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I like the idea and think it will be both an adventure and worth while, but it'll never be what it used to be. Here's why: My friends never really made there

I like the idea and think it will be both an adventure and worth while, but it'll never be what it used to be. Here's why: My friends never really made there own websites or anything even close, but when myspace came along everyone suddenly became interested in the ability to customize their profile page. This alone created would be programmers out of my friends, figuring out how to manipulate each page to add interesting layouts via HTML, picking music to add to the page and figuring out how to embed pictures, videos, music, links, etc. The point is, that myspace was in many ways better than Facebook, and a transition from webpages to social networking. With myspace essentially gone, my friends have on multiple occasions told me they missed the ability to make themselves unique, but when I suggest them making their own webpage they call claim it too hard, costly, no way to network, etc. Perhaps neocities can make it, but to hit a larger market it'll need more social networking that allows the qualities of facebook chat (why ALL of my friends switched from myspace). If you could add in the social networking aspect, it would trump the need for facebook and open the door for a whole new realm of people.

chriswarbo 13y ago
I would claim that Neocities should specifically not add social networking aspects. If someone wants social features on their site then they can copy/paste snippets of HTML/CSS/Javascript into the static site. I think the difficulty with doing that is that social network integration is almost exclusively focused on consumption. At the lowest end of the spectrum are the widgets containing information from within the network. That's a reasonable way to direct users from a Web site into a network (eg. a user visiting a newspaper's site may go and visit the newspaper's Facebook page) but it's useless at getting people from the network to go to a site. Nobody goes to Bob's Web site to check his Facebook status; they do it from within Facebook. The situations where this can work well are: 1) Consumer APIs with machine-readable results. The simplest mashup, data visualisation, interactive game, etc. can be made really interesting when it has real-world data to play with. As an example, one of my first programs was a balls-on-springs physics simulation, but I drove it with artist similarity data from last.fm (audioscrobbler at the time). 2) Producer APIs allow data to persist once the static page is closed. This could be as simple as posting a highscore from a game, all the way up to posting the result of a Web-based creative application. What programmer didn't throw together a "paint program" as soon as they found out how to get the mouse position and make a line on a canvas?

chriswarbo 13y ago

I would claim that Neocities should specifically not add social networking aspects. If someone wants social features on their site then they can copy/paste snippets of HTML/CSS/Javascript into the static site. I think the difficulty with doing that is that social network integration is almost exclusively focused on consumption. At the lowest end of the spectrum are the widgets containing information from within the network. That's a reasonable way to direct users from a Web site into a network (eg. a user visiting a newspaper's site may go and visit the newspaper's Facebook page) but it's useless at getting people from the network to go to a site. Nobody goes to Bob's Web site to check his Facebook status; they do it from within Facebook. The situations where this can work well are: 1) Consumer APIs with machine-readable results. The simplest mashup, data visualisation, interactive game, etc. can be made really interesting when it has real-world data to play with. As an example, one of my first programs was a balls-on-springs physics simulation, but I drove it with artist similarity data from last.fm (audioscrobbler at the time). 2) Producer APIs allow data to persist once the static page is closed. This could be as simple as posting a highscore from a game, all the way up to posting the result of a Web-based creative application. What programmer didn't throw together a "paint program" as soon as they found out how to get the mouse position and make a line on a canvas?