
It’s the end of the web as we know it - rudenoise
http://adrianshort.co.uk/2011/09/25/its-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it/
======
moe
Aren't these doomsday-posts getting boring?

Here's my take:

Stop worrying. According to internet physics facebook will gradually diffuse
into distributed services.

The first mass migration away from the silos is likely going to happen as
early as within this decade. As soon as some kid in his basement creates a set
of viable protocol specs (read: not diaspora) and as soon as a few relentless
hackers smell blood in the water.

Once initiated no Zuckerberg or Schmidt has the resources to argue with the
second law of thermodynamics. The social graph is destined to gravitate
outwards until it's more or less evenly distributed over our always-on
devices. Supported by a network of interchangeable service-providers for
caching, storage and, of course, "apps".

There you have it. But don't let that stop you from writing the next series of
sky-is-falling posts. They're part of the process.

~~~
Lagged2Death
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
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.

~~~
weavejester
Quite a few do. Why do you think this wouldn't make sense?

~~~
silverbax88
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
> 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?

~~~
sid0
_How is this any different from storing source code on GitHub, or using
Campfire to communicate?_

A very reasonable argument is that you shouldn't be using those either. GitHub
is fine for open source projects but if I were involved in writing proprietary
code I'd probably not put it up there.

~~~
weavejester
Out of interest, why not? Is it that you don't trust GitHub's security, or do
you believe there's a chance GitHub might appropriate your source code?

~~~
angelbob
Think conflict of interest. What if GitHub was bought be a competitor or other
hostile entity? Now, can you guarantee they never will be?

~~~
weavejester
You can't _guarantee_ anything. It's all about trade-offs and managing risks.
Putting your source code onto a private server doesn't guarantee that your
source code is safe, and there are far more examples of source code being
stolen from private servers than there are of companies appropriating source
code from hosting companies like GitHub.

~~~
angelbob
This is true. But would the story get out if it happened? And it's not limited
to appropriation. There _are_ stories about, say, Assembla, and the terms of
code storage changing dramatically. You could also have a company where the
security on transferring the code was inadequate. That's a concern you don't
have as much if your servers are local (though you need VPN for remote
coders).

It's also hard to talk percentages -- there are a lot more companies storing
source code on private servers than using external hosting. So yes, more
stories of that, but it's hard to talk percentage chance rather than absolute
numbers.

~~~
weavejester
Is the risk large enough to justify using a more expensive and less functional
in-house system? To me, the risk of using a third-party host seems vastly
outweighed by the benefits.

------
_delirium
There are a few things people/organizations can do that have at least some
marginal impact. For example, actually _have_ a website, and attempt to treat
it as the canonical source of information. Use Facebook and Twitter, sure, but
don't make them your canonical website, the way many bands made their MySpace
page their only website. Have the social-network stuff point back to the real
website when possible. Post links to news stories or blog posts on your
domain, rather than using Facebook Notes as a blog, for example. Have an
actual event page that gets mirrored to Facebook events, rather than Facebook
events being your only event calendar. Etc.

(This is assuming you have the time/resources/interest in doing so. It's often
easier not to, but in the long run I do think it's important to control your
canonical internet presence, and as much as possible to try to point the
presences you don't control towards the one you do.)

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Just not having a Facebook account is much more effective; once people notice
that they have to e-mail someone, they may as well e-mail everyone. Etc.
Facebook is most useful if _everyone_ is on it.

(Yes, there are downsides to this, but let's not pretend that setting up a
blog-to-Facebook converter harms Facebook. Just stick with the blog.)

~~~
pyre
Using Facebook as your RSS feed for your blog drives readers to your blog
(i.e. just post the links, don't post the content).

I fail to see where the parent was talking about 'harming' Facebook. This
entire discussion is about keeping control over your Internet presence. If you
use a domain that you control as your canonical presence, then you can easily
sign up for whatever the social network of the day is and use it to direct
people back to your domain. This extends beyond this though:

For example, if you use a GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo email address as your main email
address, then you're completely dependent on these companies to provide the
service. If they ever change policies or start doing things that you don't
like, there is a large barrier to just switching services. On the other hand,
if you purchase your own domain and use that for email on such services (e.g.
Google Apps for Domains), then you can easily switch services without needing
to tell everyone that may want to contact you about your new email address.

In general, you can still use free services, just so long as you wrap your
domain around them so that you can point people elsewhere if things change.

------
mneedham
I run a major hospital's website and have long stood against putting Facebook
'Like' buttons on the site. This article strengthens my resolve.

Lots of patients visit hospital websites to research shame conditions - things
nobody but their physician has any right/need to know about. Least of all an
organization as brazenly anti-privacy as Facebook.

Bumbling around this afternoon I came across a number of hospital websites
using Like buttons. I have fired up a Mechanical Turk job to give me a more
complete list of US hospitals that do so.

Not sure what I'm going to do with the list yet - name and shame or just a
broad education campaign? Seems pretty awful to potentially violate patient
privacy in the interest of an extra 'share' or two.

------
ddw
Privacy issues aside, the Open Graph is troubling to me because it centralizes
innovation in web services to the Facebook network.

In the short term is makes sense for a new service like Spotify or
turntable.fm to jump on the largest user base in the world, it lowers their
barrier to entry. But in the long term it's really harmful to the open web and
leads down a depressing path in my opinion. What happens if you DO opt-out of
FB, but future services require a FB account?

I just killed the Facebook like button on my personal website (not that my
site gets a lot of hits). I've signed up for a Diaspora* invite which should
be sent to me by "the end of October". I'll set it up for my friends but I
don't know who would actually join it, it's not like people need another
social networking service. Not sure what else the solution could be though.

I wonder if it's possible that these services swing back around and actually
offer a charged service without ads. Twitter for instance can offer a free
rate that leaves you open to targeted advertising and data collection, but
they'll leave you alone if you have a paid account. How much would I have to
pay FB per month to make it worthwhile to them?

------
WA
In my opinion, the article states that without Facebook or Twitter, one can't
have a reliable online business. He says:

    
    
      Many of the most valuable conversations around technology and many other fields happen on Twitter. If you’re not there you don’t really exist, especially if you’re just getting started in your field.
    

I don't agree. I don't care about Facebook and Twitter. I USE it just a little
bit, but people find my online business by other means. I believe good content
and useful services always attract their users - even without sites like
Facebook and Twitter. They are just tools in my eyes.

------
pagejim
One of the comments on the OP's page makes an interesting point:

>> This now creates a new level of Service offering for a website; not
offering a Facebook Like or Social graphing tool might be seen as a bonus if
your trying to promote privacy or respect of peoples data.

Do we have any website right now following and acknowledging this ?

~~~
damoncali
I run a bug tracker for small shops and freelancers (<http://trackjumper.com>)
- right at the border of business vs consumer applications. I chose not to
integrate any third party logins (facebook especially) for exactly this
reason. I did not, however, take the step of advertising it as a "feature".
Perhaps I should.

------
ck2
Everything old will be new again, just give it a few more years.

Once everyone is on a single service that all looks the same, individual
websites will become the "cool" thing again.

~~~
bergie
True. It appears everything in the world of software moves in cycles. I hope
we're approaching the bottom part of the openness cycle with things like these
social web silos, "only apps we like" app stores, secure booting, so forth.
The question is, what will be the next big thing after these, and how we can
prepare for it?

(well, it is also relevant to wonder about the timeline. The relatively open
PC era after closed mainframes lasted about twenty years.)

------
bo_Olean
This is so true.

 _> > As with smoking, it’s easier to not start using the social web than to
stop. Once you’ve signed up the cost of leaving increases with every “friend”
you make, every photo you post, every tweet you send_

------
danmaz74
With the web applications I've been building during the last years, I often
had to think hard about my "Facebook policy". If you have any chance of
virality, the Facebook platform can at least double it (I guess that the
multiplier is much higher, actually).

The first time I considered creating an integration with FB, though, I studied
how it worked and stopped when I discovered that I could NOT get my users'
email [note: I think this isn't true now, I didn't really check though]. That
meant that even those users that came directly to my website, but wanted to
login using facebook, wouldn't have really become "my" users, that I would
have always been dependent on FB.

Facebook changes its policies very often, so this particular problem could not
be current anymore, but the fact remains that we should be very careful in
helping a company which is building the biggest walled garden on the internet
by adding too much value to it. Because now the gates are open, but FB can
close them whenever they see fit.

Right now I'm considering again creating an integration with Facebook for one
of my new services, but I'll try as hard as possible to steer the users to my
actual website, even if this wouldn't be as frictionless as it could be for
them. Bigger issues are at stake.

~~~
justinph
> Facebook changes its policies very often...

That is half of facebook's problem. Facebook has pissed off a lot of
developers by changing their platform so frequently, often without telling
people in advance, that it makes little sense for small-time apps or sites to
invest time in it. Not to mention their documentation is laughably out of date
or just missing.

Facebook might be doing real well with mindshare amongst the end-user, but
they have not done so great with developers.

------
MatthewPhillips
Couple of comments:

1) I'm now recommending to my friends to log out of Facebook and visit it in a
private/incognito browsing mode. Probably the same thing needs to be applied
to Google sites.

2) More importantly, I think it's a bit simplistic to divide the web into
"open web" and "Big Web". There are sites that fall in between the wild west
of linking and social networking sites. Hacker News is one of these. So is
Reddit and StumbleUpon. These sites generate a _huge_ number of page views. In
fact, I would guess that they generate more page views for people with only a
few thousand followers on social networks.

Even if you don't hit the front page of HN, every submission is automatically
posted to Twitter (and probably Facebook, I wouldn't know), so the chances of
it going viral are just as strong as if you had posted it yourself. These in-
between sites allow you to gain the benefits of Big Web without directly
participating in it.

~~~
aespinoza
I have been doing point 1 of your list too. I went a little further too. And
even tried the QubeOS. (<http://qubes-os.org>)

It has the same idea as an incognito browser window, but taken to the OS
level. It is very interesting.

------
scott_s
_Every time you visit a web page that displays the Like button Facebook logs
that data in your account. It doesn’t put anything on your wall but it knows
where you’ve been._

Source? I've never heard that before. My understanding of the above is that
Facebook will store, on their servers, all of the pages I visit that display a
Like button.

Edit: The previously linked to article in the essay supports the claim:
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20006532-38.html> I was unaware that
Facebook was able to retain information even if users didn't actually press
the Like button.

~~~
jotto
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3035418>

~~~
scott_s
He linked to that post in his, but that proves the data is transferred, not
that it is stored. The article I missed, though, does make the claim that
Facebook stores the data, and it is associated with a user.

~~~
etherealG
I don't think it's possible to figure out if it's stored, as facebook would
have to own up to it, and why would they. This data gives them massive power,
why wouldn't they store it? If I were them I would.

------
etherealG
worth mentioning, google analytics does this too. and it's probably on more
websites than facebook like buttons. also, you don't need to opt in to
anything to activate google's version, at least with facebook you have to have
an account. with google all you have to do is visit these sites with cookies
switched on, something pretty much everyone does without thinking.

~~~
nl
I wish everyone would stop repeating this. Like most things it is much more
subtle than that.

Google Analytics is widespread, _but_ unlike Facebook it gives you the tools
to protect your privacy if you so choose. That is an important difference and
is worth noting.

~~~
etherealG
fair enough, I didn't intend to be repeating an untrue mantra. could you
explain how I would opt out? I know they provide privacy controls to opt out
of web search history, but analytics on a clean browser will assign me a
unique id, it will then use that id to track me on every page I go to, without
even being logged in to any google services at all. that sounds like being
opted in without my consent to me. maybe I'm wrong and I missed it, how would
I protect my privacy in this (very widespread) case?

~~~
hussong
Google offers browser add-ons to opt out of analytics tracking:
<http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout>

------
aj700
It's too complex for most, yes. But just use only facebook in say, Chrome, and
every other site in say, Firefox. All the sites you use in firefox won't link
through to your facebook account via cookies, bugs/buttons or js.

Firefox should/will also get a facebook spying blocker as chrome now has.
Microsoft is real friendly with fb, so they'll never implement this.

------
mathattack
The concept I agree with is the Web will look much less like the Wild Wild
West. The Web of Grandma needs easily integrated pieces - this is Apple and
Facebook, not Linux and Usenet.

It's not all evil, there will still be behind the curtain users. It's just
they won't be as visible. People who aggregate customers charge for the right.
Just ask Wal-mart!

------
dendory
I have my own website and always post there first. My system then
automatically posts to Facebook, Twitter, and so on. That's the way to do it I
think. Of course Facebook doesn't like that and the API never allows you to
have the post look quite as good as if you were posting directly, but it's
plenty for me.

------
altrego99
> and even writing stories just like this one

Alright, that is a bit farfetched.

------
jpitz
… and I feel fine. ( apologies to Bill Berry et al, and my karma )

------
georgieporgie
_You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and
be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But
increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to
starve._

Uh. Anyone else remember the days of curated Internet directory sites? Yahoo
was just a huge, organized database of links. Didn't make it to a good
standing on Yahoo's directory? Too bad for you. Luckily, search technology
matured and (largely) freed us from that.

