4 ms·

When has this "diffusion into distributed services" happened before? It seems to me the trend is most often in the other direction. There were once many search

When has this "diffusion into distributed services" happened before? It seems to me the trend is most often in the other direction. There were once many search engines, now there is Google. Usenet was a distributed system; now there are centralized forums. Email was once something that was largely administered locally, now everyone has a Gmail account. Sharing things with friends and family used to be done through a constellation of different services, like blogs and Flickr and email. Now Facebook does all of those things.

silverbax88 15y ago
I have a gmail account, but I don't use it. I would say the same for any business. No business with any sense is going to rely on Gmail for their internal business communications.
- nl 15y ago
  No business with any sense is going to rely on Gmail for their internal business communications http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/customers/ http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/customers/ says you are wrong. And I don't think that's a bad thing - Facebook is a problem, not Google. Don't tar every company with the same brush.
  - silverbax88 15y ago
    Any companies on that list using Gmail as their primary email service are foolish. But I'm not sure why you think I was somehow equating Facebook with Google simply because I don't agree that everyone has Gmail and is using it.
    - Vandy_Travis 15y ago
      I use google apps to host my email for my company, with all emails backed up to our server. Why is that foolish?
      - loup-vaillant 15y ago
        Ah, now here's a different thing: should a comet fall on Google's data centres, you still keep your data. I infer that you probably thought about privacy risks. I also suppose your company's email address isn't "@gmail.com". That would be foolish.
- Lagged2Death 15y ago
  That's your prerogative, of course, but more and more businesses are outsourcing their internal email to an outside service. Sometimes that's the commercial version of Gmail and sometimes it's a competitor. Regardless, that seems like a move toward central control rather than toward anything I'd describe as a distributed service.
  - silverbax88 15y ago
    I'd bring up that "outsourcing their internal email" is not the same thing as "using Gmail". But as to your point about centralization, companies (like Facebook) have tried for years to centralize data and it hasn't worked yet. Microsoft has tried it, IBM has tried it, and Google continues to try it. I think the issue is that there is difference between allowing people to log into an account with Facebook and companies actually sharing their data with each other. There's also the reality that as companies die, merge or change course, the massive amounts of data they have often simply becomes unused.
- weavejester 15y ago
  Quite a few do. Why do you think this wouldn't make sense?
  - alexqgb 15y ago
    Have you ever suffered a Google outage? I don't mean the kind of system-wide failure that gets all Googleplex hands on deck. I mean the kind of random, individual catastrophe that comes with a crash-course in just how astonishingly unreachable the Googleplex really is.
    - silverbax88 15y ago
      Yes, I have first hand experience with this. Dealing with Google "support" taught me a harsh reality that Google simply isn't interested in support in the way that Fortune 500 companies need and expect.
      - alexqgb 15y ago
        It comes down to the not-so-subtle difference between "customer" and "user". Reminds me of the joke about there being two kinds of people in the world; those who have lost data, and those who will.
  - silverbax88 15y ago
    The first is support - Google isn't in the business of keeping you in business. The second is that you are turning over all of your internal communication, almost all of which should never leave the company, to a third party.
    - weavejester 15y ago
      > The first is support - Google isn't in the business of keeping you in business. I'm not sure I understand this. Why isn't Google in the business of making sure its paying customers stay in business? > The second is that you are turning over all of your internal communication, almost all of which should never leave the company, to a third party. How is this any different from storing source code on GitHub, or using Campfire to communicate?
- darksaga 15y ago
  Despite the other comments, I completely agree with you. It's just foolish to give up control of one of the most important communication resources your business has to a company with a notoriously poor customer service record. http://www.formortals.com/gmail-is-not-a-business-tool-period/ http://www.formortals.com/gmail-is-not-a-business-tool-perio...
moe 15y ago
I'd argue this way: Search is not easily distributable and will remain silo'ed up for a long time. GMail is huge. But SMTP is still a distributed protocol, you can switch providers in a blink and not lose anything other than a shiny interface. NNTP was always run in a hierarchical fashion and more importantly is centered around discussion groups. People a) prefer more control over their publishing/group-comm (blogs, forums) and b) demand the "follow individual" pattern (RSS). Consequently the Usenet-monolith shattered into said services, all of which you can either run on your own server, or rent from a service-provider. Sharing always sucked and that is the niche (apart from the social graph) that made Facebook big. However, today we can build mashups that plug into all these services and present them under a unified interface - just as pretty as facebook. The only missing bit to lace it all together is the social graph. Today our little mashup has to load the graph from either facebook, twitter or google. In the future some smart kid will come up with a "DNS[1] for social relations" and everyone will start using that, just because it's the natural thing to do and because futzing with proprietary API-keys is so 2011. [1] As in Domain Name System
- Lagged2Death 15y ago
  But SMTP is still a distributed protocol, you can switch providers in a blink and not lose anything other than a shiny interface. I think you may underestimate the importance of the shiny interface. Regardless, the use of an outside provider is still a move toward centralization. Ten years ago, the small offices I did software work in all had local email servers. Today, running an email server well is a big job, and those offices all outsource their email service to much larger companies. People ... demand the "follow individual" pattern (RSS) ... In the future some smart kid will come up with a "DNS for social relations" It's interesting that you bring up RSS. I was thinking about that too. I think RSS is already very nearly a "DNS for social relations." But it's also failed to catch on outside the circle of techies, early adopters, and web-potatoes. I'd say the failure of RSS to achieve mainstream popularity is an example of a decentralized system losing out to centralized alternatives. Like Facebook. Facebook is just plain simpler to get started with than a self-administered approach like RSS or a hypothetical next-generation DNSfSR would be. And Facebook and Twitter both killed off their RSS feeds once they'd felt they'd achieved a certain critical mass. They understand that RSS is an alternative for much of what they do. I don't celebrate any of this. I use and like RSS. I wish I didn't feel the need for a Facebook account (but that's where my real-world friends are). But the pattern I see is that convenience beats out control every time. For complicated devices like computers and for complicated situations like the (real, human) social network, the inevitable complexity that comes along with local, personal control is often a problem, not a feature. Under such circumstances, I don't see how Facebook (or its successor) will be overtaken by a distributed anything.
extension 15y ago
Go back a bit further to the days of the big online services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc. I mean before they were ISPs. They competed with the internet and lost, because they couldn't match the wild creativity unleashed by the web, which made everyone a publisher/broadcaster/developer/priest. Social networks have taken a few of the biggest distributed applications of the web and started mass producing them, in watered down form. But notice how they have to keep absorbing every new fad that comes along? The coup will start with some platform that allows ideas to be realized faster than the networks can clone them.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  But Facebook isn't closed off from the internet. The internet is now using Facebook's APIs to tie the two ever closer.
  - extension 15y ago
    I'm pretty sure those services were all on the internet before they died.

silverbax88 15y ago

I have a gmail account, but I don't use it. I would say the same for any business. No business with any sense is going to rely on Gmail for their internal business communications.

nl 15y ago
No business with any sense is going to rely on Gmail for their internal business communications http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/customers/ http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/customers/ says you are wrong. And I don't think that's a bad thing - Facebook is a problem, not Google. Don't tar every company with the same brush.
- silverbax88 15y ago
  Any companies on that list using Gmail as their primary email service are foolish. But I'm not sure why you think I was somehow equating Facebook with Google simply because I don't agree that everyone has Gmail and is using it.
  - Vandy_Travis 15y ago
    I use google apps to host my email for my company, with all emails backed up to our server. Why is that foolish?
    - loup-vaillant 15y ago
      Ah, now here's a different thing: should a comet fall on Google's data centres, you still keep your data. I infer that you probably thought about privacy risks. I also suppose your company's email address isn't "@gmail.com". That would be foolish.
Lagged2Death 15y ago
That's your prerogative, of course, but more and more businesses are outsourcing their internal email to an outside service. Sometimes that's the commercial version of Gmail and sometimes it's a competitor. Regardless, that seems like a move toward central control rather than toward anything I'd describe as a distributed service.
- silverbax88 15y ago
  I'd bring up that "outsourcing their internal email" is not the same thing as "using Gmail". But as to your point about centralization, companies (like Facebook) have tried for years to centralize data and it hasn't worked yet. Microsoft has tried it, IBM has tried it, and Google continues to try it. I think the issue is that there is difference between allowing people to log into an account with Facebook and companies actually sharing their data with each other. There's also the reality that as companies die, merge or change course, the massive amounts of data they have often simply becomes unused.
weavejester 15y ago
Quite a few do. Why do you think this wouldn't make sense?
- alexqgb 15y ago
  Have you ever suffered a Google outage? I don't mean the kind of system-wide failure that gets all Googleplex hands on deck. I mean the kind of random, individual catastrophe that comes with a crash-course in just how astonishingly unreachable the Googleplex really is.
  - silverbax88 15y ago
    Yes, I have first hand experience with this. Dealing with Google "support" taught me a harsh reality that Google simply isn't interested in support in the way that Fortune 500 companies need and expect.
    - alexqgb 15y ago
      It comes down to the not-so-subtle difference between "customer" and "user". Reminds me of the joke about there being two kinds of people in the world; those who have lost data, and those who will.
- silverbax88 15y ago
  The first is support - Google isn't in the business of keeping you in business. The second is that you are turning over all of your internal communication, almost all of which should never leave the company, to a third party.
  - weavejester 15y ago
    > The first is support - Google isn't in the business of keeping you in business. I'm not sure I understand this. Why isn't Google in the business of making sure its paying customers stay in business? > The second is that you are turning over all of your internal communication, almost all of which should never leave the company, to a third party. How is this any different from storing source code on GitHub, or using Campfire to communicate?
darksaga 15y ago
Despite the other comments, I completely agree with you. It's just foolish to give up control of one of the most important communication resources your business has to a company with a notoriously poor customer service record. http://www.formortals.com/gmail-is-not-a-business-tool-period/ http://www.formortals.com/gmail-is-not-a-business-tool-perio...

moe 15y ago

I'd argue this way: Search is not easily distributable and will remain silo'ed up for a long time. GMail is huge. But SMTP is still a distributed protocol, you can switch providers in a blink and not lose anything other than a shiny interface. NNTP was always run in a hierarchical fashion and more importantly is centered around discussion groups. People a) prefer more control over their publishing/group-comm (blogs, forums) and b) demand the "follow individual" pattern (RSS). Consequently the Usenet-monolith shattered into said services, all of which you can either run on your own server, or rent from a service-provider. Sharing always sucked and that is the niche (apart from the social graph) that made Facebook big. However, today we can build mashups that plug into all these services and present them under a unified interface - just as pretty as facebook. The only missing bit to lace it all together is the social graph. Today our little mashup has to load the graph from either facebook, twitter or google. In the future some smart kid will come up with a "DNS[1] for social relations" and everyone will start using that, just because it's the natural thing to do and because futzing with proprietary API-keys is so 2011. [1] As in Domain Name System

Lagged2Death 15y ago
But SMTP is still a distributed protocol, you can switch providers in a blink and not lose anything other than a shiny interface. I think you may underestimate the importance of the shiny interface. Regardless, the use of an outside provider is still a move toward centralization. Ten years ago, the small offices I did software work in all had local email servers. Today, running an email server well is a big job, and those offices all outsource their email service to much larger companies. People ... demand the "follow individual" pattern (RSS) ... In the future some smart kid will come up with a "DNS for social relations" It's interesting that you bring up RSS. I was thinking about that too. I think RSS is already very nearly a "DNS for social relations." But it's also failed to catch on outside the circle of techies, early adopters, and web-potatoes. I'd say the failure of RSS to achieve mainstream popularity is an example of a decentralized system losing out to centralized alternatives. Like Facebook. Facebook is just plain simpler to get started with than a self-administered approach like RSS or a hypothetical next-generation DNSfSR would be. And Facebook and Twitter both killed off their RSS feeds once they'd felt they'd achieved a certain critical mass. They understand that RSS is an alternative for much of what they do. I don't celebrate any of this. I use and like RSS. I wish I didn't feel the need for a Facebook account (but that's where my real-world friends are). But the pattern I see is that convenience beats out control every time. For complicated devices like computers and for complicated situations like the (real, human) social network, the inevitable complexity that comes along with local, personal control is often a problem, not a feature. Under such circumstances, I don't see how Facebook (or its successor) will be overtaken by a distributed anything.

extension 15y ago

Go back a bit further to the days of the big online services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc. I mean before they were ISPs. They competed with the internet and lost, because they couldn't match the wild creativity unleashed by the web, which made everyone a publisher/broadcaster/developer/priest. Social networks have taken a few of the biggest distributed applications of the web and started mass producing them, in watered down form. But notice how they have to keep absorbing every new fad that comes along? The coup will start with some platform that allows ideas to be realized faster than the networks can clone them.

pavel_lishin 15y ago
But Facebook isn't closed off from the internet. The internet is now using Facebook's APIs to tie the two ever closer.
- extension 15y ago
  I'm pretty sure those services were all on the internet before they died.