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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I would go do far as to say that WordPress made something inherently difficult look easier than it actually is (in addition to some parts which really are easier: as in, there are two metrics, and the former was lowered in an amount much greater than the latter), causing a bunch of people to mistakingly believe that they can handle it themselves; sometimes, a weird configuration file format, or a requirement that you get four pieces separately and stitch them together, is not making something harder for no good reason: it is a subtle indication that helps people understand when they are getting in over their head.
I liken it to the idea that the Infested Forest should look as dark and imposing as it is dangerous: replacing the craggily trees with candy canes and the wolves with golden retriever puppies (still trained to kill, mind you), and carefully laying a golden brick road through the center for easy access with a new sign at the entrance reading "Welcome to the Friendly Forest (Version 2.0)", makes a very dangerous situation look much less scary than it should... the "looking scary enough--or just being difficult enough to navigate--that you don't go in without an RPG party wearing enchanted armor carrying Ariadne's thread" was actually a feature, not a bug.
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.
> 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.
Windows Azure Websites (http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/web-sites/) is similar to what you're describing, you can install a variety of popular platforms in one click (ie Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke,...) and get up and running right away. You own your data, the apps (ie Drupal, not Azure itself) are open source, and most things are easily managed for you.
I write a lot on both WordPress and Google Plus, and Google Plus is way easier for basic authoring. Image uploading, post re-sharing, dealing with comments...all much simpler on G+. I still use WordPress because I prefer to own more important content, but I'm under no illusions about ease of management and writing.
"And businesses exist that will even make that as easy as filling out a form."
Which businesses? I recently migrated to one of the major dedicated WordPress hosts and it was anything but the trivial experience some make it out to be.
I've had a job where babysitting the hosting business clients was part of service description. Including things like custom WP plugins, and modifications. Dig that.
Must have been fairly lucrative at the time, now that I think of it. But it must have made sense for the client, as some of them I see are still hosting their business with that firm; that's a small sample and just a few years down the line, but are you sure you're not looking at the subject from inside your own bubble?
Also, Blogger, the service that the link in the paragraph "... publishing tools that epitomized all of these traits..." was referring to. Or, more modernly, Tumblr. These are all sites that give you your own [sub]domain, where you make the rules and you control (almost) all the data, and where, even if there are other mechanisms for connecting things together, you can still just pull an RSS feed of all the relevant content and mash up whatever you like.
I wasn't aware that Tumblr had an export function, and it looks like, officially, it doesn't[1]. There is a third-party migration tool to WordPress[2], but that's about all I can find. So unfortunately, not all is roses.
It would be nice if there were a standard format for storing blog posts and their metadata and attachments, so you could move from anything to anything. Perhaps the nascent Tent protocol[3] could do that when it's mature.
Tumblr has a JSON API [1] that is fairly usable, and provides access to the essential parts of blogs (and terms of use explicitly allow building data portability applications on it, which is a nice touch). It's not instant-export, and I get the impression nobody uses it so it might not be rock solid, but if you need to export data, it's possible.
This tumblr2wordpress tool is probably built on it. So is Jekyll's tumblr importer. Honestly, the lack of export tools for Tumblr probably comes less from a lack of demand than anything else.
I strongly prefer the web of today to the web of ten years ago because those barriers to entry prevented most people from doing all the cool stuff Anil talks about. So it was possible to have all those better connections, but it didn't happen much.
One way or another, services would've arised that would've tied it all together for the non-technical. I don't think we lost anything more than a potential to have a "better web" that never would've been realized anyway. (And many of those things are still possible, just even less worth the effort now that there are entrenched networks.)
I miss the barrier to entry that we used to have. I know this might be a narrowminded view but that barrier to entry prevented a lot of the drivel that we see on the internet today.
In the 90s and early 2000s if you wanted to put something online you had to have at least a moderate level of technical aptitude. Compare that to today's nonstop garbage fountain of ignorance on sites like tumblr, twitter and facebook.
Are you arguing that the Eternal September effect doesn't exist? Because having been seen the effect first hand in no less than a dozen different online communities over the years, I can confidently say that it very much does exist.
But this is in regards to specific sites and communities; "The Net" has long since become too large to be considered a single community.
Yeah, my experiences on the late-90s, early-2000s internet don't support the idea that some level of technical aptitude correlates to a desire to share anything other than drivel.
Timecube, dancing babies, blink/marquee tags, MIDI music backgrounds on yet another "hey look at these pictures of the new muffler I put on my car!" site... ah, the good ol' days.
I honestly haven't noticed any increase in drivel, as a proportion of overall content, on the web now compared to when I first got on in 1998.
> I miss the barrier to entry that we used to have. I know this might be a narrowminded view but that barrier to entry prevented a lot of the drivel that we see on the internet today.
The takeaway: If the Network Effects aren't harnessed for the cause of freedom and cool, beautiful stuff, then someone else will harness them to make money off of drivel.
And at the same time it allows someone in the middle of a war torn country to take a picture with their mobile phone and instantly upload it to the world.
You are essentially talking of the same kind of barriers of entry that Anil complains about the Facebook et al put up around data exchange.
That's all part of bringing the rest humanity up to speed. At least now we don't have to do it face to face with people we'd rather not see (or rather, smell). Every time you see something stupid on the web, you should realize that is a place where education and other social institutions failed.
> 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.
This is why a lot of technically superior cool things people invent lose out to corrupted versions.
> to get that accessibility, the hosted services make you give up a lot of things.
I don't see how any of those things are necessary. I can see how the environment incentivizes those things, but none of them are necessary. Maybe there's no practical difference in the end.
Network Effects are just as important as software freedom and technical excellence. By now, the tech world should know this lesson, as should those who would support the cause of software freedom and technical excellence.
> 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.
That's not true. We've been building OpenPhoto for a year and a half to prove that statement wrong.
You can have the ease of use of signing up for a site without giving up control and ownership of your data. It baffles me why this model isn't more prevalent since we're proving it works and can be made easy enough for non technical users. We need more people building applications this way. Simply put, it's better.
For those unfamiliar with OpenPhoto you can get more information at http://theopenphotoproject.org but the highlights are:
I was very careful to say the hosted services make you give up a lot of things rather than you have to give up a lot of things, because it's not necessarily true that you must lose those things to get the easier experience. The services just want you to, because it makes life simpler for them technically (reliable interop is hard) and gives them extra ways to make money off you.
I agree. It's sort of sad that we're in the state we're at because it's "harder" to build and "harder" to monetize. But given that; I don't see it changing anytime soon.
"But to non-technical people, those losses aren't obvious"
To most people, those losses aren't losses. You can't lose what you don't have. I don't think its just about techie vs non-techie people. There are plenty of people who could have posted photos online 15 years ago that didn't until more recently. Accessibility is one thing, a critical component. But, culture is another essential part. It's a component hosted services contributed too.
People didn't tweet before twitter because there was no way of tweeting, but also because there was no such thing as tweeting. The cultural concept didn't exist.
The reason why people didn't post photos 15 years ago was that digital cameras barely existed back then. There was a revolution in photography in the early 2000s which made sites like Flickr possible.
Like privacy, like knowing you're being a product, like helping facebook, google and pals map you, your friends, your friend's dog,...
Seriously...
A smartphone is a tracking device that can make calls. An app is a tracking sotftware that can display pictures.
That's what you lose. Maybe people don't care, but i guess that if they had a chance to understand what's really at stake, they would care and reconsider.
Nothing is free. At least in the earlier days of the web people understood that, because everyone payed some sort of bill. And bills without hidden costs, sortof help people think what it is they are (or are not) paying for.
If you aren't technical, it kind of doesn't matter if you know up front or not (about potential risks). If you don't have the skill, you accept the risk or loss and hope that because it isn't relevant now, that it won't ever matter. Or you say "I will cross that bridge when I come to it."
I know a little html and css. I learned them to manage my own sites. I have some tech training (Certificate in GIS from a decade ago, never really used). I wish I were more technically savvy. I migrated my sites to Wordpress and found that frustrating and I am still trying to work out how to complete the migration. But it means that when I want to put up new content, I can at least do that much in a fairly brief span of time.
So, agreeing with you that the web we lost was harder and that was a showstopper for many people. Not agreeing that it is terribly relevant if those people know the risks or not up front, because if they want to participate (and this is increasingly not something you can really opt out of) and you can't do the technical piece yourself, well, you suck it up. Too bad, so sad.
I think it being harder is only the second most important thing to most people. Rather, the fact that these 3rd party services are free is the biggest factor; even $30 per year for a domain and hosting is more than most people are willing to pay.
I think one could make a very good argument that Facebook is Geocities 3.0 (and Myspace was 2.0), or perhaps that Geocities was in the same space, but didn't understand the problem it actually should have been solving. Livejournal probably deserves a mention here, though I don't think it ever achieved quite the prominence of the other three.
What most people seem to want to do with a personal website is provide some contact information, list some stuff they like, link to their friends and family and occasionally tell the world what they're up to. Personalizing the appearance of one's personal page seemed important, looking at Geocities and Myspace, but Facebook seems to suggest that it might not be necessary. On the other hand, interaction with other users has become more important.
I knew someone was going to pick this nit :-D I just feared overloading an already-herniated comment with additional verbiage. Sorry about that.
For the record: yes, if you buy a track from the iTunes Music Store today, it is most likely DRM-free. However, people who have been active ITMS customers over the years are likely to have purchased at least some DRM-encumbered tracks before Apple moved away from DRM.
While it is a nit, it's actually an interesting nit if you follow the trail a little. The most significant problems with the modern Internet, I think, come from the "walled gardens" that DRM creates -- and DRM is almost entirely the fault of media publishers rather than distributors. Apple gets a lot of fingers pointed at it, but I honestly don't think Apple -- or Amazon, for that matter -- really cares about DRM one way or the other. If the movie and television studios or the book publishers said tomorrow, "We want you to drop all the DRM from your files," I doubt Apple would stand in their way any more than they did with the music publishers.
Ironically, it's Apple's dominance in the music distribution market that led to record labels wanting to drop DRM, because they realized it was the only way to loosen the vise grip they'd inadvertently given Apple on their balls. Eventually the same thing will happen with books due to Amazon. Video is going to be the really tough nut to crack, though.
(Incidentally, if you turn on iTunes Match, it will let you replace all your remaining DRM-encumbered tracks with the DRM-free and higher quality ones, even ones that for arcane reasons weren't eligible for the $0.30/track upgrade. That, combined with switching my remaining MP3s to AAC -- yes, I think the quality's a little better -- made it worth the price for me, at least for a year.)
All itunes tracks are drm free. And you can upgrade any drm tracks for $0.30c a track. Basically the difference that the labels wanted for everything to be $1.29 versus $0.99 which Apple wanted things to stay at.
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.