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FriendFeed’s Real Opportunity: Reassembling the Internet

2 points by prakash 18y ago

jacobscott 18y ago
Article in two sentences: "I believe the Internet today is highly fragmented and disassembled... Sooner or later the “Internet’s middleman” must emerge." [FriendFeed, it could be you!] I feel like this is something else everyone knows, but I don't have a canonical document explaining it (like I do for why DRM is bad, http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt). Can anyone suggest one? Maybe Google's written up some stuff like this for OpenSocial? There is a very interesting incentive system for social networks and complete data transparency. Facebook et. al. only make ad money when you visit them, so it doesn't make financial sense for them to open up unless they expect to get more traffic from doing so then they lose. You might think that this means there's a market opportunity for a totally open social network, but to be useful it would first have to achieve critical mass in a crowded space. This makes me idly wonder whether the real solution is a social networking nonprofit (in the spirit of Wikipedia) where you store the canonical version of your data.
unalone 18y ago
Is it just me, or was this a real nothing of an article? I'm pretty sure it's not just me. Basically, it's explaining how FriendFeed works and pretending like that means he's making a decent point. Really, his only slightly interesting quote is this one - "Sooner or later the 'Internet’s middleman' must emerge." - and he's wrong about that. Reason being, most people don't obsess over the Internet like that. Most people manage one or two sites, and as the Internet gets bigger that'll change to three or four, five if they're feeling ambitious. Because beyond "put stuff online" and "communicate with people," there's no reason to use the Internet. And some people care about using Flickr and Vimeo and Twitter and Tumblr and staying connected in every network at once because they like pretending they'll be John Gruber one day... but the average Internet user uses one application for each of those two things, and those two things are Facebook and Facebook. I think that we as hackers ought to spend a lot of time outside the narrow bubble of people who are as neurotic as we are. It helps to give a LOT of perspective.

2 points by prakash 18y ago

Article in two sentences: "I believe the Internet today is highly fragmented and disassembled... Sooner or later the “Internet’s middleman” must emerge." [FriendFeed, it could be you!] I feel like this is something else everyone knows, but I don't have a canonical document explaining it (like I do for why DRM is bad, http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt). Can anyone suggest one? Maybe Google's written up some stuff like this for OpenSocial? There is a very interesting incentive system for social networks and complete data transparency. Facebook et. al. only make ad money when you visit them, so it doesn't make financial sense for them to open up unless they expect to get more traffic from doing so then they lose. You might think that this means there's a market opportunity for a totally open social network, but to be useful it would first have to achieve critical mass in a crowded space. This makes me idly wonder whether the real solution is a social networking nonprofit (in the spirit of Wikipedia) where you store the canonical version of your data.

unalone 18y ago

Is it just me, or was this a real nothing of an article? I'm pretty sure it's not just me. Basically, it's explaining how FriendFeed works and pretending like that means he's making a decent point. Really, his only slightly interesting quote is this one - "Sooner or later the 'Internet’s middleman' must emerge." - and he's wrong about that. Reason being, most people don't obsess over the Internet like that. Most people manage one or two sites, and as the Internet gets bigger that'll change to three or four, five if they're feeling ambitious. Because beyond "put stuff online" and "communicate with people," there's no reason to use the Internet. And some people care about using Flickr and Vimeo and Twitter and Tumblr and staying connected in every network at once because they like pretending they'll be John Gruber one day... but the average Internet user uses one application for each of those two things, and those two things are Facebook and Facebook. I think that we as hackers ought to spend a lot of time outside the narrow bubble of people who are as neurotic as we are. It helps to give a LOT of perspective.