A very, very confusing article that jams together several seemingly unrelated concepts, and makes it hard to understand what the overall point is.
- different sites having different UIs (so?)
- Companies use tools like Intercom chatbots because they don't have the resources to develop them in house (again, so? don't reinvent the wheel)
The case study presented is a crypto wallet, because of course it is. I have yet to see an article from a person with ".eth" in their handle that isn't shilling NFTs, Web3 or something else that's pretty much only for the Ethereum crowd.
The thing about Web 1.0 was that it sold itself. The first time you saw it in action at a friend's house or in a college computer lab, chances are you immediately recognized its value. Whether it was exploring X-files fansites, Shockwave games, or even the original CERN site with its then-novel hyperlinked structure. It was Minitel in full color, with audio and video support (RealPlayer "buffering...." messages aside)
Web3 OTOH doesn't seem to be much besides gauche e-trinkets and dApps that are mostly crypto/NFT stores. Is there a killer app or use case that isn't already served by the actual open web?
The very first website I ever saw was at my cousin’s house during a visit for Christmas. They had just recently “gotten the online” and he was showing me his favorite site which was an Oprah talk show discussion forum. At first I was like “wow this is stupid” but then he told me that there’s discussions for “almost everything” and that you’re talking to people all over the world…now I was from a town of about 10,000 people or so and had probably met a thousand people total in my lifetime if that (I think I was 8 or so at the time) so it was mind boggling to me to have the ability to just talk to someone on the other side of the world just by clicking a few icons on a computer screen…I was hooked immediately.
Flash forward years and years and so far I just have not sensed the same magic and awe with things like blockchain “stuff” but it may be that I’m not allowing myself to be mentally agile and open (I’m willing to admit it’s a possibility, at least).
I hope I was not too harsh in my comment. There are a lot of disparate threads in the article. If you wanted to get one point across, what would that be?
Web3 isn't an easy concept to understand because it has 'web' in the name, yet it can't be accessed via the clearweb, only via browser extensions, or mirror sites.
The NFT site "hicetnunc" went down recently, with little to no explanation and people on Twitter recommended going to one of several of its mirrors, all with a different address. Would a regular user go to "amazon.win" if "amazon.com" was down?
There's so much about Web3 that feels shady or prone to malfunctioning at any time, with no communication. I hope you can understand that that aspect of it simply does not reconcile with the 'monetize-first' attitude of its proponents.
my article is not really about web3, just using the analogy to touch on "layer 2" and introduce the idea of querying your interactions with a website _over time_ : hence the "temporal web"
Web 3.0 immediately sells itself the first time you make a transfer using your MetaMask account. This is a transaction effected solely from your computer, using no trusted third party intermediary or proprietary financial network. Its appeal is immediately evident.
God, maybe I'm dumb despite my beliefs to the contrary, but what is this guy trying to say? Ctrl-F for "temporal":
> web4ᵗʰ aka "the temporal web": user interactions across screen space and time of an immutable conversation
> What do we have?
> * The temporal web with conversation-first interfaces, leveraging decentralized communication protocols.
> * Forcing developers to really think at the isolated-component level, while reducing the surface of worry (remember mobile-first, constraints are a blessing).
> * Making their life simpler (even though they don't want it because… money, you know)
> * And most importantly making users' lives simpler: catering better for their intents and adding outstanding build-in support
That's a lot of bullshit bingo points...
Is it basically a chatbot as a UI?
To misuse his term, I thought "temporal web" was the recognition that the internet you're looking at now is different from yesterday's, because content get added, deleted and changed all the time. A web where you can rewind to "Version from $DATE" would be interesting...
But me clicking a button to see the details of my booking and getting transferred to a chat interface where my click was translated to a question with a "processing" progress bar irritated me to no end. And it replies with just a partial info inside a tiny chat bubble instead of having all the info in full screen! Just give me the freaking page with my booking details, godfuckingdamnit!
interesting, didn't know about the booking experiment
but as i was trying to explain, they missed the point and just created frustration for users
didn't want my article to sound like bullshit, that's why i built a poc to try and explain that it's not about having chatbots, but having entire components in a chronological order of the interactions with a website
in your case the booking details would be easily accessible just by scrolling up for instance
I have long thought that a doc centric view could unite apps and web much better.
Obviously docs we use every day are doc centric. Although the holy grail of easily embedding and linking docs has not been achieved.
Games and other "session" type interaction should simply be docs. You create a new game session, you could have several. You pick up each session by opening it. You can back up sessions yourself if the app doesn't let you, or you just prefer to do so. You are in "control" of you own data, i.e. game state. (Identity management can allow transferred/leg-up games to be easily differentiated from true one person game accomplishment.)
Accounts are just docs. A doc shared by two owners with data and state that gets appended as it is used. Much easier to have two accounts with your financial exchange or bank, or anyone else if you like, without special custom support for that kind of thing.
Apps, web or native, take a back seat. They can be auto dowloaded as needed. App folders become just caches as docs know what apps or app classes they need.
Most doc creation is simply a duplication of a template with no parameters, or perhaps a simple configuration of creator/viewer/owner/capability parameters. (i.e. an energy utility account.)
Because everything is a doc, users can organize them, back them up, etc. Own their own data.
A lot more thought could go into this. But there is no reason why the code behind different doc types would matter much - native, web, etc. once the limitations of those platforms for this simpler model were ironed out. Why should the user ever have to care or be aware of platform choices?
Working on this myself, evolved from a personal notepad I built about 12 years ago. Inverting the data / app relationship is super powerful, it's not quite sufficient to live in alone though, I had to make my platform fit the base truth of known reality before it was natural and simple to live in.
Basically, a notepad that grandma and tech intelligencia can interop on is unbelievably powerful.
- different sites having different UIs (so?)
- Companies use tools like Intercom chatbots because they don't have the resources to develop them in house (again, so? don't reinvent the wheel)
The case study presented is a crypto wallet, because of course it is. I have yet to see an article from a person with ".eth" in their handle that isn't shilling NFTs, Web3 or something else that's pretty much only for the Ethereum crowd.
The thing about Web 1.0 was that it sold itself. The first time you saw it in action at a friend's house or in a college computer lab, chances are you immediately recognized its value. Whether it was exploring X-files fansites, Shockwave games, or even the original CERN site with its then-novel hyperlinked structure. It was Minitel in full color, with audio and video support (RealPlayer "buffering...." messages aside)
Web3 OTOH doesn't seem to be much besides gauche e-trinkets and dApps that are mostly crypto/NFT stores. Is there a killer app or use case that isn't already served by the actual open web?