

The unbearable lameness of web 2.0 - kgarten
http://blog.koehntopp.de/archives/2978-Die-unertraegliche-Lameness-des-Web-2.0.html#en

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brazzy
Very valid points - but I suspect the main barrier to this kind of thing is
that every single "social" site out there wants to be _the_ aggregator and
sees others only as potential input for its own service.

Smart aggregation would require some degree of collaboration and standards,
and anyone supporting it risks making their own service a subordinate source.

Even though this kind of thing would be extremely useful to users, companies
will only embrace it if the added value helps driving users to their own
service more than to others.

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petervandijck
In other words: if you're the current market leader (FB), then there's no
reason to support other social graphs.

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blasdel
How would that even work in practice? What's the use case that's not already
possible via <http://graph.facebook.com> (besides hoovering up emails).

Besides, if they did somehow integrate further you'd all be crowing about how
Facebook was doing an embrace / extend / extinguish maneuver.

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Stormbringer
From the article: "my ass has round corners too" ... priceless.

If you do web design work in an Enterprise, you pretty quickly run into people
who don't understand that there are fundamental differences between web apps
and desktop apps.

What Web 2.0 does is it lets us get around some of those limitations. When Web
2.0 is done right, the Ajax is going to mean that they can work on an 'online
app' without loading pages all the time (or rather, without appearing to load
pages all the time).

Combine that with some of the database in a browser capabilities, and, in
theory, you could get around even more of the limitations. E.g. user closes
the browser window before hitting submit means the data is lost = annoyed
users = poor usability. But if you use the offline storage to save the fields
then it isn't lost after all. Hooray!

But yes, Facebook is retarded. Build a better one I dare you. ... Please.

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wheels
> From the article: "my ass has round corners too" ... priceless.

Interestingly, in the German, he used a completely different example:

"What the devil is the whole web 2.0 crowd doing all day? I mean, other than
sitting around in St. Oberholz [1], sucking down Bionade [2] and Twittering
their brains out?"

[1] Berlin equivalent of Red Rock Coffee in Mountain View

[2] Trendy organic fruit soda

~~~
isotopp
Yes, I did not know how to translate that concept properly into US english,
because it references Berlin-specific things. Thanks for the help!

~~~
dasil003
Not as topical, but the ass reference was the best sarcastic comment to date
about the proliferation of rounded corners since people really started
complaining about them 7 years ago.

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dkarl
This is not a problem with a simple solution. People can handle Twitter (one-
way subscriptions); people can handle Facebook (reciprocal friendship.) But
they are annoyed at having more than one service. Which one is the winner?
Which one replaces the other one? If I drop one then I abandon all my contacts
on the other! Argh!

The easy technological solution is a site that offers complex, configurable
relationships, but can people handle it? Probably not, or at least, not yet.
So we have reached the current equilibrium of multiple services, with Facebook
the winner, and a minority of people choosing integration or choosing to
manage accounts separately on more than one service.

Perhaps the day will arrive when people are ready for more sophistication in
managing relationships on a social networking site. If Facebook times it right
and adds relationship configuration options at roughly the right pace, they
can stay on top and supplant Twitter entirely for social networking. Or
perhaps the current situation reflects the limit of what people want to cope
with. I'm sure Facebook is researching the question and deciding which way to
bet.

~~~
Wilduck
The main point of this article is that it's possible to do the filtering
without having a single social network.

"Yes, it is possible. Each of these services has an API, and I have to
authorize them against each other anyway. So could these services use their
APIs and offer useful filtering preferences to me, pretty please?"

I think this, along with the ability to show what pieces of information are
most important, would be a killer features. The network that could implement
this would do a lot of the elimination of noise that plagues using multiple
social networks.

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samd
Has anyone actually done some studies about what the best predictors of
interestingness are? We tend to assume that if our friends like something that
we'll like something, but is that really the case?

~~~
anthuswilliams
That was precisely what I was thinking while reading the article. Facebook
already does a bit of multidimensionality, e.g. 'So and so and 12 others like
this.' The problem is, being in Utah, a huge portion of the social scene is
Mormon. So vast swathes of my social graph jumped on board the LDS fan page,
with the result that I get PMs and ads from Mormon.org. A lot. Perhaps I am an
outlier here, and everyone else's social profile coincides nicely with their
own personal interests. But I doubt it. Freelancers end up friending their
clients, employees friend their coworkers, tenants friend their landlords, and
we expect all these varied interests to work as predictors for one another?

The problem with using our friends' activities as predictors of interest is
that Facebook has no way to distinguish between strong and weak
friendships[1]. There is a marked difference in my life between Facebook
friends and meatspace friends.

[1] - Sure, they can determine which of my friends I spend the most time
talking with on Facebook. But that says more about our relative Facebook
activity than the quality of our friendship.

~~~
dkasper
What about click-through rate? I'm pretty sure Facebook uses this in
determining what to show on your newsfeed, and it's a percentage, so it's not
based on quantity.

~~~
rorymarinich
Click-through rate might be slightly more accurate than simply pushing
everything, but it's not an ultimate solution because it too makes assumptions
about your usage. The one assumes you want everything equally; the other
assumes that your desires can be perfectly correlated to your clickthroughs.
But that's not true for anybody; what's worse, the reason why it's false is
different for everybody. (What if the people who interact with me are more
active than the people I actively seek out, and Facebook misinterprets my
responses as active interest? What if I'm simply innocently stalking a girl
obsessively but actually find her updates bland and individually unworthwhile?
One must think of the stalkers, especially if one is hoping to make money on
the Internet.)

The real issue is that cases like those of anthuswilliams above you are unique
and difficult to replicate. That's one of the noted problems with music
recommendation services like Pandora too: What matters isn't _what_ users tend
towards but _why_ , and _why_ is a question that can't be effectively
computed. It's more freeform.

I think the real solution would be a site that actively helps a user be
responsible for himself. Something that doesn't simply indicate _what_
features are available, but _why_ users might want to use them to sort out
their friends. Contrary to what the OP says in his blog post, that is possible
today, but it requires responsibility on both the parts of the reader (who
must sort his inputs neatly) and the publisher (who must figure out where to
publish what). And web sites presently don't feel it's worth their time to
help you with that task.

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gtufano
Very interesting article... The point on Languages is a major pain point for
everyone in Europe and, probably, for everyone that lives outside english
speaking countries (and probably for some of them too). I find amusing that
nobody approached it more seriously... I understand it's not an easy task...

~~~
mark_l_watson
Language detection is faily easy to do: Help yourself to my word frequency by
language data files at: <http://www.knowledgebooks.com/determine_language.jsp>

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gtufano
That's very interesting. Thank you very much.

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num1
I am continually amazed at the quality of Google Translate. That translation
was incredibly readable with maybe two or three errors. This used to be black
magic just a few years ago!

~~~
isotopp
If you refer to the translation in the lower part of the article: That's a
rather free translation of the upper part of the article that was done by me,
the original author.

I am a native german speaker.

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PedroCandeias
Twitter and google are indeed aware of the importance of tends and context.
They may not be where the op would like to see them yet, but there's clearly
work being done in that direction.

Facebook, on the other hand, doesn't really seem to be doing much with its
data. But it does have an extremely powerful API, so, maybe someone could try
taking this matter into their own hands.

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maxniederhofer
This is one of the reasons I started Qwerly (<http://qwerly.com/>), so the web
would have portable contacts between sites and a meta-graph across all
platforms.

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swombat
This guy makes some interesting points... it would probably not be too hard to
extend qwerly into that direction and make it very immediately useful...
"meta-follow people across networks, with de-duplication"...

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isotopp
[http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-
networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-
network-v2?from=embed) looks pretty promising.

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scg
You might wanna take a look at Summify (<http://summify.com>) It aggregates,
de-duplicates and ranks your streams.

~~~
neonak
My6Sense (<http://www.my6sense.com/>) does something similar.

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warmfuzzykitten
Should be titled "The unbearable lameness of Google." Google has all the
technology needed to implement what he wants, including autotranslation, but
Google doesn't know a human interface from a hole in the ground. Wave was
incomprehensible to mere humans. When they hold the contest for most boring
social network design on the web, Buzz will win hands down.

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Revisor
Tangentially:

In the real life, friends rarely go through the formal notion of "accepting
the other as a friend" (aka send/accept friend requests). Friends are those
who I talk to gladly and often. Simple as that.

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antichaos
Social networks don't really need to filter content by languages, as the
author suggested. A better alternative is to integrate a translation service
like Google Translation API to remove the language barrier.

~~~
fps
I think I'd prefer Chrome's approach to have the content translated in the
browser. That way I know that the content is being machine translated and it
can be undone.

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est
The symptoms reminds me of FriendFeed. Every "friend" is over-sharing and
dumping duplicated and trivial stuff into a main stream. The overlay problem
became so huge that everyone abandonded it.

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terra_t
I wonder if Web 3.0 will miss Silicon Valley.

I've found that the less technical and "webby" people are, the more they
understand Web 3.0

A lot of that is that, in Web 3.0, perhaps 70% of what's necessary for Web 2.0
is superfluous... Perhaps nice to have, but frankly, the next generation
systems need a community the same way that "The Terminator" needs people.

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kul
Twitter has never called itself a social network.

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mfukar
Since it's that easy, build it yourself.

