
The World Wide Web is Moving to AOL - jchrisa
http://brianbailey.me/the-world-wide-web-is-moving-to-aol
======
RyanZAG
Unfortunately, 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
The 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

~~~
rayiner
> Hopefully, having a free (as in, non corporate controlled) internet will
> come to be seen as an important economic differentiator

Sorry to break it to you, but the internet is very corporate controlled. Its
bits flow over the private networks of Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc. It's just
that so far, these companies have not exercised the extent of their control.

~~~
adventured
Government controlled actually, as AT&T and Verizon are government protected
monopolies. Much like the largest banks, they're merely an arm of the US
Government pretending to be private.

And then when you examine eg China (arguably the largest Internet market), it
too is completely government controlled.

~~~
jbooth
This comment is a great example of what I call 'cynical/naive'. You're trying
to be cynical but putting forward such a naive, simplified view of the
interrelationships between those companies, the relevant regulatory bodies,
legislators, local/state governments, lobbyists, market competition and lack
thereof, steak dinners and whatever.

The tier 3 internet business of these corps is different from the consumer
internet business. The consumer internet business's legal monopolies aren't so
much an arm of a big federal government as they are completely dominant over
thousands of very small local governments, where $50k of local access TV
funding will buy you exclusivity because those governments have been squeezed
for funding for the last 10 years.

It's also not really comparable to the way things work in China, except
insofar as 'corruption and imperfections exist' in both cases.

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jchrisa
The is not from 1998, it's satire of all the we got bought blogs in this
latest round of angel consolidation...

~~~
macspoofing
Thank you Capt'n Obvious. You save the day again.

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
It may be clear, but still the title shouldn't mention "1998".

~~~
tlrobinson
I think including the "1998" made the satire more effective.

~~~
jchrisa
It made it better linkbait but confused some commenters...

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MatthewPhillips
Fantastic 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
Most 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
_somewhere 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
The 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
That 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
In 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
I 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.

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kevinprince
Love the line "Just to be safe, be sure to print out all of your favorite
pages before the end of the month."

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bhauer
Being 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.

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anigbrowl
I'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
True, 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.

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EGreg
I wrote this two years ago:

<http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21>

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whoosy
"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
Well, the websites I check are made of the same "text, images, and links"
nowadays

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znowi
I did a search on "World Wide Web, Inc." and this came up:
<http://websales.us/>

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kevinlu310
The history is always repeating itself. So what is the next repeating story?

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andyl
We 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
WordPress could be expanded to do battle with Facebook, IMO.

~~~
tlrobinson
This 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
Some 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.

~~~
rmccue
<http://buddypress.org/> is the WordPress-based solution for
messaging/activity, but it's mainly intended for niche social networks. To
fully build a distributed and decentralised system, we need both a protocol to
communicate between servers, in addition to the support from those servers.

~~~
pjbrunet
"both a protocol to communicate between servers, in addition to the support
from those servers"

Yes, I think this is the advantage of WordPress over Diaspora. To some extent
the infrastructure is already in place. Diaspora runs Ruby so ubiquity might
take longer. (I was skeptical of Diaspora at first but I do think it has a
fighting chance.) I don't have stats handy but I'd guesstimate there's several
million self-hosted WordPress blogs out there representing tons of computing
power, at least a starting point. Why bet on a Twitter or Facebook or Google
Plus API that could be shut off without warning when you know WordPress is
here to stay? I've been saying this for years--since then Automattic has
launched Jetpack and user profiles, extending Gravatar.com, but we're still a
long way off. But as I've said before, I think something like this would need
Matt's blessing, not because he's a gatekeeper but because I think it's an
ambitious idea that needs an influential visionary behind it to pave the way
forward. Anyway, I'm not saying anything new, lots of smart people are working
on decentralized networks.

