
Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong - vectorbunny
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/dark-social-we-have-the-whole-history-of-the-web-wrong/263523/
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zhoutong
It's called "social web" for a reason.

Instant messenger and chat rooms and ICQ and USENET forums and email are not
web. At most the OP is talking about the history of the Internet.

{The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3,[2] commonly known as the Web),
is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web>}

~~~
georgemcbay
Pedantically speaking, Usenet and email at least are part of the web. They
aren't http-based, but the "web" is really anything with addressable URIs, and
both usenet and email have well-defined URI formats, eg:

    
    
      nntp://<host>:<port>/<newsgroup-name>/<article-number>
      mailto:<user>@<domain>

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sp332
You can't really like email documents or accounts to each other, so I don't
think they're part of the "web" of connected pages.

~~~
Evbn
You can link nntp news articles.

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gordonguthrie
I was just saying to someone that we had IM on IBM mainframes (the chat
facility) or the (confusingly named) Ethernet on DEC VAXes back in the mid
80s.

What we used them for was 'are you going for tea?' and other social chit-chat
between the various terminal rooms up the Uni...

~~~
zaptheimpaler
I just discovered the 'kibitz' command on linux, which is basically remote
desktop assistance for linux (well, remote terminal). Apparently, this is used
for chatting quite often too (i.e open up a text editor).

EDIT: screen can do this too! screen -x can attach to a non-detached screen
session.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Can't you just use talk(1)?

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netcan
This is one of those topics where you have to be careful not to slip into
meaningless semantics where you're just arguing about how we should use some
word and what things should be named.

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aw3c2
By their logic the "dark social" is ANY inbound link not coming from
"Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YComb, Digg, Stumble" or do I get that wrong? If
so, well, that is called the "Internet". It uses hyperlinks to send people
between pages on it.

~~~
papsosouid
No, it is any inbound link to a page unlikely to be typed manually
"blah.com/articles/random/crap/article-title-goes-here/35487623", that has no
referrer header at all. Traffic coming from other websites will still have
referrer headers, just traffic from email, IM, etc don't.

~~~
kzahel
I believe any referral traffic from an <https://> site will NOT send the
referrer header. It does not seem like the article is taking that into
account.

~~~
papsosouid
He did mention that, but of course there's no way to figure out how much of
that traffic is from https referrals. Of course, I wouldn't be shocked if 90%+
of https referrals are from gmail, which would put it right back to what he is
assuming: email, IM, etc.

~~~
Tipzntrix
You make a pretty good point, but not just gmail. Pretty much all -mail
providers use https when users access their web interface.

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chris123
Oops, someone (the author) forgot about AOL, which was founded in 1985 and
began mailing floppy disks to people in 1993
(<http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/28/aol-floppy-disk/>). That is when and where
I had my first social web experience (it was in an AOL chat room,
specifically). The company and the "social web" boomed from there, so much so,
in fact, that eventually AOL bought Time Warner. It was the largest merger
ever, at the time (<http://money.cnn.com/2000/01/10/deals/aol_warner/>). And
it flopped, but that beside the point :)

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jonmc12
+1 for tldr inserts on The Atlantic articles. Always have found their articles
meaningful but verbose.

~~~
btrautsc
+1 for immediately thinking the same thing

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humdumb
The title could be better. What he's describing with the term "dark social" is
not the "Web", it's the internet. That's a distinction that is important to
understand. There is much you can do over the internet that is difficult to do
over the "web". Moreover, the "web" is still quite centralized in the sense
that there are a disproportionate number of servers to clients. It has been
called the "calf-cow" model. Some are calling for an end to that.

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Keyframe
I vividly remember working on SunOS (later Solaris) and SGI machines and using
ytalk, irc and gopher all the time before WWW. WWW made us all want to occupy
graphics workstations more instead of vt320s, ha! Even though most of us were
in graphics programming at the time, we were working on vt320s, imagine that.

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EGreg
I think he's confusing the web and the internet.

AIM, email, USENET etc. are not really web. Unless you have web clients.

~~~
3rd3
I think, most people confuse the internet with the web, so maybe the essence
of the article should have been that the internet is "social" even without
Facebook, Twitter etc. wich would be still a very similar statement.

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teeja
I use few "social" web links, maybe 1%. He fails to mention bookmarking. Most
of the traffic I generate comes from bookmarked or search engine URLs. (I may
or may not be unusual in that I surf with referrer turned off.)

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barce
This piece reads so much like the Salon.com piece in 2004:
<http://www.salon.com/2004/03/09/deep_web/>

~~~
humdumb
I'd say this is a flaw of the "web" and relying on hyperlinking and "HTML
forms" as a means to access all content. That's what web crawlers do.

Better would be putting databases on certain known ports, with no "hostname"
requirements and let search engines scan IP ranges for openings on those
ports. You send a ping to the port and if a "Welcome" response comes back,
then you have a public database to explore. The response might even describe
the contents of the database. (Yikes, I'm having flashbacks to gopher.)

What's funny is that "port scanning" is like the term "hacker" it has a
negative connotation even though there's nothing inherently devious about it.
Pinging a port to detect if there's a public database open on it is actually a
more efficient less resource intensive means of service discovery than
crawling hyperlinks in HTML generated by some web developer (maybe even one
employed by a governemnt agency with a tight budget) hoping to stumble upon
every possible data resource.

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lukasb
This is why app developers need really well-thought out sharing features -
preferably based on URIs.

