[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/

[cbs]

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

We have taken two steps forward, is it all that bad to reflect on the step we took backward?

A lot of the improvements we've made do not come at the cost of the things we've lost. Some things did have to go to enable the new ways, but some are also the victims of happenstance and circumstance. Some losses are implementation details really, or nice-to-haves that got cut for time/budget. Instead of a point for point dismissal of his post, consider the possibility that desirable properties of the old way do exist. Could long lost characteristics of the internet be rolled back into the current state of affairs in a beneficial way?

I think so. For example, a few of his points strike on the consolidation of the internet. Now that computing is dirt cheap I can run off into my corner and do my own thing, and the interconnectivty some of the new toys offer mean the people I care about know what I'm up to over here and can seamlessly experience it.

Facebook is just as susceptible to disruption

It sure is, but not by the kind of people who can't think about the concept of portable data and interoperability beyond POP/IMAP. Is mint.com not a very obvious poster child for data portability in this decade?

[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.

[SoftwareMaven]

sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family

This can't be understated. As a highly technical person running my own web services, even I rarely posted photos. The support burden of managing the server, securing it, and keeping family up-to-date on passwords was just never worth it.

Facebook wants to own all your data. It wants to be your identity.

I would love to hear ideas for ways we can fix this that are realistic because I completely agree with you. Any ideas have to recognize the value that sites like FB provide (as the OP did not) and come up with better solutions.

In 1995, I would not have believed that Microsoft would not be the focal point of the industry. The Internet shifted things such that Microsoft is no longer the focal point. It can (and probably will) happen again to Google and FB.

[locopati]

'I would love to hear ideas for ways we can fix this that are realistic'

Peer-to-peer social with discovery. A system where companies/people/groups could self-host their own server, companies could host for others, but all the systems could talk to one another. Data gets stored where you want it to - on your own system or on another (though it's portable even there, by design).

[SoftwareMaven]

I agree that this is probably the right answer. Unfortunately, it's a difficult business model to pursue and open source may not be able to solve it.

I look at this like I look at Linux versus Windows/OS X (as I type on my MBA next to my work Linux laptop): Open source may provide an alternative that, for a certain class of people, is every bit as good as the commercial mainstream; but for Joe Sixpack and Molly Mall, using such a solution doesn't even factor into their consciousness. It's not that it isn't good enough; it's that it doesn't even exist on their plane of existence.

I've spent a reasonable amount of time thinking about this (as a side-thread from a previous start-up I was involved with), and I have yet to come up with a combination that satisfies my preferences for data privacy and ownership with "normal people's" preferences for ease of use.

Unless a catastrophic failure occurs (Facebook crashes and loses everything), I don't think people will realize there might be better solutions.

[intended]

You don't always need Joe and Molly sixpack. You do need the leading edge of adopters.

Some solutions aren't for everyone.

[dlitz]

You guys should touch base with the https://tent.io guys.

[oscargrouch]

I think im working right now in a technology that hopefully will attack this sort of problems..

i have fried my brains out , and i think i got a answer..

i think the root of all evil that is happening with the web is in its core design.. a common thinking that reduce reason to client-server (with the weak part bean the client and we know now who are the strong server part now) and where the protocol is on the visual entities.. not in the thing that really should be given the real attention.. data and information itself..

The answer was not easy to come through, cause "its not there".. but i think ive got a good point here.. and i expect to show it soon.. with a running code

[regularfry]

You just described email.

[locopati]

Or DNS. Or probably any number of other foundational systems of the internet. At the bottom of it all, the basic concept of communicating data across distributed systems is the internet.

This is where the original post is spot on - the new players are not interesting in distributing, they want to collect and retain, but not share, except in their own limited and controlled ways.

To break out of that you need to break away from centralization. Yes, I don't know how you make this is self-supporting business, but then again, I doubt the Wikipedia folks did either and they went forward (open platform, freely available data), not to mention the folks who wrote the SMTP, NNTP, FTP, HTTP, and every other RFC we have built our global communications on top of.

[regularfry]

DNS isn't social, though, whereas email is. That's my point. Of your other examples, only NNTP comes close.

[locopati]

In your view, what defines social?

I'm seeing this as one point receives updates from many other points and announces updates of its own. In the case of DNS, it's domain record updates. In the case of email, it's messages. In the case of social, status updates, photos, events.

[yawn]

Are you interested in building this?

[doctorpangloss]

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).

When hypertext was still conceptual and imagined in microfiche, links were still the primary discovery mechanism of new or related content. I think that idea has stuck around for over 50 years because it is intuitive. It reduces whatever models you might be imagining for discovery into a simpler form.

Google may command the top spot on visited websites, but people use it so often to just open a wikipedia article with the exact query. This suggests Vannevar Bush understood some mechanics of knowledge acquisition better than Larry and Sergei did.

The OP is right. There are fewer links on blogs, and he helped me understand why.

[saraid216]

It's worth noticing that, in Google+, only one link gets a first-class position in any given post. If you want to throw down a fuller list of citations, it's a lot less visible. To me, this says that Google subconsciously understands what they've done and have chosen not to fight it. Or they just don't know how and have given up.

[npsimons]

"Not knowing how" and "giving up" seem very un-Google-like to me. Give it time.

[moheeb]

If "giving up" seems un-Google-like to you then you haven't been around very long.

The number of services, applications, and ideas they have shut down is probably nearing the hundreds.

[yozmsn]

What did Einstein say about failure?

[PaulHoule]

Technorati always seemed to be a joke to me.

A friend of mine got thousands of splogs indexed in Technorati and got real traffic from it.

On the other hand, whenever I ran a blog that was legit, Technorati always dismissed it out of hand as a splog.

[rythie]

> 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.

I don't understand this point at all. Flickr has a feature for sharing with friends and family, in fact it has a group for 'friends' and another for 'family' or you can use both. I was doing exactly that in 2005 with Flickr though to 2008 when moved that to Facebook as more friends and family were registered there. What they didn't have was all the other social network stuff like status updates, chat, people tagging etc.

[barce]

In Technorati's defense, it's what allowed lots of savvy people to target the top 100 blogs and enjoy the network effect from doing that. A good example is Tim Ferriss' book, The 4 Hour Work Week. It was useful for figuring out which blogs one ought to be commenting on in order to create synergy with one's blog.

[ghaff]

With all due respect etc., I think you're sorta making the parent's point. Technorati (and related) was useful for the Xrati to create their commentariat bubble that was largely irrelevant to the world or even the tech-focused world as a whole. Not that such bubbles don't still exist to significant degrees with or without specific websites whether Technorati or HN.

[freejack]

Anil is technically correct. And 10 years ago, the top three social networks were Userland Radio, MoveAbleType and Blogware. And Blackberry was an awesome smartphone.

And 10 years later, the early adopters have moved on to other things and the mass market has arrived to stake their claim to the social web with Facebook, Twitter et al.

[Alaskan005]

"The only real problem I see with the present state of the Web is that Facebook wants to own all your data"

"I don't agree that the monetization of the Web has degraded the value"

Good thing you work for Google and can give an unbiased opinion.

"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."

If you have a money-making website, the new medium, you have to pay tribute to Adwords or be bust, increasing prices on every item. The King is dead, Long live the King.