
The Web We Lost - kzasada
http://dashes.com/anil/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html
======
smacktoward
I agree with Anil 110% that the Web he's talking about was, in many, many
ways, a Better Web than the one we have today.

The problem is that it's worse than the one we have today in the only way that
most people care about: it's _harder._ To participate, it expected you to know
how to do a bunch of things that seem trivial to tech folks but frighteningly
complicated to everybody else. You had to buy a domain. You had to choose a
Web host. You had to know how to connect the domain to the Web host. You had
to choose the right software to do what you wanted to do. You had to _install_
that software, and configure it properly.

The reason hosted services became popular is because they let you skip all
that stuff. You fill out a form and you're up and running. Someone else
worries about all that other stuff for you. This makes those services
_accessible_ in a way that the Web of 2000 was not.

Of course, to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a
lot of things. You lose access to your raw data. You lose your privacy. You
lose the ability to change vendors if the one you're on turns evil.

But to non-technical people, those losses aren't obvious. They don't
understand what they've lost until losing those things turns around and bites
them. It's like DRM: people don't understand why DRM-encumbered music
downloads are bad until their iPod dies and they want to move their iTunes-
bought music to an Android phone. "What do you mean I _can't do that?_ " is
what you hear the moment the penny drops. But before then, they don't
understand the risk.

This is what will need to be overcome to make tomorrow's Web like yesterday's
was: it'll need to be as easy for people to use as today's is, or you'll need
to educate the entire world about why they should put up with it not being
that easy. Otherwise people will keep on blindly stumbling into the heavily-
advertised walled gardens, not realizing that's what they're doing until the
day they decide they want to leave, and can't.

~~~
roc
What about Wordpress? (snark about technical messes aside)

It's as easy as it can possibly be to get a hosted blog up and running -- even
with your own domain -- via their forms.

But, unlike Facebook, if you don't like their service, or need more, or don't
like some ToS change or version 'update', you can wrap it up with a bow and
take it elsewhere.

And businesses exist that will even make _that_ as easy as filling out a form.

There's nothing about making the web of 2005 easier that _required_ things be
built as monolithic products instead of protocols and platforms.

And it's _that_ distinction, products vs protocols, that's being lamented.

~~~
smacktoward
WordPress is actually a good example. There's the self-hosted software
distributed at WordPress.org, which works in the Web 2000 fashion (here's some
software, figure the rest out yourself). And there's the hosted service at
WordPress.com, which works in the walled-garden fashion (though with liberal
allowances for things like getting at your data, which is nice).

Lots of people run their own WordPress installations, but very, very few of
them manage to do it _well_ \-- properly locking the software down, keeping
the core and plugins up to date with security patches, putting the admin area
behind SSL, etc. Which is why there's so many hacked WordPress sites out
there.

~~~
graue
You made me think, "If only there were a host where you could install the
software with one click, and it would automatically update itself..." Follow
that thread far enough and the line between a blogging service and a hosting
service begins to blur.

The real objective, I think, isn't to get everyone hosting their own stuff,
but to popularize technologies that both allow data portability (you can move
to another service), _and_ are easy to use.

But WordPress has kind of already done this. They have step-by-step
directions[1] for moving from a WordPress.com blog to a self-hosted install.

People who prefer Tumblr (an example of a blog host without an export
function) to WordPress do so for reasons that seem orthogonal to data
portability:

1\. simpler, even easier to use,

2\. aesthetics (sleeker design),

3\. social networking features built in,

4\. reach (because of #3, it's a lot easier to accumulate readers and
engagement).

In theory, a service with an open-source codebase, or support for a standard
export format, could provide all this. In practice, one hasn't.

Edit: icebraining pointed out downthread that you can mostly export a Tumblr
blog by adding '/rss' to the URL of each page, a process that is easily
automated.

[1] [http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/#moving-to-
wor...](http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/#moving-to-wordpress-
org)

~~~
rmccue
> You made me think, "If only there were a host where you could install the
> software with one click, and it would automatically update itself..." Follow
> that thread far enough and the line between a blogging service and a hosting
> service begins to blur.

This is one of the things the large hosts (Bluehost, GoDaddy, Dreamhost, etc.)
are very keen on, and they've been doing lots of work to try and get this to a
good level. It's one driving factor behind the push in the WordPress community
to get automatic upgrades built in.

> Edit: icebraining pointed out downthread that you can mostly export a Tumblr
> blog by adding '/rss' to the URL of each page, a process that is easily
> automated.

In fact, WordPress has a Tumblr importer:
<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tumblr-importer/>

Notably though, it's built on their JSON API, not on the RSS, so it's not
really an open standard.

------
10098
Maybe I have changed, or maybe the Internet has changed, but I used to meet
people on the internet. I used to make friends online, and some of these
friendships gradually mutated into "offline" friendships. There used to be
message boards, IRC and web chats where people would talk, form groups, become
friends or enemies.

People used to have blogs on livejournal or other services, some were trying
to create content, write interesting posts. I met a lot of new people through
that medium too.

But now everybody is locked inside the narrow bubble of their own social
network. People don't become friends on facebook - they usually "friend" their
IRL friends. You can't fit a good meaningful post into a tweet. And you can't
have a normal discussion without sane comment threads like on livejournal -
and I haven't seen that on any of the popular social sites.

That's also a part of the web we lost.

~~~
hmexx
My feelings mirror yours... I'm actually building a product that I hope can
help re-introduce some spontaneity in people's online interactions, as they
journey through the web. Still very early stage though:
<http://getmetaweb.com>

Here's a 60 second concept video: <http://vimeo.com/52398982>

~~~
fudged71
Neat idea. I love the video. How would you recommend creating a video like
this? Just get someone good with after effects?

~~~
hmexx
Yep.. and if you can't find anyone, you can hire someone from eastern europe
to do it for under $1K.

I've always had horrible results outsourcing dev work, but outsourcing design
seems to work just fine.

------
agentultra
I think it's rather funny when people talk about the, "social web." Before the
social graph, technorati, and flickr there were newsgroups, email lists, HTTP,
IRC, etc. The Internet itself is a social tool. Perhaps the term refers to
some epoch of which I am not aware but it seems to me from a big-picture
perspective that we've only narrowly improved the experience since Eternal
September.

The "walled garden" networks will always strive to find their value in
lowering the barrier to entry for new participants on the web. Facebook makes
it super easy to share your photos with your family and friends and passively
update them on the minutiae of your life. Twitter does the same thing to large
degree in a more public fashion. Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest... all of the
same zeitgeist: user experience.

But the cognoscenti are certainly aware that the web is the sum of its parts
and walled gardens are antithesis to participation within its ecosystem.
However the problem is and has always been participation: there is no single
sign-in, no simple user experience, no common parlance for the mainstream to
absorb. We got about as far as blogs and stopped there once MySpace, Facebook,
et al took over.

I'd prefer a return to the roots but I think we'll need software and services
that provide a better user experience and product-based focus rather than the
service-oriented approach that has become popular.

~~~
kjackson2012
I think it's different now than before because almost everyone is comfortable
with the idea of communicating over the Internet. I used to IRC and MUD and
the types of people that engaged in those activities were, for lack of a
better term, more nerdy, like me. Back in the 1990s, people still weren't used
to sitting in front of their computers all day long, because there largely
wasn't anything to do with a non-networked computer. You could play games, or
you could be writing an essay or a report, but there wasn't much else that
could keep you engaged for hours upon hours, unlike today.

People used to spend more of their time talking on the phone or watching TV,
or socializing. But having computers online all the time has turned it truly
into a "social web".

------
untog
Funny that he says all this then has a Facebook comments box at the bottom of
the page.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that IMO- people are far more
likely to have their real names on Facebook, and thus leave sensible comments
rather than total drivel. But it makes a point that he doesn't include in the
article- _sometimes_ these centralised information stores can be useful.

~~~
anildash
I think I did mention that in the piece, but I deliberately keep the Facebook
comments even on articles where I'm critical of Facebook to show that I'm not
some extremist zealot. I'm just a normal person who happens to love the web.

~~~
marssaxman
It does guarantee that people like me can't comment on your pages, though,
which would not be true if you had a normal self-hosted comment system.

~~~
ndefinite
Same here. Seeing the Facebook comments was such a surprising twist to end an
otherwise well argued article.

------
joebadmo
After all that, I can't comment on the piece with OpenID or any other service
I actually use. Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, or AOL? Really?

The way out of this mess is for people with loud voices to support efforts
like Tent.io, open, decentralized, standardized protocols that don't lock us
into corporate silos: <https://tent.io/>

------
unimpressive
:P

I hate to add emoticons to this quite serious discussion, but I can't help but
think that we've lost; over the course of 40 years, a lot more than the
cooperation and interoperability described here.

We lost operating systems that expect the user to eventually learn a
programming language.

We lost the expectation that a user will ever learn one.

We lost the early expectations of a peer to peer Internet.

We lost the hope of encryption protecting anybody beyond a few stubborn nerds
and activists.

We lost the idea of client programs, forcing more and more of our data into
computers we don't control.

Were losing the idea that the public can manage their own computers, as we
have thus far seen a poor job of it.[0]

Were losing our memory that these things were possible, that they ever could
have been or could be.

Were losing the chance to change these things for the future, should we wish
to.

[0]: I remember reading over 50% of computers on the Internet are in a botnet,
if anyone could indulge my laziness and source this; I would be grateful.

~~~
Mz
Your list makes me want to add:

We lost "six degrees of separation".

(Though that loss seems to run somewhat more in one direction than the other.
Still, ordinary people can rub elbows these days with people they couldn't
have so much as gotten an autograph from in the past.)

------
mrb
I am suprised nobody mentioned it already, but the Google Wave Protocol [0]
was _exactly_ about bringing some of these properties back to the Web: easily
discoverable information, real-time data feeds, decentralization of content,
running your own "site", etc.

The author said "we've abandoned [these] core values", and this is precisely
why Wave failed: people don't care enough about these values.

[0] [http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/05/hello-world-meet-
goog...](http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/05/hello-world-meet-google-
wave.html)

------
gfodor
Wow. Microsoft Passport. I haven't thought about that in years, and recalling
how the tech world recoiled in horror then for things we have eagerly embraced
now is illuminating.

------
cletus
I think this is an example of seeing the past through rose-coloured glasses.

Yes there was Flickr but you could discover photos. Thing is, _Flickr is still
there and you can still use it_. What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't
(and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with
a limited group of friends and family.

Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a very small
bubble. I'd honestly never heard of Technorati until long after it had waned.

I don't agree that the monetization of the Web has degraded the value (to the
user) of links on sites other than links on sites aren't the primary discovery
mechanism like they used to be, which is actually a good thing (IMHO).

> In the early part of this century, if you made a service that let users
> create or share content, the expectation was that they could easily download
> a full-fidelity copy of their data, or import that data into other
> competitive services, with no restrictions

This is only true to a limited extent IMHO. The primary services for creating
information 10+ years ago were email providers. Because Web-based mail was a
latecomer, services like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail grew up in an era where many
people used Outlook, Thunderbird and other desktop email clients so they had
to support POP3 (and later IMAP) and you could use those services to export
your mail.

But that isn't the same as designing your services for interoperability. That
was an unintended consequence.

As the idea of "your mail, everywhere (you have an Internet connection)"
became dominant, so did Webmail. POP3/IMAP became less important.

Again, I consider this a net positive change.

> In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that
> regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites

This I disagree with. Having your own domain and Website 10+ years ago was
pretty unusual. Administering your own site is not easy, particularly as
malware became more prevalent. This has declined because no one wants to run
their own Website (or email server for that matter) because it's a crazy
amount of effort for very little real gain.

The only real problem I see with the present state of the Web is that Facebook
wants to own all your data. It wants to be your identity. It wants to be your
Internet. That's bad. It's bad for the Web and bad for consumers. But
honestly, I don't see it coming to pass. Facebook is just as susceptible to
disruption as so many behemoths that have come (and gone) before it.

10+ years ago Microsoft dominated your computing environment. Many couldn't
envision a future that would break free of this grasp. In a few short years
Microsoft has diminished their control of your computing experience in ways
few could've predicted. I'll just leave this as an example of the danger of
extrapolation:

<http://xkcd.com/605/>

~~~
mmahemoff
"Technorati? Honestly, I think this is an example of living inside a very
small bubble. I'd honestly never heard of Technorati until long after it had
waned."

To any blogger back then, Technorati was as ubiquitous as Google Analytics is
today. I think the point here is Technorati reached a point where it couldn't
deal with all the spam and today, it's very hard to track inbound links.
Neither Google nor anyone else does a decent job of this. (They show referring
pages when people click on a link, but not occasions when an author creates
the link.)

"What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the
use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and
family."

This is a bitter irony, because Flickr was (probably?) the first service to
explicitly include a privacy option for sharing with friends and family. That
most people do it today on other services (e.g. FB) probably says more about
senior management at Yahoo over the years than anything profound about the web
and walled gardens.

------
jasonkester
Anybody remember meaningful URLs?

As in, site.com/view?postid=1234 or site.com/view?userid=1234. Back when "the
URL [was] the new command line" and you could easily discover all the content
from a site and rework it as you liked. You could tell how many posts a blog
had or how many users a site had by pluggin in a few numbers and doing a
binary search. No need for an API or a feed. Just look at the URL and you
could see what you needed to mess with.

Then SEO happened and URLs started looking like site.com/10-shocking-secrets-
about-cat-odor-control-devices, which you can't really do anything with except
shorten them to shrt.nr/Ssk and make them even less meaningful.

It always surprised me that nobody complained when we started losing that.

~~~
sellandb
I think that is an interesting point. I have always found
"site.com/view?postid=1234" feels lazy vs. the alternative
"site.com/posts/article-title". While there is a relatively small group of
people who might poke around with the URL parameters regularly, the vast
majority of internet users IMHO would prefer to see a URL with some indication
about what is on the other side. That's not to say we can't have both either,
just that you tend to only need one or the other.

------
aes256
Looks like the author is wearing rose-tinted glasses to me.

While much of the observations may be true, the web is still a far richer and
more valuable resource than it was five or ten years ago.

~~~
IheartApplesDix
I don't find this to be true, but that's perhaps I'm not far richer than I was
5 or 10 years ago. Somewhere along the way, accessibility to truth was thrown
under the bus for clickbait and walled gardens.

~~~
marcioaguiar
Accessibility to truth? Tell me more about how you used to access the truth in
1998.

~~~
yread
You can read all about it here: <http://www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm>

------
ricardobeat
I think people are missing the point. Yes, Flickr is still here and you
_could_ use it. But Flickr never really got to mobile (a major strategy
failure). Do you know since when Flickr has similar functionality to
Instagram? _Today_ \- they just released a new version with filters.

The point is, you can't build much on top of instagram, twitter, facebook,
whatever. APIs are encumbered by pricy licenses, nobody wants to collaborate.
Open standards for sharing data are dying. RSS is dead. Mash-ups are dead.
Everything is behind private APIs and walled gardens, the web doesn't connect
everything anymore.

~~~
acheron
My Google Reader account is surprised to learn that RSS is dead.

How else do you keep up with updates on a bunch of different sites? (Serious
question.)

~~~
gurkendoktor
That's "easy" in 2012: You Like them on Facebook (and wait for them to pay $$$
to promote their postings to get into your newsfeed).

~~~
jaredsohn
As a user, if you want to get every posting from a Facebook page, you can
select to be notified on all updates.

With a little work (not easy for people who don't care a lot about it) you can
create an RSS feed for any Facebook page:

[http://sem-group.net/search-engine-optimization-blog/subscri...](http://sem-
group.net/search-engine-optimization-blog/subscribe-to-your-favorite-facebook-
page-via-rss/)

and then read that content in your RSS reader.

------
krakensden
I don't understand why he thinks the pendulum is swinging back. Is there any
particular evidence of that?

~~~
gojomo
You're right, he doesn't specifically give support for the idea idea we're
recovering these values and capabilities.

But I think he's alluding to people, as they gain experience and perspective,
becoming aware of the limits of proprietary platforms, and investigating (or
rediscovering) other possibilities.

~~~
mhurron
I'm honestly not seeing that people are giving up Facebook or the like because
of any limits imposed by Facebook.

The worst I saw was some of the more technical minded go to Google+, which is
basically the same thing all over again.

------
kamjam
Meh, I disagree with a lot of that. You speak as if the internet ONLY consists
of social now. Your points are nostalgic and looking at the past through rose
tinted glasses IMO.

 _Five years ago, most social photos were uploaded to Flickr_

You can still do this. People choose not to. I don't want strangers viewing my
social pictures, esp if I had kids. These are private moments to be shared
with my friends.

 _Ten years ago, you could allow people to post links on your site_

You still can, it's _your_ site. If you decide to monetize _your_ site and
display AdWords then that's your call. You don't have to be a sheep and follow
what everyone else is doing.

 _In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by a
company..._

Don't use them and create an account. No one is forcing you to use them, but
for some of us (me) it's just easier to link several sign-ins together with my
Google account. These are generally sites I trust. If I don't trust them then
I'll use a disposable email account anyway to register. If the "average man"
on the street doesn't know better then that's his/her problem, it's the same
basic principle as identity theft and people guard against that. It's time
they did the same online.

 _In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that
regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites_

Really? A few people maybe, but most non-tech people I know really couldn't
give 2 hoots. Wordpress and all the blogging sites have made a lot more people
I know open their "own" sites than would have been owning a domain name and
all the other hosting and "headache" that goes with it.

 _Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your
own site or app..._

Yes, agree it is bad, but that's business. The same thing happens in the real
world, just because it is online the principles of business do not disappear
and unfortunately not everyone is that tech-savvy and some of those people who
pumped millions into a business may not "get" the web like you.

I don't think we have "lost" any of these. People have just decided to move on
as the technology has advanced. The internet is a lot more open and a lot more
accessible to many more people than it has ever been. As a developer I may
care about the above (I don't) but as a regular joe, I don't think I would
waste 2 seconds, no matter how long I have been using the web.

~~~
haldean
The point about links is that other people can profit by posting links on your
site. Before Ad(Words|Sense), you could freely allow people to post links in
comments (without having to worry about nofollow or anything) because people
would only profit from those links if what they linked to was
relevant/interesting. Now just the act of following a link can mean a few
pennies in someone's pocket, so allowing links to be posted to your site is a
quick way to get seriously astroturfed.

~~~
kamjam
Right, fair enough. Stackoverflow used to add in a nofollow to all links
posted on their site. I think they have removed it now for users of a certain
rep.

If your site is small, then just moderate the comments yourself. If there are
not that many then it will not take much time!

------
quasistar
Just a few reasons today's Web trumps anything from the 'Technorati'
(seriously?) era: Open API's that reply in JSON, Cloud VPS's at $0.02 per
hour, 10 Gb ethernet, 54 Mb fiber in my house, multicore computers in
everyones pocket, GPS at everyones fingertips, web frameworks like Sinatra
(yes, it took more than three lines of code and two bash commands to publish
'Hello World!' to the web back then), caching solutions like Redis, data
crunching pipelines like hadoop, payment processing like Dwolla...need I go
on? There will always be folks hankering for the glory days of
alt.religion.kibology and compuserve. Ignore them. Create something game-
changing instead.

~~~
4ad
Let's take an opposing view, shall we?

> Open API's that reply in JSON

The serialization format doesn't matter. What matter is that we have way more
APIs, all different, with inconsistent semantics and non-orthogonal feature
sets than the non-web APIs of 15 years ago. On average the people designing
these APIs are less competent than the people from 15 years ago creating more
headaches for the people that _are_ competent.

> Cloud VPS's at $0.02 per hour

Cloud virtualization is expensive, not cheap. It has its merits, the overhead
for elasticity is much less than it used to be, but this matters only at
scale. At small scale you get unpredictable performance and terrible I/O.

> 10 Gb ethernet

No such thing. Even on servers its rare. I had 1 GigE on my laptop 10 years
ago. I can't get a better NIC on any laptop today. The world is actually worse
than it used to be because back in the day I didn't need to worry about
saturating Ethernet. Now I do.

> 54 Mb fiber in my house

I used to be able to buy a symmetric link with a fixed IP address and reverse
DNS. Now fixed IP is a rarity, symmetric links are usually not available for
non-business customers and when they are, they cost more than 15 years ago.
Reverse DNS? Ha ha.

> multicore computers in everyones pocket

I don't need a multicore computer in my pocket. I need a phone with good
signal and a battery that lasts. They don't make them anymore. Even if I need
a computer, smartphones barely qualify. iOS is locked and Android requires me
to do a type of programming I don't like. I'm used to computers that I can
program the way I want, not being bound by some framework.

> GPS at everyones fingertips

I don't care. I never used a GPS, never needed one. What I've seen is that now
people get lost when their GPS breaks. I view that as a failure of
civilisation.

> web frameworks

I'd probably break some Hacker News scalability limit if I started writing
about this one.

> caching solutions like Redis

Redis is required because the other pieces of the stack suck. It's a remedy,
hardly a cure from an architectural point of view. The broad architectures
around us are more unsuitable and more abused than they used to be.

It's actually worse than that. Unix and Plan 9 have thought us that's it is
better to model behaviour through a single bounded interface rather than a
growing set of specialised interfaces. This allows composition, protects
against lock in, and allows synthetic components. Now there's a Redis API,
there's a Cassandra API, there's a MongoDB API, there's a Zookeeper API,
there's a Riak API, there's a RabbitMQ API. Everything has an API. A
_different_ API. Not only this destroys composability, it also hinders
experimentation, increases the technical debt, makes the cost of transition
higher, and bounds the writer into using a limited set of tools.

> data crunching pipelines like hadoop

Hadoop is a a player in an extremely niche field. I don't think it's relevant
to talk about a thing as specific as hadoop in the context of something as
general as the cultural and pragmatical shifts in the Internet. However, if
you brought in the discussion, Hadoop is awful. Companies deploy it because
it's trendy, not because they need it, introducing complexity, additional
dependencies and a whole new set of problems to solve. Hadoop also dropped the
bar on what is considered simple and sane deployment causing new software to
be just as awful to deploy when they wouldn't really need to.

> payment processing like Dwolla

No idea what this is, but payments on the Internet are worse then they used to
be. Sure, now you can buy anything, but it's harder to pay. Paypal
periodically asks me for IDs and freezes my accounts just because I happen to
move between two countries, there are many more types of cards, some work on
the Internet better than others, some _banks_ work on the Internet better than
others. Merchants support only limited and disjoint set of payment options
forcing me to have multiple types of credit cards and various types of
accounts I don't want or care about. Back in the day, you had a credit card,
it worked. Now I can buy groceries and shoes on the Internet. Back in the day
I could not, but I didn't want to. I wanted to buy various types of
equipement, and that I could.

> There will always be folks hankering for the glory days of
> alt.religion.kibology and compuserve. Ignore them.

The article was not about the olde glory days, it was about a fundamental
shift in the way people and machines interact on the Internet. A transition
from protocols to services. I think this is a worthy thing to discuss and your
dismissive, condescending post is not warranted.

~~~
cbs
I'd like to subscribe to your e-zine.

~~~
rerere
e-zines are a sign of the decline of civilization. We engage in discussion on
Gopher, the way God intended.

------
chris_wot
"...They're amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But
they're based on a few assumptions that aren't necessarily correct. The
primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility
and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts
growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting
extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and
sustainability of their networks."

Oh my gosh. This is the GNOME project!

------
yo-mf
I think Anil missed something in his allusion to AOL. There was an Internet
before AOL that a few of us were actively using. There was a thing called “the
web” that some folks were toying with while the masses toiled in Prodigy and
AOL. Were those services bad or evil? No, but they accelerated the onramping
of the next generation of Internet adopters that then quickly moved to the
wild and free Web. With the development of the web came all sorts innovation
and novel services that brought order to the often chaotic web.

We are on the same onramp now as we were in the late 90’s. Facebook, Twitter,
et. al. are just another stopping point to whatever comes next. We lost some
things along the way, we abandoned some of our anonymity, and in some ways our
freedom and experience suffered. But we have also gained tremendously in the
decade since. We have smartphones with apps that guide us to cool places and
discovery new experiences. We have apps that make our shopping experiences
easier and cheaper. We have apps that let us express ourselves in sounds,
pictures, videos, text, and to share those expressions of ourselves to the
world in a few clicks. We can find any number of experts and sites that offer
assistance without flipping open phonebooks or blindly Googling the world.

Yes, we lost something. I also agree that we have forgotten some of the
earlier values that made the web such a joy. We got enticed by free apps and
gaudy user experiences. However, there will be a backlash someday and the next
generation of Internet users will jump outside of these walled gardens to take
control of their own online identity.

------
benwerd
This. This is the web I care about. The principles that keep me doing what I
do for a living. I love this web, and how it works.

But the thing is, I love the web we have now, too. I love the
interconnectedness and the fact that you don't _need_ to be technical to find,
share and create amazing stuff. You just have to have imagination and
humanity.

So, let's go back. Let's take the web we've got today, and let's consciously
retrofit it with the plumbing we had back then. Let's take the services we all
work on and stick in those APIs. Let's make it all work better together, so
that the sum of all the web applications is far more than all the web
applications separately.

Think about the back-end services we all value: Stripe. Twilio. AWS. What
unites all of them is that they're incredibly simple to develop with, and to
connect into other applications. That's why Twitter succeeded in the
beginning, too: because its API was simple enough that people could build apps
for the nascent mobile app ecosystem. _This is good for all of our products_ ,
as well as for the web's health as a platform.

It's not hard. That's the beauty of it: all these APIs and standards are
simple to build and simple to use. That's why they survived. All that has to
happen is an understanding that being closed is not a better way to serve your
users or run a tech business.

------
nnq
We moved _in the wrong direction_ a bit, but still, we moved _further_ and
that's all that matters! "Average people" "wanted"/needed the web to become
like this because they want "everything in one package" kind of deals and
that's the only way they could swallow it... but they've swallowed the "red
pill" even if was hidden inside a poisoned cheeseburger, so they're on the
right track now.

And we had to move in this direction to get the "average Joes" and your
grandma on board. Facebook pushes everything in the wrong direction IMHO, from
privacy and censorship and content monetarization to technology (PHP, Hiphop,
C++, hackathlons?! what new "toxic" technologies and ideas will they support
or "invent" next?), but they and those like them brought "the people" online.

But now that they've survived the poisoned cheeseburgers and digested them,
it's time to reap the benefits of the red pill. _Now that we've taken the
detour necessary to get the non-techies on board, it's time to steer the ship
in the right direction!_

------
fleitz
The web we lost is still there, it's just that's it's just as accessible as it
was 10 years. We post photos to Facebook not because of the technical
superiority but because our friends and family can see them.

You can still put your photos on flickr where no one you know will ever see
them.

------
lifeguard
This is an excellent writeup. I think it misses an important trend in the
Web's population: fewer nerds. It used to be a lot of work to get a PC with a
broadband connection. Now every cell phone has cheap broadband and a suite of
apps built in. The Web today is mostly populated by users who are not
enthralled with the technological underpinnings that make it possible. And
that is natural. The the lamentable effect is that now there is a market for
accessible communication and media. And this is overwhelming the traditions of
sharing and valuing anonymity on the Web.

I imagine the nerd population has grown, and accelerated over time. It is just
that the non-nerds are getting on-line much faster.

------
return0
I would advocate it's a good thing that we have closed social platforms. Most
of the content they generate does not leak to search engines and that's a good
thing, because most of it is trivialities. Imagine a researcher looking for
medical information having to filter through all kinds of anecdotal nonsense
to find true scientific studies. It's like browsing youtube and expecting to
randomly bump on gems. IMHO, most social stuff is of little value. People
still publish in traditional platforms the important bits [with the exception
of closed scientific journals; but that's a different issue].

------
meerita
I Think Anil went too melancholic with this article. It doesn't give us any
clue of the bad things, he just feels the current web isn't right, to my point
of view, "the past was better" argument always fails, because in the past
there were more chaos than current one, just look how bad was the web 10 years
ago with crappy websites coded with HTML and gifs, search engines that didn't
do a good job, no webservices at all functioning properly.

Adapt of die.

------
saurik
There is an example in there of how creating a single sign-on service in 2005
being "described as introducing a tracking system worthy of the PATRIOT act".
That was years after this kind of thing was considered a problem, however, and
it was somewhat _rightfully so_ , and I believe the real story is that things
actually got "better" as we came to understand these services more. I am not
certain things actually got worse over the last ten years: in some ways they
really got better.

Going back to 2002, Microsoft had been working on "Hailstorm", which was a
very poorly chosen name for something that people rapidly became afraid of ;P.
It was later renamed to "My Services", but it included Microsoft Passport
(yes, this is mentioned in the article, but I don't think it is given enough
weight), a single sign-on service provider that Microsoft was encouraging
other websites to use. It would provide details about you, including your
e-mail address, to the sites you connected with.

I had remembered a bunch of people being angry about it, so I did a Google
search for "Microsoft Password mark of the beast", and came across an article
written at the time in some random magazine called "Microsoft's Passport to
Controversy -- Depending on whom you ask, Passport is either a useful consumer
convenience or the mark of the beast".

[http://business.highbeam.com/787/article-1G1-83378739/micros...](http://business.highbeam.com/787/article-1G1-83378739/microsoft-
passport-controversy-depending-whom-you-ask)

However, it should be noted that one of the fears at the time was not "man,
vague centralization is bad", it was "omg, Microsoft doesn't just want this
service to take over the web... they want this service to take over _the
world_ ". Now, of course, you read me saying that, and think "ugh, stop with
the rhetoric: that's just an example of people freaking out about something we
find common-place; that's what the article is about: did you read it? ;P".

But... it was actually for real. Microsoft was lobbying to make Microsoft
Passport be the new US National ID system, and it wasn't just a pie-in-the-sky
goal... they were lobbying to make it happen, had the ears of the right
people, and were making serious progress on it. For reference, there was an
article written about the situation in the Seattle Times with the title "Feds
might use Microsoft product for online ID".

> Forget about a national ID card. Instead, the federal government might use
> Microsoft's Passport technology to verify the online identity of America's
> citizens, federal employees and businesses, according to the White House
> technology czar.

> On Sept. 30, the government plans to begin testing Web sites where
> businesses can pay taxes and citizens can learn about benefits and social
> services. It's also exploring how to verify the identity of users so the
> sites can share private information.

[http://web-beta.archive.org/web/20020802161525/http://seattl...](http://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20020802161525/http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134438173_passport18.html)

I thereby feel the need to note that, even as late as 2005, if you were going
to start talking about building the world's next best "single sign-on"
provider, this is what you were being mentally compared with: yes, the one
service mentioned (TypeKey) ended up having "much more restrictive terms of
service about sharing data", but it is looking at the past through rose-
colored glasses to think that things have gone downhill.

Let's put it this way: can you seriously imagine Facebook or Twitter ever
being considered as the official login system for the IRS? I can't in 2012,
but that was the honest-to-goodness reality of "the web we lost" from 10 years
ago. At some point, in the last 10 years, it became more, not less, clear to
everyone that this kind of service needed limits. There was backlash in 2002;
but I believe it was much more fringe-concern than it would be now in 2012.

> Yesterday, appearing at the conference, Gates reiterated the goal, saying he
> expects governments in many countries will find it difficult getting to
> "critical mass" with authentication systems they develop on their own. He
> said some governments may opt to use companies such as Microsoft or America
> Online as "the bank" that registers people for online usage.

~~~
lifeguard
In 2002 Microsoft was still a dangerous (and the US DOJ found illegal)
monopoly. THAT is why we feared Hail Storm.

------
endlessvoid94
I think most of the frameworks, libraries, and tools we use to build these new
services can do an awful lot more to make this kind of thing easier. I
actually suspect we'll enter a new age of programming soon, where a lot of the
cruft and boilerplate of managing filesystems and metadata around your data
(from databases) will be handled automatically, making this kind of thing
much, much easier.

Who knows, though. I'm optimistic.

------
vividmind
Facebook is web's McDonalds.

~~~
djbender
The new AOL.

~~~
meej
Indeed, the first thought I had upon reading Dash's article was, "Kottke was
right".

<http://kottke.org/07/06/facebook-is-the-new-aol>

------
joey_muller
I find myself disagreeing with my cofounder on things like giving the user
more and more control. It adds too much complexity. Providing the basic,
minimum requirements will be sufficient for 99% of our customers. I'd rather
focus on them than the small sliver of folks who'd want that extra control.

------
dimitar
I really miss old-fashioned forums.

I know you can point out that they weren't that different from this site or
that facebook groups are not that different, but it doesn't feel the same.

I hope they enjoy a Renaissance someday soon and cohabitate with 'social
media'. Maybe a new, shiny framework or CMS for making them?

------
aaron695
Sorry but I think this article is totally wrong.

Tags for instance are a classic example of something people raved about,
thought would work than were a total failure.

It was found filenames actually gave more useful information to the user than
tags.

(PS if it's not obvious hashtags are not tags)

------
rastem
I find it humorous that the comments on that site are only enabled if you
login with Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail.

------
barce
I think Facebook benefited lots from what could be called "Net Neutrality" in
2003.

------
papsosouid
>we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world

No, _we_ didn't. _They_ did. The users of this new non-web never saw the old
web, they weren't online then. People seem to forget that the entire internet
connected population back then is like 5% of the current internet connected
population. Those of us who liked the web are still here, we're just
outnumbered.

------
azio
We also lost Flash. Screw you Steve Jobs for killing it. I remember the days
when futuristic sites were built using it with all the advance animation and
stuff that nobody is doing these days.

------
mattmanser
This guy has the most awesome title ever!

 _Director of Public Technology Incubator Expert Labs_

Listen to him! That's like master of the universe. On steroids. Go Anil, go!

~~~
ricardobeat
I don't see the sarcasm. He is the Director of Expert Labs, a public
technology incubator.

