What We Lost with the Social Web -- Good!

Danil flogging the Goatse. Photo by ptufts, 2006.

My New York City neighbour Anil Dash -- who was the entrepreneur who founded this very site Typepad I'm blogging on, in fact, and who went on to greater glory to wear his Goatse t-shirt at a White House gig -- has a weepy post up about "The Web We Lost".

Good! This was the unworkable web of the technocommunists still hanging on from Web 1.0 and it's good that history is moving them along now and they can stop their slow-walk to socialism with their tools. Well, not completely, because they all worked assiduously to get Obama elected -- they were born for nothing else, really -- but still, there's enough struggle left that it's not over until it's over.

Mourns Dash:

The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.

Well, in other words, his fellow tekkies, maybe a little more cynical and calculating but as a result, a little more attuned to what customers really want, have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and left the Better Worlding ideologues in the dust.

He recalls with keen nostalgia a site that has absolutely no relevance to anyone, even tekkies anymore, Technorati:

[Y]ou could, in theory, write software to examine the source code of a few hundred thousand weblogs, and create a database of the links between these weblogs. If your software was clever enough, it could refresh its information every few hours, adding new links to the database nearly in real time. This is, in fact, exactly what Dave Sifry has created with his amazing Technorati. At this writing, Technorati is watching over 375,000 weblogs, and has tracked over 38 million links. If you haven’t played with Technorati, you’re missing out.

I was first introduced to Technorati by Second Life geeks. I went there and linked my blog and blogged directly occasionally. In fact, I rapidly acquired a high score. In its heyday, my Second Thoughts blog devoted to critical discussion about Second Life had high traffic and was among the top blogs (all blogs about SL have crashed in their traffic now because there isn't the usage and concurrency there once was in this virtual world seemingly abandoned by its makers, who have gone on to new products for the tablets.)

It was interesting to me to see that I even got this high score on this Technorati site for nerds, but part of the reason was because this very blogging platform automatically enabled you to insert Technorati key words, and linked to Technorati. So I did.

Then what happened was very interesting. I criticized Joi Ito, who rules the Internet and was a founder of Technorati. I was even more critical of his "spimes," which were the early versions of the RFIDs and QR codes that today are going to make up the ominous "Internet of Things". I said this geeky intrusion into the world to scrape data, including personal and proximity data in the name of "tracking pollution" or "health" or whatever Better-World fakery they coated on top of it, was insipient totalitarianism.

Joi Ito reacted with incredible spleen. He simply blocked my blog from showing up on search. He didn't delete it or cancel my account. He just made sure I didn't show up at all on search. It was astounding. It was one of my early exposures to the nastiness of thin-skinned geeks. I kept protesting this vigorously and openly on Twitter. After weeks and weeks, finally it went away.

But then some time later, Technorati went through various reforms. They wanted to figure out how to reformat search and display of blogs, and along the way, make sure that blogs that didn't ideologically "fit" would get very much lowered in their scores. So naturally mine did. But it still climbed up again anyway because I have a lot of readers, even if they don't like me. But eventually, it just wasn't worth it. Why bother with a site where no reader will discover you, and where you can't play the game? I stopped playing because it was gamed; I stopped playing because I couldn't see anybody anywhere even referencing Technorati anymore -- I think it's irrelevant now in a world where people go to TechMeme, TechCrunch, PandoDaily, etc. I think none of the oldbie geeks will admit this; I think it's probably fairly easy to establish.

Well this and a thousand other stories of the horrors of the open source cult led me to my positions today. Here they are in a nutshell on Anil's comments page below.

But when you read the stuff he's pining for, you realize the problem:

When you see interesting data mash-ups today, they are often still using Flickr photos because Instagram's meager metadata sucks, and the app is only reluctantly on the web at all. We get excuses about why we can't search for old tweets or our own relevant Facebook content, though we got more comprehensive results from a Technorati search that was cobbled together on the feeble software platforms of its era. We get bullshit turf battles like Tumblr not being able to find your Twitter friends or Facebook not letting Instagram photos show up on Twitter because of giant companies pursuing their agendas instead of collaborating in a way that would serve users. And we get a generation of entrepreneurs encouraged to make more narrow-minded, web-hostile products like these because it continues to make a small number of wealthy people even more wealthy, instead of letting lots of people build innovative new opportunities for themselves on top of the web itself.

Anil, nobody but the geek squad CARES that they can't see Instagram on Twitter. Truly. They don't use Twitter! They use Facebook or Tumblr! If they do (like me), they don't care. Instagram lost all my photos when its app stopped working on my, um, perfect Android phone *snort* and I downloaded and reinstalled the app. Thanks, guys! That's the only thing consumers care about, whether you lose the stuff, not whether you have the only apps for it or possess it. Copyright is inherent and I claim it. No, you don't need me or my pictures to monetarize your Twitter.

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state Too bad, so sad. The socialist utopia that you guys dreamed up with Web 2.0, which grew directly out of your frenzied hatred of walled gardens in Web 1.0, was a failure. Nobody needed to take part in collectives with liberated property except those who already got paid somewhere else, like

Too bad, so sad. The socialist utopia that you guys dreamed up with Web 2.0, which grew directly out of your frenzied hatred of walled gardens in Web 1.0, was a failure. Nobody needed to take part in collectives with liberated property except those who already got paid somewhere else, like Big IT, or Big University, or government, or their geek consulting, or Mom's Basement. You were in a narrow, finite class of people and you served yourself, not the rest of us. You invented and nurted and Internet that suited your cult of open source software, but it had three main flaws in it: a) everything was copyable and nothing was protected by engineering in good faith b) privacy was eliminated and sharing coerced; c) commerce was scorned and Creative Communism was promulgated.

But as always happens when the Internet does something agai

nst living human beings, people routed around. First there was Amazon and ebay flying in the face of your hatred of commerce and your turning of everything into a big freebie colony. Then there was Apple's i-tunes and DRM which still persists, imagine that, only now in the form of Google Play (hah!) or Spotify. Then, to make it most humiliating for you, three really huge walled gardens were created with proprietary software which was not opened to the public, for communities that were managed with data protection: Facebook, Twitter, and even G+ (there might be "data liberation," but you can't so easily download your pictures and posts swiftly). To be sure, these services were opened to engineers to make apps, but they couldn't just slurp everything they wanted to monetarize only for themselves.

So all this nostalgia for Dave Winer's RSS feed and all the other technocommunism is getting very dated, Anil. The rest of the world want to move on from the share-bear and the collective hugs with group-think geeks. We don't care if Instagram doesn't show on Twitter; we care that we can't sell our Instagram photos easily or tip others or buy their photos for our blogs easily with one click of the mouse and a micropayments system with microcurrency. All of this is eminently able to be engineered these days. But none of you are doing this because you're still clinging to you Better World myths and ideologies that always come back to socialism and selective libertarianism.

Give it up, Anil! People flocked to these big commercial companies like Facebook because they had easy features instead of wonky geeky ideology. Because they could have some kind of management of governance, something that the geeks often leave out and even these companies don't do very well.

Now you simply have to get out of the way while the world moves to Web 3.0 that pays people livelihoods because we are all moving online. That means you have to give up your communist ideology about deliberately enabling copying as a business model enriching a few at the expense of the many; that means you have to give up your data-mining and ad solutions as a ubiquitous substitute for viable and secure payment systems for paid content on line; that means you have to give up all this Better World bunk and let people create what they want with these tools without you hovering over their shoulder with your obvious political agenda you keep trying to weld into the tools.

Reply · Like · Unfollow Post · 33 minutes ago

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

And yes it is a stupid polemic about "those stupid walled gardens". You lack a fundamental grasp of non-geek reality here: nobody cares whether you "can't find your Facebook or Twitter friends on Tumbl". Good Lord, the overwhelmingly huge use case for Tumblr are teenagers trying precisely to ESCAPE their Facebook or Twitter friends (they use Twitter left). The user complexity isn't as great as you imagine -- what you are trying to say once again is the greedy geek's lament: why can't I get my hooks into these services and slurp out all their lists of names and gestures attached to those names so I can personally market to them or purvey my political theories for more power. That's all. And the world remains unimpressed by your naked ambitions.

 Tristan Louis · Subscribe · CEO and Founder at Keepskor

I think missing from the commentary is the push/pull of business vs. openness. While an open web is great, from a democratic (the concept, not the party) standpoint, businesses tend to prefer more closed out system. Let's be honest, even Flickr was a closed system as it aggregated all content on the Flickr site.

By contrast, the openness of the web, with domains, blogs, and RSS is inherently open and distributed, and thus more unruly.

I guess from a different lens, the old web is New York City and the new social world is Disney world: one is messy, a little crazy, and a little scary while being totally free, while the other is bound by certain rules that ensures most people have a good experience.

Reply · 7 · Like · Follow Post · 15 hours ago

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick · Top Commenter · Blogger at 3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state

But it's not unruly or free or really open, Tristan because the ideology constantly mitigates against privacy and commerce. That's why real openness and commerce are what are produced by your hated walled gardens of Facebook and Twitter and even Anil's home platform, Typepad, which makes it easy to put in Ad Sense and PayPal tip jars.

Um, no, the commercial web with openness for normal people isn't Disney World or Wal-mart. It's just not your cramped geeky cult. You're the one who is a little scared that normal people use the Web freely the way they want without your control.