that, in terms of features, Wordpress is little better than Jekyll/Hugo. Social integration is the aspect that's missing. Chat, access control, tagging, push/pull update, etc. I envision this is a two part problem: the "back-end", one-click install or oauth register services to create your private space and identity (possibly a VPS or agglomeration of AWS services) for sending/receiving emails, direct messages, tags (push), and friend posts, group updates, news subscriptions (pull), plus APIs for search, access control, creating/managing your own content, so on; and the front-end, a glorified RSS reader for using the above services through standard APIs. That's the challenge. The solution is way more complex then the existing offerings, like WP or other simple blogs, but all that complexity must be buried away so it's at least as easy as registering to Facebook. It's possible, all of the constituent problems have been tackled separately... what's lacking is a unified standard, comprehensive tools, and stable (corporate) backing.
    - losteric 9y ago
      and I kinda wonder how much of this ultimately falls on ISPs for not building out high speed internet... it's not inconceivable to imagine an always on "social network" box, or more options for home servers
- tommorris 9y ago
  > Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. There's an effort to try and build some standards for open web sharing at indieweb.org - cross-post comments, syndication to existing social networks. A few of those standards have now been given the W3C stamp (MicroPub, WebMention). There's some services built on top of it like WithKnown, MicroBlog and people building on top of WordPress, building their own site and so on. The founding principle of that community (build what fixes your problem, don't try and solve everyone's problems) keeps it quite well focussed.
Animats 9y ago
Actually, that's a misquote from an incident at Stanford involving USENET in the early 1980s. There was an administration attempt to censor alt.humor.funny over some forgotten PC issue. The group was blocked at the main Stanford USENET gateway. It didn't work. USENET nodes, when they connect, automatically exchange any messages in any group common to both that the other node hasn't seen. There were a few other USENET low-bandwidth nodes on campus that connected to the outside world, and as long as there was at least one, the missing posts in "alt.humor.funny" would be re-inserted. USENET really did route around censorship automatically.

losteric 9y ago

Amazon and Facebook, to me, are symptoms of a deeper problem: Technology is still hard. We're building complex large-scale products because the non-technical consumers can't use the simple small-scale products. We're here because it's convenient, not because it's good. I always felt that Google should have created simple tools for web publishing and creating personal walled-gardens - make the web personal for 7 billion non-technical humans, and the brands they consume. Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. G+ copied Facebook when they should have studied why people were using Facebook instead of the open web. Don't make the problem worse, fixed those problems; take the role of guardian of the internet. Create or support standard APIs, release relevant IP/research, and bankroll SV startups that build the tools to publish or consume through the open web. Google is still an ad/search company that relies on the open web. They need to protect it and drive further innovation. What happens after the coming adpocalypse - micropayments? Subscription bundles? Who knows? Or, perhaps we'll be chained to ads forever because we'll be locked into walled-garden apps... what a hell that would be. Are there any companies working in this space? Closest I've seen is Squarespace, and even then... not really...

callumlocke 9y ago
> Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. I guess Wordpress is an example. It's got a hosted plan, which requires little more computer literacy than Facebook, and you can also leave at any time and self-host the software, which keeps the hosted offering honest. But it's just not as contagious as something like Facebook. That's the problem, Facebook isn't just more 'convenient' than self-hosted tools, it also has your friends tagging you in photos.
- losteric 9y ago
  I'd argue that, in terms of features, Wordpress is little better than Jekyll/Hugo. Social integration is the aspect that's missing. Chat, access control, tagging, push/pull update, etc. I envision this is a two part problem: the "back-end", one-click install or oauth register services to create your private space and identity (possibly a VPS or agglomeration of AWS services) for sending/receiving emails, direct messages, tags (push), and friend posts, group updates, news subscriptions (pull), plus APIs for search, access control, creating/managing your own content, so on; and the front-end, a glorified RSS reader for using the above services through standard APIs. That's the challenge. The solution is way more complex then the existing offerings, like WP or other simple blogs, but all that complexity must be buried away so it's at least as easy as registering to Facebook. It's possible, all of the constituent problems have been tackled separately... what's lacking is a unified standard, comprehensive tools, and stable (corporate) backing.
  - losteric 9y ago
    and I kinda wonder how much of this ultimately falls on ISPs for not building out high speed internet... it's not inconceivable to imagine an always on "social network" box, or more options for home servers
tommorris 9y ago
> Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo. There's an effort to try and build some standards for open web sharing at indieweb.org - cross-post comments, syndication to existing social networks. A few of those standards have now been given the W3C stamp (MicroPub, WebMention). There's some services built on top of it like WithKnown, MicroBlog and people building on top of WordPress, building their own site and so on. The founding principle of that community (build what fixes your problem, don't try and solve everyone's problems) keeps it quite well focussed.

Animats 9y ago

Actually, that's a misquote from an incident at Stanford involving USENET in the early 1980s. There was an administration attempt to censor alt.humor.funny over some forgotten PC issue. The group was blocked at the main Stanford USENET gateway. It didn't work. USENET nodes, when they connect, automatically exchange any messages in any group common to both that the other node hasn't seen. There were a few other USENET low-bandwidth nodes on campus that connected to the outside world, and as long as there was at least one, the missing posts in "alt.humor.funny" would be re-inserted. USENET really did route around censorship automatically.