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The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL
- anigbrowl 14y agoI've been arguing for a few years that this is a cyclical thing - just as before Facebook there was AOL, before AOL there was Compuserve and so on. Every so often technological advances make the wider net so much easier to use that the curated platform suddenly looks antiquated, then a few years later those advances facilitate the construction of a new platform.
- teeja 14y agoTrue, true. Consider the 'September' phenomenon. Newbies need a place to congregate. Those services catered to new users (termed IIRC 'lusers' at the time). Once 'it all' has become more familiar, then specialization happens, and more creative/sophisticated users start to resent the 'operation of the machine' and branch out into the niches (as teens are doing now with FB). I see no reason to expect that has changed.
- kevinprince 14y agoLove the line "Just to be safe, be sure to print out all of your favorite pages before the end of the month."
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoFantastic bit of satire. Poking fun of companies built for the flip is well deserved, however I have to wonder if things really have changed? Or was it that in the 90s when a web company didn't take off did it simply shut down without notice?
- flatline 14y agoMost of the money in online services in the mid-90s was being made by companies like AOL, CompuServe, etc. [citation needed] WWW was essentially one competing protocol/platform among many. When its dominance was all but assured by the late 90s, indeed, many companies started trying to make money directly on the web, and most of them collapsed and took with them all the VC funding that was being poured into the virtual black hole of the "new paradigm" of unbounded e-business growth. For a time, Microsoft practically did own the inter- and post-bubble WWW with IE 5-6, but their profits were through OS and Office sales, not web revenue, and e-retailers of various sorts were the main players making money directly from WWW. I think today's web, which perhaps started somewhere in the 2005 period with the rise of social media giants and the dominance of online advertising ala Google, is definitely a change, and brought with it the flip.
- rmc 14y agosomewhere in the 2005 period with the rise of social media giants and the dominance of online advertising ala Google And the rise of AJAX and client side javascript web applications and made the web much better. Gmail was one of the first "ajax" applications that got big./
- rayiner 14y agoThe web was far better before AJAX and client-side javascript. Pages were actually in HTML, fonts were adjustable, and ads were tiny and unobtrusive.
- GhotiFish 14y agoThat post just confused me greatly In the modern web, pages are still in HTML, font's can still be adjusted, and ads are automatically filtered out.
- rayiner 14y agoIn modern web pages, much of the content is delivered through AJAX and isn't in the actual HTML of the page, adjusting fonts often breaks layouts, and for people who can't figure out how to use AdBlock (or are on a mobile device), ads are big, obtrusive, hover over the page content affairs.
- markisonfire 14y agoI think you're thinking about the OLD web, when adjusting fonts would break table-based, graphic-intensive websites. Unless you want to go even further back - to a time when gif backgrounds of the stars were common and text was displayed through Comic Sans.
- thomasz 14y ago> ads were tiny and unobtrusive Huh? I remember loads and loads of pop ups
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- RyanZAG 14y agoUnfortunately, this decision has never been in our hands. We got lucky with WWW / TCPIP / many others - sometimes because the people implementing it were more interested in making it good than making money, and sometimes because technical limitations made it impossible to close. So while this blog post makes a great point, it feels like it's trying to convince the sun not to rise tomorrow - nothing we do will stop platforms such as Facebook rising if they offer what people want/need. We would need to make a better version, and that isn't always feasible. I don't use Facebook, but that certainly doesn't stop the masses using it and looking at me strangely when I try to explain to them why I don't use it. We're probably in for a bumpy tech ride in the near future as always-online comes to apps everywhere.
- codeulike 14y agoThe paradox is, platforms like Facebook never could arise without the free internet for people to rapidly prototype, evolve, pivot and merge ideas. Hopefully, having a free (as in, non corporate controlled) internet will come to be seen as an important economic differentiator. I would argue that economic success* for a country in the 21st century and beyond is largely going to hinge on it having an open internet ecosystem. * = unless we trash the natural ecosystem, of course, in which case all bets are off
- rmc 14y agoAdditionally many people share links (funny and otherwise) through Facebook. You can break out of Facebook by clicking on a link someone posts/ Part of the benefit of Facebook is that it's on the WWW.
- pjbrunet 14y agoSure but a few problems with that: a) WARNING you are leaving safety, are you sure you want to go out into the DANGEROUS Internet? Your friends will miss you! How about some Soma instead? b) Censorship c) They have the power to turn off hyperlinks at any time--like YouTube has already done.
- timrpeterson 14y agoRank the most egregious offenders: Obviously Apple is #1 with their App ecosystem but then who's next? 1) Apple 1) Microsoft (back in the day was #1) 2) Facebook 3) Twitter X) where does the Goog fit?
- znowi 14y agoI did a search on "World Wide Web, Inc." and this came up: http://websales.us/ http://websales.us/
- bhauer 14y agoBeing so zealously anti-Facebook as I am, I kept waiting for a Facebook punchline. Ah, I see you have risen above that and make a bigger point. Bravo.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- EGreg 14y agoI wrote this two years ago: http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21 http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21
- andyl 14y agoWe are lucky indeed to have www, tcp, etc. The open ethos of the internet works, but needs defending. Sometimes a good offense is the best defense. IMHO we need more internet-inspired disruptions that bring an open ethos to energy, transportation, and health.
- pjbrunet 14y agoWordPress could be expanded to do battle with Facebook, IMO.
- tlrobinson 14y agoThis is a good idea. It seems like everyone working on this problem so far has been trying to start from scratch (Diaspora, Tent, etc), but building on existing popular platforms would give a system a huge advantage. I don't know exactly what it would look like, but I think it's worth exploring.
- harshreality 14y agoSome sort of WP (or other software) plugins for a messaging/activity stream, and a distributed pubsub messaging system between sites? (using probably json over http/spdy/websockets, not something separate like AMPQ) It would require certain capabilities from the participating blogs/pages/webservers, and it would be fragile in the case of url changes, but it might be workable.
- esrauch 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opensocial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opensocial
- pjbrunet 14y agoBut if it depends on Google Gadgets to work (at least I think that's what your link says) they killed Gadgets back in 2011. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/06/2021227/google-kills-desktop-search-and-gadgets http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/06/2021227/google-kills...
- jchrisa 14y agoThe is not from 1998, it's satire of all the we got bought blogs in this latest round of angel consolidation...
- macspoofing 14y agoThank you Capt'n Obvious. You save the day again.
- ezequiel-garzon 14y agoIt may be clear, but still the title shouldn't mention "1998".
- tlrobinson 14y agoI think including the "1998" made the satire more effective.
- jchrisa 14y agoIt made it better linkbait but confused some commenters...
- mherdeg 14y agoSo just to spell it out for other readers: * This item links to a blog post published 3 March 2013 and fictitiously dated "1998" at the top as a rhetorical point. * The original title of the link as originally submitted was "The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL". * The link was subsequently retitled to "The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL (1998)". I like to think that this was done as a covert act of subversion by a mischievous moderator quietly trying to draw attention to the capricious nature of news.ycombinator headline changes by following the rules to the letter.
- elathan 14y agoAccording to Wikipedia, the term 'blog' was invented in 1999. :)
- whoosy 14y ago"Just to be safe, be sure to print out all of your favorite pages before the end of the month." Oh, yeah... Back then websites were pretty much only text, images, and links.
- gbog 14y agoWell, the websites I check are made of the same "text, images, and links" nowadays
- kevinlu310 14y agoThe history is always repeating itself. So what is the next repeating story?